QuickBooks vs SAP Business One

Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) are moving away from accounting solutions like QuickBooks toward enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, particularly SAP Business One. While QuickBooks works well for startups, growing businesses need ERP’s broader and deeper capabilities. This page highlights the advantages SMBs enjoy when they replace QuickBooks with SAP Business One.

SAP Business One vs. QuickBooks

With over 60,000 customers and one million users, SAP Business One is the top choice among growing businesses that need more than QuickBooks’s limited functionality. With SAP Business One, SMBs can serve their customers and run their businesses in ways that aren’t possible with QuickBooks – like with complete, integrated functionality in:

Accounting and finance
Sales and customer management
Inventory and distribution
Purchasing and operations
Reporting

With SAP Business One, you can operate faster and more efficiently at scale because your business information is immediately accessible and secured for company-wide use.

Challenges
Growth
QuickBooks to ERP
Industry Solutions
Customizations
Key Features
SAP Services

Information in QuickBooks is scattered across several applications and has no central location to perform data analysis. The result is that data must be manually re-entered into each application, leading to errors and reducing employee productivity.

Integrations beyond the core QuickBooks applications are weak or nonexistent. Organizations must manually import and export data when integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and other must-have applications. Industry-specific add-ons such as retail inventory management frequently fail due to a QuickBooks ecosystem that lacks necessary modules, widgets, and APIs.

Unlike QuickBooks, ERP systems easily account for product batches, multi-warehouse approaches, FIFO support, and various product costing measures (e.g., average and standard cost). QuickBooks is limited to basic tracking, and even that depends on desktop and web-based add-ons.

Small businesses need to continually update innovative add-ons to keep pace with larger competitors, but QuickBooks cannot support many industries, including manufacturing, distribution, life sciences, and food and beverage.

Even when QuickBooks can provide the required functionality, growth is stunted by poor system performance. When a business reaches ten users or must input a lot of data into QuickBooks, performance slows to a crawl, leaving users unable to complete core processes and reporting on time.

Too many SMBs using QuickBooks waste significant time and resources manually gathering data for reports because it’s challenging to access and manipulate data in QuickBooks. Whether it’s GAAP, SOC, or customer-driven reporting, QuickBooks only delivers basic reporting functionality suited to average users. But customers, suppliers, and regulators often want unique reporting you can’t find in QuickBooks but is readily available in SAP Business One, including Crystal Reports, richly formatted reports, and dynamic reporting from virtually any data source.

As your business grows, you’ll inevitably discover the shortcomings of QuickBooks. While it’s a great solution for starting a business, growth means you must move beyond accounting software to business management software.

Over 80 percent of our SAP Business One customers migrated from QuickBooks. Four signs told them it was time for ERP:

Manual data entry was increasing error rates
Lack of integration between QuickBooks and other applications had created inefficient workflows
It was difficult to maintain visibility into growing inventory
Poor system performance was hurting employee productivity

Former QuickBooks users stated that the negative impact on customers was the ultimate reason for switching to ERP. When customers deal with incorrect orders, late shipments, and overall dissatisfaction, revenue falls and your brand is damaged. So, when the complexity and scale of your operations outpace QuickBooks’s ability to handle them, it’s time to consider business management software over basic accounting software.

For most SMBs, ERP is the most transformative step they’ll make in their evolution because it manages the entire business. Extracting the most value from ERP and transforming your business for maximum scale and efficiency requires six critical steps.

As the largest SAP Business One partner in the world, we’ve based these six steps on hundreds of successful first-time ERP implementations:

Assess your need for business management software
Understand the difference between ERP and accounting software
Assess your business’s ERP readiness
Evaluate ERP software on the market
Select an ERP partner
Choose the right ERP deployment option

Each step involves careful consideration, planning, and participation by multiple stakeholders from different departments and levels of your organization. That way, you ensure proper selection, implementation, and use of your ERP software. We strongly recommend starting your journey from QuickBooks to ERP by reading this comprehensive ERP software selection guide.

SAP Business One is ideal for a wide range of industries and provides functionality for each of them. In addition, SAP’s software development kit (SDK) has been giving software developers expanded integration points with every new product release since 2004. Combine this with Saltbox Platform by Vision33, a cloud iPaas (integration platform as a service) solution for enterprise integration, workflow, and collaboration between business applications.This enables you to customize your SAP Business One deployment with numerous industry-specific innovations from a long list of software solution providers. The result is in-depth solutions for:

Aerospace and defense
Food and beverage
Life sciences
Manufacturing
Oil and gas
Retail
Wholesale distribution

The global food and beverage market is constantly changing and relies on a complex supply chain. Add new customer demands and regulations regarding traceability, quality management, and inventory control, and your business needs to access and report on an array of data in real-time.

SAP Business One customers are winning in the food and beverage industry because they use SAP Business One to:

Comply with strict industry standards and GMP guidelines, including FDA, EMA, BRC, IFRA, and GHS
Manage shelf life and expiry dates by tracking byproducts, co-products, yield, wastage, shelf life, expiry date, FIFO, and FEFO
Track materials backward and forward from vendor to customer
Calculate costs with flexible, multilevel margin calculations per article, production order, and batch
Eliminate waste and minimize delays with advanced quality controls on raw materials and components
Improve planning, communication, and responsiveness with advanced scheduling and production controls
Make faster, more informed decisions with real-time reporting, dashboards, and alerts
Easily integrate with subsystems such as SCADA and LIMS

Effective inventory controls, warehouse management, and recall features are built into SAP Business One, not bolted on as an afterthought. SAP continuously incorporates these features and functions into the product because SAP Business One was developed as a comprehensive business management software solution that handles all forms of operational data.

Huy Fong Foods Automates Distribution Operations with SAP Business One

California-based Huy Fong Foods simplified end-to-end supply chain operations by consolidating five systems into just one: SAP Business One. The intuitive nature of the software enabled the company to implement its ERP using only non-technical staff.

Watch the customer video

The supply chain network is becoming more complex. Customers want more choices, faster fulfillment, and lower prices. To meet expectations, SAP Business One gives you a single, transparent view of all your warehouse and distribution operations, which helps you deliver goods on time, boosts customer satisfaction, and optimizes inventory.

Greater Inventory and Supply Chain Management

SAP Business One provides real-time information about inbound and outbound shipments and inventory data. Whether you stock and ship hard or soft goods, food, or other items with complex serialization and lot tracking, or your services are a mix of drop ship, 3PL, and stock and ship, SAP Business One will smooth your operations and improve your operating margin. With integrated solutions for EDI, shipping logistics, and supply and inventory management, Vision33 can automate your warehouse so everything happens automatically based on a single transaction.

EDI enables wholesale distributors to electronically exchange order information with a supply chain partner without manual data entry and re-entry, which results in fewer errors and faster order completion. SAP Business One integrates your backend data (e.g., sales, invoicing, production, scheduling, and shipping data) via EDI, eliminating manual processes associated with sharing data with business partners in a format they accept.

Innovative Cloud EDI

Cloud EDI is designed and built exclusively to connect SAP Business One to a network of over 55,000 retailers, manufacturers, suppliers, 3PLs, and more. The integrated EDI solution is available on both Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA and enables customer- and supplier-facing EDI in a single environment.

With cloud EDI for SAP Business One, you can:

Use standardized document formats to seamlessly interact with any partner
Increase cash flow by reducing invoicing and payment cycles
Send and receive real-time catalog, inventory, order, and shipping information
Save time by no longer building individual point-to-point connections with each trading partner

Superior Auto Extras

Superior Auto Extras, a full-service distributor, manages a range of products and product variants in SAP Business One and implemented advanced inventory management so their 60 employees, 75 outside sales reps, and two distribution centers are always synchronized.

Watch the video

SAP Business One is an all-in-one solution that provides accurate, real-time information for managing your end-to-end operations. The platform integrates features unique to discrete, process, and project manufacturing, including:

Production
Profitability measures
EDI
Supply chain management
Shipping logistics
Advanced manufacturing capabilities

Because SAP Business One maintains a full, 360-degree view of your operations, it delivers the broadest set of features and functions on the market:

Opportunity management
Advanced inventory management
Project-based purchasing
Comprehensive project management
Partner updates and news
Real-time, cross-functional reporting
Time and materials management with a built-in MRP system
Process-oriented bill of materials (BOM)
Centralized sales order entry
Change order management
Customized quality controls
Production management, including planning and scheduling

SAP Business One simplifies BOM management. The platform’s advanced real-time reporting lets you control user rights and offer BOM reporting views that display only the information employees need to do their jobs. Because SAP Business One stores all its information in a single database, all product data is captured in a single record. This centralizes the information from your engineering, manufacturing, and purchasing BOMs along with data for packaging, quality inspection, and identification labels. This ensures you produce and ship products exactly as specified.

Advance Adapters Exceeds Revenue Doubling

The highly complex products of Advance Adapters require detailed information-sharing with customers and prospects. The manufacturer switched to SAP Business One and more than doubled its revenue by streamlining customer views and feedback on project-specific data.

Watch the video

SAP Business One can manage your entire life sciences business, from inventory control to production and customer relationship management. The system can automate processes and bring sales transactions, supply chain logistics, warehouse management, and accounting capabilities under one platform. You also gain reporting capabilities specific to medical device companies, as you can access real-time information and view all operations in one place.

Meeting FDA Requirements

Regulators want to know your business has the proper controls, particularly for CAPA collection, analysis, resolution, reporting, and trending. With SAP Business One, your medical device company can produce documents and evidence to prove you’re following standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Quality Control

Your medical device company must provide quality management for class I, II, III, and IV medical devices, including quality standards compliance (i.e., TS14485 and ISO 9001). SAP Business One configures workflows and provides quality check procedures; after measurements are defined, the system sets up the acceptable quality level at each production checkpoint to ensure components don’t proceed until they meet that checkpoint’s criteria.

Traceability and Product Recalls

SAP Business One includes serial number traceability to help companies ensure products are tracked accurately through all stages. The system can manage UDIs, guarantee traceability, and enable your company to properly and efficiently manage recalls.

Avinger Transforms an Entire Business

Medical device company Avinger implemented SAP Business One to transform their business and prepare for growth. Today, they manage everything better with their finance, supply chain, logistics, and warehouse management under one platform.

Watch the video

Growing small and midsize businesses perform better when using an ERP system that delivers features, functions, and workflows that match their company- and industry-specific needs. Vision33 has extensive expertise in planning and implementing SAP Business One to enable industry-specific processes that work the way your business works.

Whichever industry you compete in, powerful SAP Business One customizations and add-ons optimize the platform’s value. Our SAP-certified consultants will deploy SAP Business One to maximize your company’s unique differentiators, and SAP Business One’s broad range of capabilities will speed your operations and expand your market reach.

Saltbox is a cloud-native, low-code integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution that empowers small and midsized companies to integrate disconnected business systems like ERP, CRM, and eCommerce.

By eliminating data silos and automating manual processes, Saltbox unlocks new levels of operational efficiency and cost savings.

Learn more

Vision33 offers two value-add web portals for SAP Business One:

Customer Portal
Employee Portal

Each portal makes SAP Business One a powerful enabler for speeding daily work and reducing mundane support tasks.

Customer Portal gives customers a secure, flexible, personalized self-service gateway to retrieve and interact with information in a standard web browser. It's a convenient, self-service way for your customers to make online payments, manage orders, and more.

Learn more about Customer Portal

The Employee Portal puts employees in the driver’s seat with access to the information they want and need at any time. A real-time, web portal that integrates with SAP Business One and gives them tools to get the work done.

Learn more about Employee Portal

Financial Management

Improve margins, reduce errors, and drive more profitable decision-making with a complete set of tools for streamlined financial operations.

Sales and Customer Management

Oversee the sales process and customer lifecycle more efficiently, from initial contact to final sale, after-sales service, and support.

Inventory and Production Functionality

Gain complete control in warehousing, inventory, stock movement, production, and MRP and make faster decisions based on detailed reporting for all areas.

Reporting & Real-time Analysis

Empower your employees to make smart, confident decisions faster by capturing all critical information and making it instantly available company-wide.

Business Intelligence (BI)

Create timely and accurate reports based on company-wide data with analytics and reporting tools.

Vision33 is the only SAP Business One partner that holds the AWS SAP Competency, and our Global Services group routinely helps SMBs expand into new geographies, making us the ideal implementation partner for growing businesses. Post-implementation, Vision33 continues to deliver value through our industry-leading support program, TOTAL Care, and ongoing ideation and implementation services from our world-class consulting team. They help customers continuously innovate using the best industry-specific add-ons and integrations to support new business initiatives and evolving market demands.

SAP Business One vs. QuickBooks

SAP Business One vs. QuickBooks

Challenges

Growth

QuickBooks to ERP

Industry Solutions

Customizations

Key Features

SAP Services

Challenges

Infographic: Why Companies Migrate from QuickBooks to SAP Business One

David Leadbetter Scales More Profitably by Migrating from QuickBooks to SAP Business One

Growth

“SAP Business One has streamlined our processes and helped us become one of the fastest shippers in the industry. Whereas the competition can take several weeks to deliver an order, VIETRI can do it within 2 to 3 business days, on average.”

QuickBooks to ERP

Review the ERP Software Selection Guide

Read the Graduating from QuickBooks eBook

On-premises vs. Cloud ERP Guide

Cloud Information Kit

Industry Solutions

Huy Fong Foods Automates Distribution Operations with SAP Business One

Greater Inventory and Supply Chain Management

Innovative Cloud EDI

Superior Auto Extras

Advance Adapters Exceeds Revenue Doubling

Meeting FDA Requirements

Quality Control

Traceability and Product Recalls

Avinger Transforms an Entire Business

Customizations

“Vision33 helped us transition to the cloud with SAP Business One. Not only can our sales professionals perform better from wherever they are, we have one place where all information can be found."

Juice Beauty Expands as Business Complexity Grows

Emerald Home Furnishings Manages Growth to Exceed $100M

The Fruit Company Optimizes Product Traceability

Key Features

Financial Management

Sales and Customer Management

Inventory and Production Functionality

Reporting & Real-time Analysis

Business Intelligence (BI)

SAP Services

How to identify the right ERP partner

Tolteca Foods Gains Inventory Insight, Then Expands

Get Started with SAP Business One

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