As your company continues to grow and matures, it’s important to upgrade the software used, to streamline the business processes. When it comes to selecting the right one, there are many things to be kept in mind.
Does the software meets your needs, how much you want to spend, whether or not your selected tool is secure enough to handle data? Accounting software market creates this huge dilemma.
With a variety of tools for small business, enterprise tools, freemium, etc. available, it can be quite a daunting task for a small to midsize businesses(SMBs) to select which software is fit for their requirements.
According to Scott Davisson, co-founder of Acclivity, a provider of desktop-based small business accounting tool AccountEdge, there are many factors need to be considered like pricing, flexibility, customer service and security features of software before purchasing it. In this article, we highlight the important questions businesses should ask themselves before taking the final call.
1. Does the selected software do more than the four core aspects?
As per Davisson, most of the freely available accounting tools can handle expense tracking, invoicing, account management and sales. These are the minimum tasks that any tool should be able to handle regardless of your purchasing power.
There may be situations when there will be need of additional functionality that your freemium tool doesn’t have. In case you need a software that can handle things such as inventory tracking, payroll, and billing for time, you may have to invest in a paid tool. Even if most of the free tools can handle sales data, if your business has many departments, you might have to consider to go with a more sophisticated and complex tool.
2. Is your accounting tool flexible enough?
One of the key reasons businesses go for enterprise-level software in place of lower-cost or freemium software is that these enterprise tools often provides countless customizations that can change the software according to each client’s needs.
If small business accounting tool can provide you with multiple add-ons and integrations, then in that case you don’t have to spend a large amount on an enterprise-level platform.
3. How secure is your software?
The level of security is very crucial points of differentiation between enterprise-class, freemium or small business software.
Security is one of the primary reason that makes businesses to prefer on-premises software over cloud-based tools. That doesn’t mean cloud-based tools are not worthy enough as they also come with their set of unique features and advantages over the on-site software.
4. How good is the customer service?
In this competitive market, customer service is a very important aspect. In the case of something isn’t properly working, can you reach your software vendor? Whether or not you can reach them on the medium of your choice and comfortability? Are the customer support representatives converse in your language or not?
These are important questions you should ask yourself and vendors offering you their software. In the case of enterprise-level software, you may get 24/7 support but in the case of freemium or paid SMB accounting tools, you will have to investigate and research your service options.