New Features Don't Help
Accounting in a small/med size business (even in larger ones) is a non productive function; that's a fact.
Try this: fire your current mediocre accountant and hire the best accountant in the country. The impact on your business will be marginal. Replace your current mediocre operations person with a good experienced operations person and the impact on your business will be substantial. You, owner/manager already knew that, didn't you? Or try this: Replace your level 1 accounting software with a level 2 or even a level 3 accounting software. The impact on your business will be marginal. Implement a business software that fits your operations, the benefits will be substantial.
An accounting software, any, aims at streamlining the record keeping/accounting process and making the accountant's job easier and more efficient. In other words, it aims at making a non productive function more productive. With every new version, the new features take this idea one more step further.
Step back and ask yourself what have any of the new features added to your company when you purchased the latest version of your accounting package. Really, very little and in many cases practically nothing.
Just as an example, what does any of these features, taken randomly, do to your company?
- Bank reconciliation feature. Nothing. It just saves the accountant one or two hours a month, that's all.
- Downloading bank transactions from your bank's website directly into your software. Impressive, but it adds nothing to the company.
- Efiling a GST return. Sounds spectacular, but the benefit to your company is practically nil.
I can cite many more examples.
In their last version QuickBooks touted that they have added new CRM feature. In my view, this is lipstick on the dog, a marketing gimmick, nothing else. A half decent low end CRM software should be modeled around the type of relationship you have developed with your customers. How can one claim that their CRM feature is good for your company when they don't even know that you exist? As I said, it's just a marketing gimmick.
No war has ever been won by counting the dead. However, many wars have been lost because of poor or faulty logistics or a piece of operational info was not passed on because buried under a pile of useless data, or even worst the wrong operational info was transmitted. Your accounting software's new features cannot help you here.