Reporting for Distributors: 4 Big Advantages of D365 Business Central vs. QuickBooks

Reporting is the lifeblood of your distribution business. You depend on reports for everything from helping you track inventory to understanding the overall performance of your business. Without real-time access to all your data (not just financials) and a way to easily see and analyze that data—reports aren’t going to help you make strategic decisions.

This is where the shortcomings of QuickBooks are, unfortunately, on full display. You may be using QuickBooks effectively for core accounting operations, but when it comes to reporting, QuickBooks simply does not allow you to gain the depth of understanding into your data the way an integrated ERP solution like Dynamics 365 Business Central does. Below we expose four ways QuickBooks is holding you back from the reporting experience that will drive your growth.

1. Connect Insights with True Business Intelligence

With QuickBooks, you are severely limited as to the visibility you have into all aspects of your operations. Your data is siloed across applications, departments, and users and your systems do not communicate with each other. Disconnected data limits your ability to create dynamic reports that compare data from multiple sides of your business so you only see a snapshot that isn’t always complete or accurate.

Dynamics 365 Business Central natively integrates with Microsoft’s Power BI solution – a powerful business analytics and data visualization solution that gives you deep insight into data across your entire organization. In QuickBooks, it’s not possible to easily compare sales data with operational data so without a lot of manual work, you can’t track project costs based on your resources for example. Power BI’s integration with D365 enables you to connect multiple internal and external data sources across operational, inventory, and financial segments and create personalized dashboards and reports with ease.

2. Discover the Flexibility of Dimensional Accounting in Dynamics 365 Business Central 

While you are likely familiar with the “classes” capability in QuickBooks that lets you organize your transactions, you might find you’ve hit your limit with the number of classes you can set up and that, in turn, limits your reporting. You can only report on one class at a time which isn’t much help. The result is a bloated chart of accounts that grows and grows over time.

With Dynamics 365 Business Central, you have unlimited “dimensions” which enables you to tag transactions and expenses in multiple ways. For example, if you have a subcontractor working for Project A and Project B, you can tag their transactions to both projects and create reports on any dimensions simultaneously. Compared to QuickBooks – where you can only see expenses on individual projects – Business Central gives you visibility into sales, projects, inventory, and more in almost any permutation you can imagine.

3. Eliminate Data Capacity Restrictions with D365

In QuickBooks, you are limited as to how many fields you can populate while exporting data, and you also have time limits for importing data from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online. With Dynamics 365 Business Central, there are no limits placed on how much data you can import or export. You also have much greater data capacity in Dynamics 365 Business Central than you do in QuickBooks – ensuring your business won’t hit any caps and need to scramble to issue reports manually. 

4. Make Profitable Decisions with Consolidated Reporting and Insights

QuickBooks users are constantly toggling between spreadsheets and systems. With data siloed and scattered and no communication or visibility across data segments, you have limited insight into how your business is performing or where you can improve. In an integrated ERP solution like Dynamics 365 Business Central, you are able to see data across all aspects of your business so you can create visual, interactive reports that are more meaningful and easier to translate than complicated spreadsheets. With this level of visibility, you can identify where things need to change, improve, and evolve to help your business grow and thrive.

Want to see what reporting should be?

When you move from QuickBooks to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you not only transform the way your reporting functions, you ultimately change how your leadership drives the business. True business intelligence means you’ll finally be able to bridge the gap between your data and the analytics that lead to meaningful decision-making.

The experts at Western Computer have been helping distributors like you make this important transition for years. Connect with us today to speak to one of our experts, and download our interactive self-evaluation checklist to figure out if Dynamics 365 Business Central is right for you. You can also view our quick comparison guide of QuickBooks vs. Business Central for more key differences.