Vern Jorgensen, Co-Founder
Rover Data Systems
In Part 1 of this blog series, my partner and co-founder of Rover ERP, Ron Vogel, wrote about how Rover can help ease your growing pains when transitioning from QuickBooks to a modern ERP. Ron focused primarily on the features of Rover that are geared towards shop-floor management. But Rover also provides enterprise-ready accounting to help your business grow.
If your finance team has outgrown QuickBooks, Rover can help.
Getting off the QuickBooks “island”
When you’re trying to make QuickBooks work for a growing enterprise, you’re challenged by more than just a lack of enterprise features. Using QuickBooks is like being on an island in the middle of the ocean. Packages interface to it and send information back and forth, but you have no idea of how those numbers really got there. Without an integrated package, there’s a divide created.
General ledger analysis
Accounting is built into Rover from the ground up. Rover’s inventory management system lets you track inventory items as they move from one location to another, enabling you to keep track of debits and credits throughout each item’s journey. Unlike QuickBooks, Rover never erases that information without your approval, so you always have your audit trail. Rover’s inventory integration means everything flows up to the general ledger, AR, and AP—nothing is standalone. You can drill down into each of those areas and find out where all that data came from, using a granular view for each invoice, transaction, work order, and line item.
Instead of using a “bolted-on” solution like QuickBooks, Rover gives you all of those capabilities in one integrated package. You can get up-to-the-minute detail on how each data point was made. Of course, you don’t always have to go that far to figure out, but there are times when it’s really valuable to be able to do that.
Rover helps your accounting team spend less time and effort on granular decision making by making the general ledger analysis available to your entire organization. Let’s say you’re closing the books for the month and you want to make sure nobody backdates anything before the cutoff date. Accounting can still have that level of control, but the rest of the operation can go ahead and run without being encumbered by that process.
Oftentimes, making receipts might hold the month open for a number of days waiting for invoices to come in. The month stays open to make sure you’ve received all the invoices from your customers. Rover keeps track of all that information in the register, so you know exactly where the accrued liabilities are. There’s no need to keep the month open because you can see all that information and you know where it came from. It’s the same thing on the AR side. If you’re looking at your sales, there’s an accounting register and a sales register that you can access to see what happened, what makes up an invoice, if it was reversed, etc. You can make a sale in May and decide in June to get rid of it, and you have a transaction report that tells you what happened.
Rover doesn’t erase data. We want to make sure that everything lines up so you can validate what happened and why. Some systems just let you remove something, and they might expect you to go back and change the journal from the previous period, which can be very frustrating.
Consolidated financials
With Rover, you can consolidate your financials, enabling you to run individual companies or divisions with their own sets of registers, AP, AR, and general ledger (GL). You can then take those and consolidate them into a corporate GL, so you can still see all the pieces broken out in a consolidated view.
We have a concept called “company code” where you can all work off the same database and inventory, but different transactions are coded for different companies. We don’t force you to create a big consolidation structure when you’re really just trying to break things out logically. Rover’s accounting reports let you specify a company code to look at specific items pertaining to a company.
A lot of smaller companies coming off of QuickBooks are running multiple GLs. They don’t want to take on three full-fledged general ledgers, but they want to be able to break these things out in terms of what they consider company or division entities, all working in the same environment. Rover lets you do that. With Rover, you can automatically post recurring journal records. You can also create reversing journal entries, and you can make them automatic so you don’t have to keep a list in a spreadsheet.
Improved flexibility
Rover is built around letting you do things the way you want to. Rover has support for flexible fiscal calendars. We don’t lock you into a calendar month. We don’t enforce a strict nomenclature for how you define your accounts. With QuickBooks, if you want accounts to roll up into each other, you have to have them structured in a certain way, like the division code, and then a number. Rover doesn’t enforce an account structure on you like that. If you move to Rover, you can just bring along the accounts that you’re already accustomed to. The way Rover handles that rolling up is in the financial report writer. Within that report writer, you can define income statements and balance sheets and any other statements you want to put together. You can specify wildcards that have to do with account numbers.
We also don’t force you to format your balance sheet in a certain way. You can create them however you want them to look, with multiple versions for different audiences. In a rigid structure like QuickBooks, you might have to revamp your whole structure to make it fit. With Rover, you can add your account numbers, insert them into appropriate places in the report writer, and you’re good to go.
Maintaining a standard cost system
A lot of our customers that are coming off QuickBooks or Sage want to know why they have costs and where they came from. Rover enables you to maintain a standard cost system so you can drill down into variances and find out exactly why you’re off. Let’s say you’re building a product and you have a standard cost for it. That cost means you expect to put a certain amount of labor into it at a certain rate with a certain amount of overhead, and you expect your material to come in at a certain amount. That’s all based on the different parts that go into making it, whether you’re buying those parts or making them.
With a standard cost, you can see that it should cost you X amount per item. This could start up at the GL level. You can see if you’re way over your standard and start drilling down to look at all the things that were produced over a period of time. You can see how off things were and by what percentage to find out where the overages are. You can drill down into labor, materials, vendor costs, etc., to find ways to get that cost down. Is it material related? Is it stuff you’re making in-house? Is it your own overtime that’s causing the problem? Are you getting things from a supplier that you’re paying more for? Rover lets you get into the specifics.
That data can be hard to parse when you don’t have a system that’s connected all the way down to the actual producing of the item and purchasing of the parts. That’s something that Rover does well. With Rover, you know why you’re not making a profit. You can find out the reasons why and make smart decisions about what you can do to fix the problem.
Start your journey off the QuickBooks island today
The transition from QuickBooks to a modern ERP doesn’t have to be complicated. We’ve designed Rover to work with your custom systems and procedures so you don’t have to start over from scratch. Talk to us today about how you can get started with Rover ERP.