Inter-Departmental Integration With QuickBooks

Published January 14, 2023
quickbooks integration for small medium businesses

In many ways, an organization is like a living, breathing organism. There are individual parts in both of these that help make the whole thing function. In order for it to function properly, coordination is a must between each of the separate components of the whole entity. The marketing departments rely on the finance departments to know their spending budgets, while the finance department depends on the supply chain to find out revenues. This is just one example of the multiple interconnectivity that makes the whole organization run. If you are well-coordinated as an organization, you’ll be better able to respond to the changing circumstances you face as a business.

With improving decision-making, you will become increasingly profitable, and your corporation will have fulfilled its purpose. The question then becomes, how exactly do you achieve better coordination within the company? The answer is by adopting QuickBooks throughout your company.

How Can QuickBooks Help?

QuickBooks is an all-in-one accounting system that can be incorporated with multiple functionalities which will assist across multiple departments. Most notably, the platform can be used to manage inventory, expenses, and taxes and expanded to help with project management as well as managing the vendors working for your business.

The functionalities you can expect from QuickBooks include:

  • Income and Expense Tracking
  • Organizing Receipts
  • Maximizing tax deductions
  • It can generate invoices and can be modified to accept payments
  • It tracks sales and sales taxes
  • It can also manage your bills
  • Tracking project Profitability
  • Vendor management systems

Cloud support systems

One major advantage of QuickBooks is the cloud hosting capabilities which do away with the huge costs associated with database management. The average cost of setting up and maintaining your databases can range between $10,000 to half a million dollars. QuickBooks, on the other hand, has authorized third-party cloud hosting service providers to set up QuickBooks for clients in the cloud. This passes on the costs associated with database management to the QuickBooks hosting service. These services will provide technical support and keep your systems running at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost you to do it yourself.

Remote access and multiple users 

QuickBooks is also equipped with remote access capabilities that eliminate the inevitability of holding up your work if you or someone else can’t come to work.  You can carry your work with you wherever you go and keep track of how your business is doing at a time and place of your choosing. With this, a lot of the inefficiencies associated with conventional ERP systems are eliminated.  Most of these can only be accessed through the dedicated lines within the premises of your company.

In addition to this, the platform is designed to be used by up to a total of 25 people working within various capacities in the organization. You can dedicate privileges as an administrator to monitor what information each individual is authorized to access. With this, you can ensure that the right information is going to all the authorized people within the company.  As the information flows in a timely manner throughout your company, you will begin to see the effects of QuickBooks improving your performance.

Implementing QuickBooks Across Your Company

Ultimately, QuickBooks is simply a tool, and its effectiveness depends on how you implement it across your company.  Considering the differences in company size and long-term goals, there are different strategies that you can apply with QuickBooks to help improve your organizational processes. The different packages Intuit has created can help companies operate across different scales. Each package gets increasingly complex and is incorporated with different functionalities to help you manage different departments across the organization. Depending on your understanding of the best managerial strategy, you can implement QuickBooks in the following capacities:

For small and medium enterprises

As a company that is looking to establish itself, some of the most basic QuickBooks packages are probably the options. These offer a basic accounting system and can be used to manage smaller inventories through manual operations. These packages only allow for one administrative user who can monitor the data flow and use it to make decisions. As someone managing a small company, you might not need everyone to know what the workings of the company are like. You can use QuickBooks in an individual capacity for a top-down approach to directing your business’s activities.

Since the platform also includes a payment acceptance module, you can maintain direct control over company accounts and direct cash flows as you see fit.

Stepping up

Once you start growing your business, you might need to begin delegating your tasks and dividing your company into separate departments. With this, you can delegate the authority to manage a specific section of your business and just report to you by providing a summary of how the business has been performing. When you reach that scale of operation, you might want to implement one of the more complex QuickBooks packages, which allow access to up to 3 people at a time. Each of these individuals could be heading their own department, and you can oversee their activities over time.

Assuming that you can no longer just assess how the business is faring based on the figures at hand, this package includes an estimation tool that can conduct rudimentary projections for sales and profits. This information ought to be sufficient to plan out what the next step ought to be for the company. So if you want to create a finance and marketing division, you can take one end of the access points while giving the others to the two heads for marketing and finance. Since each of you can see the data for sales, inventory, and the financial statements of the company, you can let the two heads coordinate with each other over what the best path to take ought to be.

Growing to larger scales 

There’s a scale of operation where the delegation increases. At larger scales, business decisions become a little more difficult, and the results become hazy. Keeping track of all business activities becomes difficult. With these considerations, you can move on to some of the more complex QuickBooks packages that can be used by 5 to 25 people. At this stage of functioning, your internal coordination becomes even more important since your teams get larger, your organizational risk is increasing, and the workload itself becomes immense. You might even decide to create new departments like Human Resources, Logistics, Corporate Relations, and as many as you feel the right amount.

You can connect each of these departments to make sure that you can create a self-sustaining organization that can function on its own, given the bottom lines for the business. With parallel and interconnected processes running on their own, QuickBooks data consolidation also begins to prove its worth. Your finance and marketing departments should always work together, except now both of these will work with the human resource department. HR will conduct its quality assurances, hiring, and contracting, depending on the requirements of each department as well as the budgets at hand.

QuickBooks will work best for the finance departments and the managerial staff. With the reporting tools and the profit estimating capabilities, each of the department heads can keep track of their progress. Your access to these numbers will help keep track of your business responses and the effectiveness of each department in terms of fulfilling its assigned goals. These inter-connectivities become even more complex as you move to higher scales of operation. Each version of QuickBooks can be implemented to handle the increasing workload and the amount of data that comes with it. QuickBooks hosting services work 24 hours to keep your servers running up throughout the day, which also becomes important as you start dealing with larger clientele.

Conclusion

There’s no one way that you can implement QuickBooks in your organization. Each enterprise has its own managerial styles and business goals. These, in turn, will have implications for how you want to adopt QuickBooks and the range of functionalities that you want to include in your QuickBooks packages. QuickBooks has been designed to help manage information that is essential to keep your business working. The reporting tools can consolidate information to present graphical and numerical projections for your cash flows and profits. With tax deductions and inventory management systems, the platform reduces a great deal of the effort and time requirements to manage your organization.

With this decrease in time requirements and the increased comprehensibility of the data, QuickBooks presents many advantages that all organizations can benefit from.

gotomyerp is a QuickBooks hosting service. We offer our clients QuickBooks hosting and Consultancy to improve organizational outcomes beyond all expectations. Get in touch with us today for more information on our services, or speak with our consultants to implement QuickBooks across your organizations.