Epicor® FM Vs. QuickBooks

In today’s highly regulated marketplace, financial reporting is no cake walk. In fact, it can get downright ugly when financial management initiatives aren’t the foundation of many business operations. Without a financial management tool that enforces transaction visibility, automates posting processes and tightens data security, businesses risk tremendous setbacks. That’s why investing in an agile financial management solution is non-negotiable.

Our software consultants often find that businesses are relying on outdated systems that are jeopardizing their fiscal processes. To help you get on the right platform, we’ll compare the financial reporting dexterity of QuickBooks and Epicor® ERP’s Financial Management module. In our determination of the better solution, we’ll focus on three primary accounting needs: flexibility, data security and integration.

Financial Flexibility

The downside of QuickBooks is that it fails to deliver enough depth in its drill-down capabilities to manage transactions at a granular level. This can be a challenge to any company that has any form of remote work. For managers out of the office, this can be problematic if oversight involves the review of a department’s overall expense report, rather than controlling corresponding hidden costs that eat away at the top and bottom line over time.

Epicor® Financial Management is a highly flexible reporting system, allocating all financial information based on a hierarchy existing inside a singular system. Every transaction inside the organization is managed in this single suite. One of the best features of Epicor® is the ability for businesses to track inventory. Inventory management can make a significant impact on the bottom line. Inventory costing can become tricky with the volatile demands of today’s market. Financial oversight in this process is critical to deciding on budgets and capacity investments.

Epicor’s® General Ledger also includes Multiple Books, which provide users with unlimited financial books to support a wide range of fiscal requirements such as budgeting, forecasting and US GAAP compliance, versus managerial accounting or comprehensive consolidations in QuickBooks. Overall, this suite takes the complexity out of reporting and streamlines data from the transaction to financial reports in real time.

Ultimately, if your business has a degree of complexity in its setup and scale or is in need of a more flexible solution, Epicor® Financial Management software provides a lot more tools and performs the work more efficiently. 

Data Security

This is where QuickBooks really falls short. Its lax build weakens internal control. The primary concern is the level of accessibility QuickBooks allocates to an organization, specifically posted transactions. Transaction information can be edited at a later date. This is bad for budgeting, management control, visibility and anything else that results in noncompliance. Plus, QuickBooks allows sales orders to be changed at any time. The resulting complication is poor quality and account care, which leads to inefficiencies further upstream. Given the pressures of today’s business environment, even the slightest breach in quality will cause an enterprise to be swallowed up by competitors.

Does your business need an internally controlled environment? Epicor® Financial Management software is simply better at securing quality financial data at every juncture from quote to cash. Epicor® provides users the ability to configure validation rules to control what gets posted to the General Ledger from sub-ledgers. It does this based on key compliance metrics or policy requirements.

In the Epicor® Financial Planning suite, a security manager allocates access to key data to specific employees defined by power users. It is here that business leaders can define and submit budgets and forecasts in their areas of responsibility. This agile feature of ERP enables individuals to have more control over their data, operate efficiently and comply with fiscal regulations.

This is where the two solutions really cannot compare. If security and precise financial reporting are critical to your business, an ERP financial management software, like Epicor® FM, is pretty much a necessity.

Systems Integration

A major dilemma that growing businesses can expect using QuickBooks is making data compatible for integration with other systems or software. In other words, QuickBooks doesn’t play nicely with other systems. This can be a major challenge in the event of a buyout or the implementation of other software, because data must be in pristine condition in order to be migrated into new systems. 

It’s possible this data will need to be entered into the new system manually. This causes projects to become extremely complex, time consuming and over budget. What’s worse, we often see general misuse of QuickBooks. Users create new data over and over again, fail to eliminate irrelevant worksheets and clutter the server with duplicate entries. In our experience with clients, unclean data has almost always cost them an extra arm and a leg. 

Those are primary reasons why having a robust financial database in a single suite makes more sense than bookkeeping software. Epicor® Financial Management can be integrated with CRM and other systems for improved demand forecasting, supply chain scenario comparisons and compliance with taxes and regulations. 

Integrating Epicor® with CRM is a common project organizations pursue. When regulatory initiatives change—as they often do—modifications in Epicor® are instantly updated in CRM to ensure both systems relay the same information to stakeholders. Databases are also mirrored in both systems to ensure no duplicate entries occur and data remains in one system, not in an alternative source like QuickBooks. The bottom line is that it’s easy to outgrow QuickBooks, but Epicor® is scalable to change with your business. 

Wrap Up

In our comparison of two of the most commonly used financial and accounting management solutions, we found that the Epicor® Financial Management module is the clear winner. Whether a firm seeks to restore internal control, improve data security or streamline regulatory initiatives, investing in Epicor® Financial Management will provide the best value.

For more information on how Datix helps clients sculpt Epicor® ERP to fit their business practices, contact us today. Datix has the expertise to help manufacturers and distributors reap the benefits of Epicor® Financial Management and other crucial ERP modules. We also use our Unity integration solution to seamlessly connect ERP with CRM, eCommerce or Marketing Automation systems. Learn more about how Datix and Epicor® can elevate your business! Contact an expert at Datix today!