As we enter 2019, the competitive landscape will continue to heat up, consumer expectations will continue to rise, and your business will need to adapt to the evolving challenges that present themselves to you. However, if you haven’t taken steps to prepare yourself for the year ahead, you may not be able to keep up.
Many businesses know the feeling. “Yes, closing the month was a challenge, but we just can’t afford to make a change right now,” or “implementing software seems like more of a hassle than it’s worth,” delaying the decision until another quarter, another year, or altogether could cause more damage to your business than cost savings.
Growing Pains
Too often, growing businesses attempt to push their technology past its expiration date or beyond its capabilities, often with unintended consequences. Whether it’s in the form of increased stress placed on back office workers, a lack of visibility into costs or opportunities, or inability to deliver to your customers, continued use of an outdated business management software could hurt your reputation, sales, and relationships.
This creates a new challenge—one that is only exacerbated by growth. If you’re feeling the pain now, imagine how bad it may be if your business is 10%, 20% or 100% bigger. Worse yet, as you grow, customers expect more from your business, not less. In the era of instant gratification, free two-day delivery, and information at their fingertips, your customers expect you to deliver.
Common Challenges for Growing Companies
Do any of these phrases sound familiar?
- We waste too much time dealing with multiple systems that can’t talk to each other.
- Manual processes are error prone and can’t keep up with increasing demand despite added headcount.
- Creating and configuring reports it too complicated, and often doesn’t give us the information we need.
- Incomplete or incorrect information creates customer dissatisfaction and lost sales.
- Increasingly stringent compliance and security concerns keep you up at night.
- Productivity is lost spending valuable time switching back and forth between multiple applications and disconnected systems.
If so, you may be pushing or exceeding the limits of your undersized or outdated accounting software.
What’s Next?
If growth—or even stability—is a priority in 2019, continuing to rely on these solutions is going to cause more pain to your team than necessary. Longer hours for workers trying to overcome the software limitations; inaccuracies that could lead to audits; lack of visibility that could harm your decision making, and so much more—you may find that your solution isn’t solving anything.
Luckily, cloud technologies have caught up—and scaled down—to meet the needs of today’s SMB, enabling virtually any business to manage their financial and business operations quickly, securely, and reliably. At the same time, these new services replace costly IT overhead, providing much-needed flexibility to grow with your business, while helping your team give customers the experience they have come to expect. When businesses choose cloud financials, they are able to integrate and automate, leading to the following benefits and more:
- Improved and increased productivity with easy-to-create workflows, quotes, orders, and audit trails using the same Microsoft Office tools you’re familiar with.
- Consistent experiences across mobile devices regardless of location, complete with enterprise-class security.
- The ability to spot trends and delight customers through centralized, business-wide, up-to-date data.
- A fast, intuitive platform to get you started right away.
Recognizing your current system’s limitations is the first step to making a decision that could change the trajectory of your business now and in the future. At Innovative Cloud Solutions, we work with companies like yours to discuss challenges and opportunities for improvement that can set your business for success in 2019 and beyond.
We invite you to read a guide for replacing accounting software, learn more about our work implementing and supporting Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and contact us for more information.
