bussines operating software - options other than quickbooks
April 11, 2024
by a searcher from Texas A&M University in College Station-Bryan, TX, TX, USA
For background, I own a wine distribution company, looking to buy competitors here in Texas and eventually surrounding states. My pricing is built on 20 users and 3 locations (warehouses).
As I am looing to grow further through acquisitions, scalable software is a huge item that needs to be addressed. Currently I run Quickbooks (like most small business). It works, great starting point, but is limited beyond a single operator.
Currently I have looked at Odoo, Zoho, and Net suite. I am leaning towards Odoo due to its scalability an customization.
Quickbooks: pretty much accounting and not much else. there are a lot of other software that can plug in or play with it, but it is a Kludge-fest. To get anything useful you need Enterprise and that is still sort on my needs. they are raising their prices a lot also. Pricing: $600 year for single seat license of Pro, 2K for enterprise.
Salesforce: holy cow it is expensive, not SMB friendly
Netsuite: kind of a more comprehensive version of QB, but dated and expensive. Probably 30K+ to implement and 36k+ a year to license.
Zoho: seem decent but a little too off the shelf. Kind of the Apple of business software, works great as long as what you want to do is what they have available. pricing, no idea
Odoo: second time looking at it, would recommend hiring a third party to implement. They do not have a US account template, you have to set it all up. You can port over QB data, but it takes some work to format. Upside it you can do just about anything you want (lots of modules), downside is that it was built to EU accounting, and will need implementation team to set up. About 25~40k to implement, less than 6k license annually.
Any other software i should look at? what has been you experience?
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from Emory University in Tucson, AZ, USA
Going past Quickbooks Online, you have many options besides NetSuite, including Acumatica, Dynamics, Epicor, etc. The suites tend to focus on specific verticals, and you might find solutions that align to your needs more closely (and if you need traceability, EDI, etc.). Pricing varies as well based on the modules you need. Generally, you'll be in similar $ ballparks between implementation and annual software costs.
Acumatica has a Grid report showing all the ERPs out there that may help identify additional candidates: https://www.acumatica.com/grid-report-erp-software-ratings/
If your headaches are managing orders, warehouse pick/pack, improving delivery route efficiencies, etc. within Quickbooks and you are not ready to leap to ERP, you might consider add-ons to QB such as BrightPearl, SOS Inventory, Fishbowl, etc.
from University of Michigan in Bay City, MI, USA
Odoo is along the same lines as Zoho. I've not used it, but I've heard other folks complain about the accounting module doing things not-quite-right.
My impression is that you need to be mid-8 figures to justify the enterprise-level stuff (NetSuite, Dynamics, etc.). I've heard a fair number of stories of smaller businesses starting to implement a big solution like this and then ripping it out. Painful. But at a certain point, it just becomes part of table stakes to have something like that. Your industry or customers may dictate going in this direction earlier.
I'm a bit of a Zoho honk, so if you decide to look at that more deeply and have questions, just reach out.