As your business grows in size and complexity, the tools that once supported you may now be holding you back. You’re faced with an important decision: replace your basic accounting software or continue down a path that leads to dissatisfied customers, lost sales, and the risk of falling behind your competition. If you recognize any of these warning signs, the time has come to make a change.

1. Your accounting software’s older than the college grads applying for jobs with your business. If you have fond memories of Y2K-proofing your current accounting system, it’s clearly past its prime. Today’s digital native workforce expects technology to support how they want to work, not limit functionality.
2. You are losing sales to competitors with inferior products. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best of the best—if you can’t provide visibility into available stock, account information, or self-service options, customer service and sales will falter.
3. You spend more time hunting for information than you do planning for ways to grow your business. You got into business to innovate for your customers, not spend endless cycles digging for details buried in disconnected applications. If strategic thinking and growth planning are taking a back seat to an ever-growing to-do list, it’s time for your technology to step up.
4. Your ordering process still requires a telephone or fax machine, and no matter how many employees you hire, you just can’t keep up with demand. Outdated technology can’t scale to meet the growth rate of today’s businesses, and customers that don’t get served quickly and conveniently (or can’t serve themselves easily) usually don’t come back.
5. You would rather take your chances with a pit full of rattlesnakes than your impending audit.

If you do not have an audit trail, or workflows in place to protect your assets and keep you compliant with industry regulations, your company could be at risk.

6. The high and lows of your cash flow cycles make you wonder if a Magic 8 Ball might be a better way to manage your financials. How many details about expenses or past-due accounts end up only jotted down on sticky notes or captured in one-off spreadsheets? Without an accurate, comprehensive view of where you’re spending and earning, knowing when and where to cut costs is going to take more than luck. Before implementing a cloud-based Microsoft business solution, Georgia Swarm Lacrosse was unable to utilize data like player stats, game stats, and player costs like payroll and travel expenses. Now, with the ability to analyze the cost per player, per game, they are able to operate much more cost-effectively.
7. You’re “pretty sure” that you might have that product “somewhere” in your warehouse.
   If your system can’t tell you what is in stock, what is on order, and what is allocated to a customer, you’re not alone. Surprisingly, many highly visible and sophisticated companies operate without a firm handle on their inventory—often to unfavorable results. If your software doesn’t easily provide you with this information, it’s time to upgrade.
8. Every news report on a data breach has you thinking it’s just a matter of time until you face the same scrutiny. You lose sleep worrying about malware, back-ups, security breaches, and fraud. The idea of your sales team’s laptops and devices getting stolen fills you with dread that critical business data may be compromised or forever lost.
9. You are doing more accounting outside of your accounting software than in it. Outdated or ill-fitting accounting systems tend to spawn one-off lists and manually updated spreadsheets that are disconnected and hard to reconcile. Without a centralized, holistic view of your data, future growth is stifled, and making educated decisions about new product lines or locations is nearly impossible, not to mention risky.
10. You are green with envy when watching others run their businesses from a smartphone. When answering a customer’s question means having to first go into the office or call someone else to help, you’re losing credibility. You need true mobility to be able to respond to new opportunities and customer expectations.

You may have outgrown your accounting system, but finding the right fit is easy. Explore how a business solution from Microsoft can improve your business today and help you achieve your ambitions for tomorrow. For further inspiration, be sure to check out The SMB’s Guide to Replacing Accounting Software, and get ready to reap the benefits of a complete, trusted, and familiar business solution from Microsoft.