Outgrown MYOB or Xero

How do you know when you have reached the limits of MYOB or Xero?

Many businesses will continue to use their existing accounting or financial software package because of the current users fear of changing systems. All to often I have heard that the software has worked for 10 years so why change. Good point… When I hear that comment, I know that the reports are slowing down, the time to process invoices is taking longer, maybe even printing is so slow. But not just that, the users are waiting and taking more time than they should to do daily tasks.

So why do businesses keep doing the same thing over and over again, frustrating employees, duplicating tasks and manually writing production records on paper?

Generally it comes down to three things.

1. The person employed to do the task only knows MYOB or Xero. They have not had experience with other applications or fully integrated financial software.
2. The person who has ownership of the financials can only see their task and not the rest of the business frustration and inefficiency caused by not having a fully integrated financial software package. Most companies resort to Excel to manage inventory, manufacturing or to get documents processed that can’t be done in MYOB.
3. The cost to change over to an integrated solution

So how do businesses address these issues:

Firstly the company needs to identify and understand that their current MYOB or Xero solution is not the right fit for their growing business. It may have worked in the past as the company was not as large as it is now. If your business has 50 – 200 employees and you’re using MYOB or Xero chances are the integrations or multiple add on’s are becoming a problem.

A quick way to identify a software review is required:           

1. Does my business have 50 or more employees?
2. Does my business use one software solution for Financial, Inventory, Manufacturing, Job Costing, Payroll, full integration to bank for reconciliation and receiving debtor payments?
3. Is data entry duplicated?
4. Does your business use Excel spreadsheets? (These create business inefficiencies through wasted labour costs and errors on tracking inventory)
5. Do I have multiple Warehouses?
6. Does my company track Inventory?
7. Do I manufacture items?
8. Do you manage multiple companies?
9. Do I have / need consolidated reporting?
10. Is my data accessible anywhere?

If you have answered YES to any of these questions the company needs to book a review. A review of software and integrations can be a lengthy process and needs to be well coordinated to achieve maximum results.

Don’t be surprised if the above three items mentioned start to become evident in the findings. If this does happen then the key decision makers need to steer the review and investigate alternate software.