I often hear entrepreneurs tell me : « Mathieu, we will keep our accounting on QuickBooks. It works well, it’s inexpensive, and our accountant works on QuickBooks. »
I have two questions for you:
- Who manages your business, you? or your accountant?
- Do you really have the means to work in a frankenstein system? It costs you more than you think!
Let’s look at the real numbers together for a moment to demystify the cost of a management system.
If we look at the current market for entry-level software:
- The basic EasyStart package of a strictly accounting solution like QuickBooks costs $28 per month.
- On the other hand, the Standard package of a complete ERP like Odoo costs $35.20 CAD per user per month.
A difference of just $7.20.
See content identifiers
Odoo subscriptions | Quickbooks Online (after the first 6 months at $2.80/month, Quickbooks is at $28/month)
Here’s what you get with the $28 solution: you manage your finances, your billing, and you categorize your transactions. End of story.
This is where the trap begins!
Because your business does not only do accounting. Very quickly, you fall into the trap of the “a la carte” billing of SaaS tools. To operate, you need to pull out your credit card again:
- A CRM (Pipedrive, Hubspot) for your sales: + $25/month
- A project management tool (Asana, Monday): + $15/month
- An appointment scheduling software (Calendly): + $15/month
- An inventory management system: + $40/month
Suddenly, your "affordable" accounting solution at $28 has turned into an invisible technology tax of over $100 per month, billed in 5 different subscriptions.
Not to mention the administrative time losses of your entire team searching for and entering information into your IT mess.
I estimate, very conservatively, between 3 to 10 hours of lost time (information search, double - triple data entries, trying to remember where you left off...) between each element of your Frankenstein system x 48-50 weeks x average hourly rate of your company (including the manager, yes yes)
Let's take, for example, a company with 5 employees: 5 hours x 5 employees x 50 weeks = 1250 non-productive hours x $35/hour on average = $43,750/year (recurring cost)
You pay a high price for fragmented pieces. With Odoo at $35.20/month, you are not just buying an accounting module. The entrepreneur ensures to invest and equips their business with an ERP (THE most used ERP in the world)
You have access to all the applications of the ecosystem Odoo from day 1:
- Accounting,
- CRM and sales cycle management,
- Project Management,
- Operations management (Purchasing, Inventory, Manufacturing, Maintenance),
- Website management and editing (transactional or not),
- Human Resources Management...
- Appointment management
- Etc.
for an additional $7.20 /month than Quickbooks.
Why pay $28 for Quickbooks for the simple privilege of pleasing your accountant, and condemn yourself to buy the rest of your tools at gold prices, when you can have a complete enterprise infrastructure for the price of two extra coffees a month?
I challenge you to do the math today: what is the total monthly cost of all your combined software licenses? The answer may surprise you.
I challenge you to calculate the total cost of your infrastructure here (the link points to our management IT structure calculation tool)
Don't let the myth of "affordable software" force you to build a monster.Invest in a solid foundation.
Synthos Consulting and Technologies
#Accounting #Software #Odoo #QuickBooks #Growth #SME #SynthosConsulting