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Many small and medium-sized restoration businesses opt to use QuickBooks as their financial management software due to the low upfront cost compared to other solutions and the easy operations that it provides for early-stage companies. However, once a company grows past a certain point and is no longer entry-level, QuickBooks begins to fall short at keeping up with the business demands. This causes companies to seek temporary fixes that only provide short-term solutions.
While QuickBooks helps businesses in the earlier stages, it lacks the more advanced features needed to sustain future growth. These limitations often lead to hidden costs and missed opportunities. Discover what these hidden costs are and how they could impact your business.
As a restoration business grows, it is common to add more entities for risk separation and operational focus. However, managing processes across them, like multi-entity consolidation, can quickly become overwhelming when using QuickBooks due to its limited features.
For example, QuickBooks does not provide flexible multi-dimensional reporting. Because of this, companies tend to rely on outdated tools like spreadsheets to keep track of consolidated financial statements and custom reports. Processes like this are time-consuming and prone to errors due to the manual data entry required and issues with version control.
According to a 2025 benchmark report by Ledge, which surveyed 100 finance professionals across industries, 94% of finance teams are still relying on Excel for their month-end close, and 50% stated it was the primary cause of delays [1]. They also found that the average time spent closing the books per month ranges from 20-50 hours per month [2]. These delays directly impact multi-entity consolidation since it relies on a timely close for dependable reporting.
Over time, these challenges drain productivity and performance, as finance teams stay stuck in the weeds collecting data instead of focusing on higher-value tasks. Moreover, the data collected may not be fully accurate or trustworthy due to potential spreadsheet errors, which compromises leadership's ability to drive confident and informed decisions.
While QuickBooks works well for managing a few companies, it wasn’t designed to handle the complexity of numerous entities. As more users and entities are added, problems that didn’t exist before begin to emerge. Bottlenecks like slower processing time and system crashes become more apparent as the system strains to keep up with higher demand.
In addition to performance complications, QuickBooks also has integration limitations, as it isn’t compatible with various third-party platforms. This causes additional pressure for a scaling business as systems can’t effectively communicate with one another, leading to data discrepancies and reduced visibility. These challenges reduce productivity as a finance team begins to focus more on reconciling data and fixing errors.
As a result, a finance team’s potential is limited because siloed data impedes their ability to effectively analyze data and achieve a holistic view of the company's performance. As the business grows, these limitations slow down operational efficiency, causing finance teams to lose time in their day to manual efforts and delayed decision-making.
Although QuickBooks offers standard job costing functionality, it oftentimes falls short for more complex undertakings. The software lacks a tailored module for job costing that addresses field-driven cost structures. For instance, users can’t automatically allocate indirect labor or equipment costs. They have to manually apply tags to emulate job costing, which can be easily marked incorrectly or forgotten about, leading to inaccurate cost data.
Without more sophisticated job costing features, leadership is left with misleading insights to guide decisions. If an employee forgets to tag a labor cost, or tags it incorrectly, a job could appear more profitable than it actually is. These types of flaws compound over time, making it hard to pinpoint where a discrepancy occurred. This ultimately leads to leadership mispricing work, hindering profitability. In fact, inaccurate job costing has been shown to shrink profit margins, which leads to bid miscalculations and cost overruns that can put the business at risk [3]. Without more reliable job costing processes, businesses may suffer financial hardship as unexpected costs arise that weren’t accounted for.
If your restoration company is facing challenges with scalability limitations, burdensome multi-entity consolidation, disparate systems or inefficiencies with job costing, it’s time to consider transitioning away from QuickBooks. While you might be able to manage these inconveniences now, they will likely develop into more complex challenges as your business grows.
Don’t wait until the inefficiencies become so daunting that the workarounds are no longer enough. You’re already missing out on tools like automation and data visibility that could help propel your business ahead of the competition. Consider moving to a more robust financial management platform, like Sage Intacct.
With Sage Intacct, customers report a 70% faster close and cut multi-entity consolidation down to minutes [4]. Additionally, a Sage Intacct user was able to reduce their time spent on consolidation by up to 90% with automation [5]. These outcomes demonstrate how Sage Intacct can support finance operations as complexity grows, enabling finance teams to reclaim valuable time in their day.
Whether you’re hesitant to take the next step or are ready to make the switch, Baker Tilly is here to support your needs. Check out our QuickBooks resource center to learn more about moving off QuickBooks and how Baker Tilly can help.
