You don’t know how much you’re missing, if you’ve never had it.
It takes new Acumatica and AccountMate users a bit of time to truly realize what it means to have a flexible system once they have it. And then whole new worlds open up to them, once they get accustomed to having an easy ability to change and evolve things without constraints, and think bigger.
Most systems only let you choose from a set list of pre-configured options, like the custom text, number, date, and drop box fields in QuickBooks Online Advanced. If you want anything else, like a new field that applies a formula to get its value, you’re out of luck.
Imagine instead, flexibility that isn’t predefined and isn’t limited to certain fields. It’s whatever you need!
Here are just a few examples of easy modifications:
1. Price and sell your items any way you want
Buy it by the case, stock it by the 6-pack, sell it by the can, run a buy-3-get-1-free price promotion, have different prices when the item is included in a kit vs. in customer contracts vs. sold in different locations and currencies (with special pricing for your brother-in-law, too), and more.
Automatically track the margins and calculate sales commissions on every pricing variation.
2. Manage any traceability detail
Track serial numbers, lot numbers, and compliance documents. Before, during, and after the items pass through your warehouse, manufacturing shops, staging areas, and retail locations. Track anything the way you want to. Handle regulatory compliance, quality programs, and audit reporting with automation.
Receive alerts for anything you want to stay on top of too—either on a regular schedule, or triggered by any status change for the info you want to closely monitor.
3. Choose on premises or in the cloud
If you want the benefits of working in the cloud, no problem. If you want the benefits of using an on-premise system, that’s also no problem—you won’t be shamed or incessantly nagged to “upgrade” to the cloud here. Many of our clients run on-premise and don’t want to move to the cloud for a variety of good reasons, and many others love the benefits of cloud just as much.
Either way, your users can work remotely and on mobile devices. And if you move from cloud to on-premise later, or vice versa, the user interface is the same either way—no need to learn a new system.
4. Change your items to fit your customer
If you’ve carved out a unique market niche, you’re probably customizing your products and your delivery of them to the unique needs of your customers, too.
For example, maybe most customers order an item one way, but a handful need special packaging or pricing or some other attribute. Your system needs to track those variations to ensure ALL customers receive the same quality of service, even those with special considerations. Your new system can accommodate multiple item attributes and other variations to ensure you deliver a high level of customer service, and that you can easily monitor those variations in your reports as well.
Flexible Languages
A manufacturer of automated welding equipment has Spanish speaking employees at their facility in Mexico, working with English speaking employees from their offices in the U.S.
We configured their system so each user is presented all menus, screens and reports in their preferred language.
5. Change your business process to fit your customer
Responding to customer needs is important! If your large client has a new requirement for you to use their insanely long purchase order numbers on your invoices, you need to get your accounting system to handle all those digits in the correct field, pronto. That’s why a flexible system is critical.
We’re always working with users to adapt and tweak their systems over time, cost-effectively and promptly.
Get an idea of some of our clients’ unique requirements—check out these 13 Examples of Real-Life Flexibility. You may decide that it’s time to stop living with the constraints you’re running into in QuickBooks so you can better respond to your customer’s needs and be more competitive.
6. Have data flow automatically to where it’s needed
You can key in 20 orders per day from your website’s ecommerce system, no sweat. At 100 orders per day, your customer service person is working HARD. At 1,000 orders per day, one rep can’t do it. You need to hire a new person or better yet—don’t hire more order entry people as you grow. Instead, integrate your website with your accounting system to automate the creation of those sales orders and free up your rep for other work.
As another example, it shouldn’t take weeks to get all your sales reps’ expenses submitted, categorized, and reconciled. Instead, imagine a rep taking a photo of a receipt with their phone and your accounting system’s AI instantly recognizes the data it needs from the image and updates your system with all the needed info.
With flexible software, everything is in a single, integrated system that automates the gathering and distribution of information to your entire team. Learn more about removing friction from your system.
7. Change anything you want
- You want a custom field that has a value calculated by a formula the way Excel does?
- You want a clickable button added to the screen that runs the end-of-day reports and emails them to people?
- Or instead of a button you want the system to automatically run and email those reports at 11:00pm nightly?
- You want EACH USER to have their own dashboard to display key performance indicators and reports tailored to their specific role and preferences?
All kinds of things like this are easy customizations that we can typically set up for you within a few hours or a day or two, or show you how to do it.
When it’s that easy to change your system, you’ll start having more ideas to make things work exactly the way you want them to.
Next step: Let’s talk about the business goals that your accounting system needs to support
We’re of course happy to start a conversation about your QuickBooks situation and where you want to be. We’re easy to talk to; no high-pressure salespeople here. We’re direct and honest in our communications too. So jot down your list of questions and reach out to us!