If your company is still using on-premise software or spreadsheets for bookkeeping and accounting, you might want to consider switching to a cloud-based accounting system. Cloud-based systems offer many benefits over on-prem solutions, including remote connectivity options, automation of time-consuming manual and menial processes, and increased accuracy and compliance.
Thanks to these and many other benefits, companies gain the ability to increase the efficiency of their financial operations whilst also reducing the effort and labor resources associated with those tasks. In fact, many organizations across nearly every conceivable industry are increasingly abandoning their on-prem solutions in favor of cloud-based enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs).
ERPs are making life much easier for businesses, and that is the universally acknowledged truth because a well-rounded ERP solution, such as NetSuite, does more than streamline your financial operations. It also helps manage your supply chain, procurement, inventory, HR, and many other services.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the benefits of NetSuite, what this cloud-based solution actually is, and how it can help your business manage its resources and set itself up for success and growth.
What is NetSuite?
Before we dive into the specifics of NetSuite, let’s discuss what exactly ERPs are. Resource management has always been important. From the moment we started growing crops and herding, humans have managed our resources to ensure our survival and drive our growth. The same analogy could be applied to modern business, but the scope of operations is much more complex than it ever was throughout history, necessitating ERP systems for efficient management.
ERPs automate and centralize your business information into a single location, a platform, providing you and your team with accurate, up-to-minute information about your business. These solutions are incredibly important form modern businesses to optimize and streamline important tasks, increase efficiency, improve collaboration, and reduce operational costs.
One of the best features associated with these types of software solutions is their ability to provide detailed analysis reports, providing business owners with valuable information about profitability, losses, and areas of possible improvement. They’re a fantastic tool to promote further growth of the company through data-driven decision-making.
Why NetSuite?
NetSuite was originally called NetLedger, a bookkeeping and accounting platform, but has since grown into an all-encompassing ERP solution that brings together all aspects of your business and presents it in a single, integrated platform. That platform combines accounting and bookkeeping with CRM and e-commerce functionalities and streamlines numerous operations by automating critical processes.
This applies to nearly all departments of your business, including sales, services, finance, employee management, and inventory management. NetSuite also eliminates the need for data re-entry into multiple systems, resolves issues of inaccurate or inconsistent data, and completely eliminates the wait time associated with batch updates.
Instead, NetSuite provides you and your team access to real-time, accurate data, which enhances the overall productivity across your entire organization. Since it’s a cloud-based solution, you can access it wherever you are in the world.
Moreover, NetSuite’s continuous updates ensure that your business keeps pace with the latest financial regulations and technological advancements, mitigating the risk of falling behind in compliance or operational efficiency.
5 Benefits of NetSuite ERP for Bookkeeping
Given the sheer number of functions it is capable of performing, the robust benefits of using NetSuite for your business’s financial operations become quite apparent. Here are some of the biggest benefits of using NetSuite:
Streamlined Financial Management
Company growth and development imply a growing need to manage broader aspects of your business’s financial operations. NetSuite provides comprehensive bookkeeping solutions that cover a wide range of your accounting operations and allow your accountants to streamline financial management.
Automation plays a crucial role in alleviating the downsides associated with manual work. For example, manual data retrieval or entry and menial tasks all consume time, which is a valuable resource. Those individual tasks might be so small that they don’t ring alarm bells for warranting automation, but the accumulation of marginal losses quickly adds up. The same applies to manual processing of large volumes of data, which makes the process more susceptible to human error due to its repetitive nature. The automation of repetitive and menial time-consuming tasks, as well as your accounting team’s overall workflow, leads to the accumulation of marginal gains in efficiency and accuracy, which become quite significant in the long run.
Enhanced Reporting and Analytics
NetSuite is a rather robust software solution with a wide range of options that also include powerful and in-depth reporting and analytics tools. The in-depth analysis capabilities, paired with unparalleled report customizations, allow your accounting team to derive all the relevant financial data and insights that software solutions with generic reports simply can’t provide.
The ability to provide enhanced reporting and analytics is extremely important, as it might provide insight into margin variances across different sale channels and provide you with an even firmer grasp of your company’s financial operations. Having access to granular financial data analysis can help you make better, data-driven financial decisions that can increase your profit margins and cut down your losses.
Cost Savings and Efficiency
While there are more “budget friendly” accounting platforms out there, such as QuickBooks, NetSuite makes up for that difference in the form of efficiency and capability. The more efficient your business is, the more you reduce costs. For those who are cost conscious, it’s important to pay attention not just to the price tags of certain software, but also to the positive impact of business process optimization.
Further, by outsourcing bookkeeping operations to a third-party NetSuite accountant, businesses small and large can enjoy cost savings that would otherwise spend on office space and supplies, office equipment, onboarding, and employee benefits.
In this instance, businesses are granted access to accounting staff with proficient knowledge of the NetSuite platform, which significantly impacts the effectiveness of their operations through improved financial processes.
Additionally, NetSuite’s cloud infrastructure significantly reduces the need for extensive IT maintenance and hardware upgrades, further lowering operational costs and enabling businesses to allocate resources more strategically. Without the need for on-prem servers, or IT staff to manage upgrades and maintenance, businesses utilizing NetSuite see a significant reduction in the overhead of their IT departments.
Scalability and Flexibility
NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP solution that offers plenty of scalability and flexibility to help businesses grow. This is rather important for several reasons. One is that the flexibility of NetSuite allows for seamless customization and integrations with modules and other platforms, showcasing its strength as a customizable ERP software. Regarding the scalability of the platform, NetSuite allows you to easily add user licenses and modules as your business expands, and can grow with you from a few million in revenue to $1B+.
Improved Security and Data Management
They say that data is the new oil. It’s an extremely important asset to modern businesses, which underscores the importance of adequate data security and data management systems and protocols. This ensures that you have good-quality data necessary for optimal decision-making while also safeguarding both your client’s sensitive data and your own intellectual property.
Being cloud-based, NetSuite consolidates all data into a single platform, which offers significantly higher security levels compared to distributed systems with varying levels of security. The software solution also features a very straightforward permission control that allows for smooth regulation of data visibility, ensuring that it’s only visible to employees with relevant roles within the company.
Lastly, NetSuite complies with all the various regulatory requirements and data security standards, which dictate the safeguarding of sensitive business and personal information; this means that your data is safe with NetSuite.
Summary
NetSuite ERP provides businesses with numerous benefits that allow them to streamline their operations, increase their efficiency, reduce losses, and drive up profits and growth. If you’re interested in upgrading your financial operations through the use of a comprehensive enterprise resource planning solution, contact ScaleNorth today. We’re a premier NetSuite Solutions Provider and outsourced accounting partner that’s standing by to assist with the transformation of your financial infrastructure.