Andrea Jones breaks down why companies should move from QuickBooks and spreadsheets to a new ERP system. She shows how it cuts tax prep from 3.5 months to 2 weeks, enables modern integrations like customer portals, and scales operating expenses as revenue grows. Hiring a dedicated project manager prevents the typical 6-month delay and pays for itself.
A CEO asked me a couple of weeks ago what the ROI of getting a new ERP system would be for his company. They are still on QuickBooks and using spreadsheets and somehow are managing to do $40 million worth of top-line business. So what would a new ERP system do for you that you can't already do today at $40 million? There's 3 real things. One is The operating expense you have ought to be able to improve and scale. And what I mean by that is imagine you could double your top line at whatever your gross margins are, and then take the same operating expense you have at your $40 million and get to the bottom line of net profit. So if you have a top line of $40, now your top line is $80. Take it down to whatever your gross margin is, and then take away your original operating expense, and now see what your net revenue plus that additional doubling of your top line at the gross margin would be. That is what you should be able to get out of a new system if you're especially on QuickBooks and spreadsheets today. That's one. The second thing is information. Specifically financial information to make decisions. And this is a personal one. We got our own system at my consulting practice, uh, a year ago, and the amount of time it took to consolidate our financials to prepare for the tax season went from 3 and a half months to 2 weeks. And we're a small company. So having all of our financial information in one system consolidated that incredibly quickly. It can do the same for you. And the third thing is a new system, especially coming off QuickBooks and spreadsheets, or perhaps an old DOS-based system, allows you— if you have a new system that has open APIs and it can be in the cloud— to build the infrastructure for future improvements such as a customer-facing portal, or you're going to integrate with a really slick CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. Any of those things can now be done in a way that pulls the information about your customers and your financial transactions to a single source of truth. Those are the 3 main reasons. And then people will ask me, should I have a project manager help this? Well, it's about a 6-month on average delay if you do not have your own project manager. This is not the same as your vendor's project manager. So do Just think about all of those savings and the ROI of having a system, and then what it would cost you to wait for an additional 6 months for those things. Put some sort of NPV on that, and that is the maximum you should be willing to pay for a project manager. And I can almost guarantee you that would be less expensive. So yes, you should have a project manager. Thanks for watching.
