Have you outgrown QuickBooks?

What this measures

QuickBooks is genuinely good software and most companies using it should keep using it. The failure mode we see is not companies staying too long — it is companies being sold a replacement before they need one, and companies staying three years past the point where the close stopped working.

The index weights nine dimensions. Entity count, close duration, and manual bill volume carry the most weight, because those are the three that compound: each one gets worse on its own as you grow, and each one is expensive to fix late.

What a high score does not mean

It does not mean you need a new ERP this quarter. In our experience roughly half of high-scoring companies get most of the relief from two changes that leave the ledger alone entirely — automating accounts payable, and building department and entity reporting on top of the existing books. Both are things we do without asking you to migrate.

The three signals that actually predict it

Across the assessments we have run, three answers do most of the predictive work. If you only want to think about your own situation for two minutes, think about these.

Entity count

QuickBooks handles one company file well. It handles two by making you switch between them, and it handles consolidation by not handling it — you export both, paste them into a spreadsheet, and apply eliminations by hand. That workbook is fine at two entities, fragile at four, and a genuine financial-reporting risk at eight, because it is unversioned, unaudited, and understood by exactly one person.

The tell is not the number of entities. It is whether anyone other than the controller could produce the consolidated statements if that person were unavailable for a fortnight.

Close duration

A close that takes five days is a functioning close. A close that takes fifteen means your finance team spends three-quarters of the month reporting on the last one, which leaves almost no capacity for the analysis that would actually change a decision. The more damaging effect is timing: if the January numbers land on the twentieth of February, every operational decision made in between was made on guesswork.

Close duration also tends to be the metric that degrades quietly. Nobody notices the day it goes from eight to eleven, because it happened over four quarters.

Manual bill volume

Keying vendor bills is the single largest block of low-value finance work in most companies this size, and it scales linearly with growth in a way almost nothing else in finance does. At two hundred bills a month you are spending roughly a full-time equivalent week on data entry. At six hundred you are hiring someone, and that hire is usually presented as a growth cost rather than a systems cost.

What to do at each band

The result page gives you a number. This is what we would actually recommend at each level, including when the recommendation involves spending nothing.

• Below 38. Do nothing structural. Fix the specific irritant — usually a reporting request or a manual reconciliation — and revisit in a year or when entity count changes.
• 38 to 62. Automate accounts payable and build the reporting layer on top of your existing books. Both leave QuickBooks in place, both are reversible, and together they resolve most of the pain at this level.
• Above 62. Start a shadow ledger. It costs you a read-only connection, accumulates proof for as long as you want, and turns the eventual decision into a low-risk one rather than a leap.

Notice that none of these bands recommends a nine-month implementation. That is not modesty — it is that we do not think a company should ever be asked to replace its general ledger before it has watched a replacement agree with the ledger it already has.

How we use your answers

They stay in your browser. Nothing is submitted unless you ask for the result by email, and if you do, we use it to send the result and a short follow-up — not to enrol you in a sequence.