As Small Businesses Grow, Microsoft Dynamics Partners Observe Steady Transition Away from QuickBooks

For Aulcorp Food Marketers Inc., a distributor and importer of European specialty foods, the good news was that the company was growing.

But the bad news was the company was also outgrowing its QuickBooks small business accounting solution and it needed to find a better product to keep pace with its continued growth.

"The reason we changed from QuickBooks is that our company grew over 200% in a two-year period and QuickBooks just wasn't efficient anymore," said Hoang Nguyen Aulcorp's Finance Manager.

Increasingly, Microsoft Dynamics Partners report seeing a steady pattern of small but growing businesses migrating away from QuickBooks and into a Microsoft Dynamics solution.  Reasons for the transition vary, they say, but it is typically to solve common challenges like improved reporting, increased security, and higher activity volume for accounting, inventory, and other core ERP features. 

At Aulcorp, employees were also doing a tedious amount of manual inputting-manual inputting that led to costly mistakes.

"A lot of what we do is making sure the inventory is correct, so the logistics aspect of QuickBooks just didn't have the capabilities we needed," Nguyen said. "We were doing a lot of the work manually on Excel spreadsheets and when you're doing things with manual formulas there can be errors and inaccuracies. At one point we were supposed to order for a two-month period but we ordered for a year."

So Aulcorp went in search of the software and services it would need to support future growth. The company evaluated Microsoft Dynamics GP, ERPnow and customized solutions built by IT consultants, but none of those options dealt with their growing business needs. Finally, Aulcorp selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV from