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Many small businesses continue to struggle with their finances, keeping track of their data with entry-level accounting software, Excel spreadsheets and even pen and pad. You may be able to get by with this method, but doing so creates a significant bottleneck in processes, especially during month-end closings. With more sophisticated accounting software for small business owners, you can gain greater visibility into finances, streamline month-end closings and drive business growth.
But many solutions are not cost-effective or are difficult to use and maintain. With that in mind, we created this list of things to consider when choosing new small business software to help you get the most value out of your new system.
Improved Visibility
Software that allows deep insight into financial performance allows you to make stronger decisions that grow the business through expansion, acquisition and new lines of business. You need software that delivers easy to reada analytics that deliver business intelligence across your company. With greater control and insight into operational efficiency, risk management, performance, materials management and changing customer demands, small business owners will be able to grow their business with confidence.
Security and Data Confidentiality
You need a solution that offers role based security and access restriction so you know that the your team is accessing the information they need, while your critical data is protected from outside threats. Access restriction like the option to add view-only users will allow you to extend access to data to your team at a lower per user cost, and it will protect the integrity of you data. Does the solution you are considering offer industry leading security and internal control standards to satisfy compliance rules such as SOX and FDA CFR Part 11 requirements?
Quick Deployment
Moving to a new accounting system can disrupt any business, so you need a solution that gets you up and running within hours, not weeks or months. It’s also critical that you and your people learn and adopt the software quickly. Keep an eye out for solutions that offer step by step videos and instructions on how to configure your core modules and with minimal disruption to your daily business. Do the solutions you are considering come with pre-defined charts of accounts and financial reports to take the guesswork out of getting started.
Support and Maintenance
Look for financial systems that lets you pay as you go, adding new users and modules as appropriate. But one of the most important things to consider about software for small business owners is maintenance and upgrades. Look for cloud vendors and solutions that offer updates, upgrades and system maintenance as part of your monthly subscription, so you are always up to date without a huge IT burden.
While traditional enterprise resource planning solutions are expensive, difficult to maintain and hard to setup and learn to use, there are affordable options online that small business owners can get on demand access to and be up and running quickly without requiring servers and other costly hardware.
Pricing will no doubt be a top concern when choosing new software, but it is also important to keep in mind the above criteria to assure you are getting good value from your system.
Learn more about software for small business owners from myGPcloud or choose a software trial option and take the software for a 30 test drive to see how it can help standardize distribution data.
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