Things are going well for your organization, with steady growth since you opened your doors. But in order to continue to grow and improve profitability you need to improve your financial processes. You start to notice that you are outgrowing standalone accounting software when reporting requires too much time wrestling with manual data entry between Excel spreadsheets and other disparate software. Month end closings seem to take forever and drain resources. Paper reports stack up.
To take your business to the next level you need a solution that can handle more data and deliver reporting and business intelligence modules that help you improve forecasting and decision making. You want to eliminate legacy and disparate software and implement a full-fledged Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that integrates to your other mission critical applications. Outgrowing standalone accounting software can be painful, but you are not alone.
Here are three examples of organizations that successfully moved to ERP after outgrowing standalone accounting software.
Financial Services Company Graduates to ERP from Sage
Founded in 2003 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Russell Simmons, UniRush revolutionized the payments industry when it launched one of the first prepaid Visa debit cards. The Prepaid Visa RushCard provided instant access to a set of basic financial services for more than 48 million Americans who previously could not establish traditional banking relationships. The firm's legacy Sage Accpac accounting software was unable to meet reporting needs and stopped supporting growth. UniRush chose Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP for its rapid deployment, affordability, integration to Excel and easy to use in-depth reporting
“Out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics GP met all our needs,” said Tom Brand, VP of Finance UniRush. “It provided reporting through Report Manager; it had the ability to export data to Microsoft Excel; it offered SmartList Builder, which enabled us to perform customized reporting; and it allowed us to upload large journal entries, which is critical to a business like ours.”
Non Profit Gains Functionality Moving from QuickBooks to ERP
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City aims to enrich the lives of communities by offering performing-arts experiences to its community members. After opening in a brand new building, the Kauffman Center quickly became iconic in the region with a dramatic, compelling design and excellent acoustics. The organization’s QuickBooks instance was unable to provide the data, functionality, visibility and performance that it needed. As a non profit they needed to have reporting transparency and strong workflow controls in place, and they needed a solution that was not going to burden them with huge IT costs and requirements.
“We wanted to be ready with a robust financial management solution that would let us record and manage revenue, perform proper depreciations, manage fixed assets, and work effectively within a complex fund-accounting structure,” Connie Silverman, Controller, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. “We also needed the reporting capabilities to ensure our compliance, in terms of proper payment of taxes, grant management, bond financing, providing informational returns, and general transparency of our financial practices.”
Publisher Improves Agility Moving from NetSuite to GP in the Cloud
UMI (Urban Ministries, Inc.) is a leading publisher that serves African-American churches and consumers. They saw rapid change in both the publishing industry and in the accounting software options. UMI had a standalone NetSuite accounting solution and a disparate legacy ERP solution. As consumer demand shifted toward digitalization, the company needed to adapt and they needed an all-inclusive ERP solution that could handle growth, new lines of business and handle a diverse set of operational requirements while delivering industry leading financial management. They chose Microsoft Dynamics GP.
“Our business is going through a revolution caused by new, breakthrough technologies and digital content delivery channels that find rapid adoption,” said C. Jeffrey Wright, CEO of UMI. “At the same time, we also support another demographic that prefers print media. We were in need of a robust technology solution that would help us serve all of our consumers and institutional customers, track the relationships between millions of people and their churches, customize marketing and products for our audiences, and help our select business partners connect with the right market segments.”
