Why startups need NetSuite ERP
Why startups need NetSuite ERP
Do you believe that “ERP is only for large businesses”? This is a misconception among businesses worldwide. This is because people do not understand ERP’s significance for startup firms. ERP is helpful software for any size of business – startup, small, medium-sized, or large multinational corporations.
An ERP solution can be the heart of your business because it can manage all the processes and workflows. Automation of all procedures reduces errors and delivers higher efficiency. Thus, it generates value for your business and leads to higher productivity.
For these reasons, startups must consider implementing a robust ERP solution for their business profitability and growth. It helps you fight your startup challenges and take growth steps in the market. Let’s explore startup firms’ challenges and learn how NetSuite ERP helps you combat them.
Challenges for startup firms
It is not easy to start a firm and manage its routine operations. You face challenges around finances, accounting, inventory, managing customers, and other functions. The following are the primary difficulties:
Attracting investors
Attracting investors to invest money in your business idea is daunting. You need capital to run your business. You need to show investors how your idea is scalable and growth-oriented.
Investors assess your planning, revenue model, product or service quality, company structure, and target audience. They also pay close attention to your internal processes. They check the presence of defined processes, well-organised workflows, and relevant technology to generate outcomes faster.
To do this, you must show that you have invested in an ERP system to manage all your functions. Your spending on a solid ERP system ensures streamlined processes, definite outcomes, and automation, leading to the quick confidence of investors. ERP system gives them a single visibility of all your processes, convincing them to invest in the company.
Managing daily tasks
Startup businesses have many daily tasks to manage and execute. They may find it overwhelming to maintain a list of all these tasks, their sequence, and other details.
Choosing a basic system to manage these activities will not give clear visibility. Also, it would need you to perform some tasks manually, affecting efficiency. So, you need to invest in a high-end solution with many features. But, some feature-rich solutions would be too expensive for you.
Also, you must not invest in a different software solution for account management, inventory management, and other business functions. They prove to be costly and difficult to manage. Integrating and keeping different business functions’ data up-to-date gets challenging, leading to data inconsistencies.
So, you must get a solution with all these capabilities integrated into one ERP software. A solution that provides integrated visibility of all functions and activities. Such a solution automates all tasks, ensures smooth operations, and provides one source of truth.
Making decisions
A startup firm faces both opportunities and threats. You must grab these business opportunities to increase your output, network with potential clients, and make more money. You must also consider threats to avoid their impact on your operations.
Identifying these prospecting situations and risks and making the right decisions is critical. To make the right decision, you must have access to relevant data. An ERP system has a single data source, storing and analysing information from all departments.
Thus, you can access the data anytime and anywhere and conclude. You can generate insights and make strategic decisions based on them. Thus, the right ERP system helps you handle threats and opportunities with the right decisions.
Managing costs
Handling the costs and expenses is crucial for any startup firm. You must be immensely careful where you are investing money. There are many options for you to invest in, but a wrong choice can lead to a waste of hard-earned money.
So, you need to invest in a solution that is cost-effective and also reduces the cost of your operations. And ERP software with integrated features is such a solution. It automates your processes, generating better outcomes and reducing your operational costs.
Handing over the process to the next department
Coordination between teams is challenging for any business. Primarily when one team performs one process step, and another team handles the next step. It requires a collaborative effort with proper handling of the transition phase. This isn’t easy to achieve for any new startup that has just started its operations.
An ERP software solution makes it possible. For example, order fulfilment has several steps. The sales team receives and transfers the order to the product delivery team. It requires the involvement of:
- The warehouse team to arrange the product
- The finance team for the payments
- The shipping team for delivery
- The customer service team to handle any complaint
All the teams have the necessary information for the order. The transfer occurs automatically, and the organisation can track it at every stage. Every department ensures the completion of its side of work on time and accurately. Thus, ERP automates every process, streamlining it and generating accurate and timely outcomes.
Keeping data safe and secure
How crucial is it for any firm to save its data? If you keep making your data entries on paper or simple spreadsheets, there are higher risks of losing them. It might get stolen or destroyed in some natural disaster. Or, some people might get access to them and use the data against you.
Also, manual entry of data and disjointed processes lead to data duplication. When you use data from one process to another, and an update occurs after that, data used across the firm is inconsistent.
But the right ERP system can deal with these problems. Your data is safe in the ERP system and always with you. You can permit people to access it for the firm’s use. Also, you can share data with other departments. You can keep it up-to-date, complete, and accurate. Thus, the ERP system is the ultimate safe house for your company’s data on clients, transactions, and finances.
Managing risks
A startup firm faces several risks on its path to survival. Some common risks startups face are operational risks, overworking, the right team members, data security, and uncertainty. You need to stand to these risks and devise measures to mitigate or manage them.
Your ERP system can help you with risk management and mitigation. You have proper planning and well-defined procedures in place to ensure expected outcomes. The ERP system gives you complete visibility of the following:
- Available finances
- Expenses
- Timelines
- Inventory
- Customers
- Payrolls
- Transactions
With this, the uncertainty disappears, leading to more surety of operations. Since you know all your transactions, you know what to control, where, and how much. The automation, scheduling, and cost allocation features help you handle these risks.
Startups struggle to combat all these challenges with a single ERP solution. You must have a solution to manage daily activities, make decisions, and mitigate business risks. A solution that keeps your data safe is cost-effective and ensures smooth workflows. NetSuite ERP is one such solution will all these capabilities and many more. Discover how NetSuite ERP enriches startups’ operational experience in the next section.
NetSuite ERP – the best ERP option for startups
Suitable for many industries
It is suitable for different types of industries in the world. NetSuite ERP works for all, whether retail, eCommerce, infrastructure, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and others. You can customise it according to industry-specific needs.
Cost-effective
You can install NetSuite ERP rapidly and use it for your business operations. You do not need to keep and maintain on-site servers for the solution. Thus, you avoid spending on servers’ maintenance and upgrading. Also, being rich with features and guaranteed performance, you get value for your money.
Also, setting up NetSuite ERP is not time-consuming. Learning to use it and maintaining it are also easy tasks. Thus, you can start running the NetSuite ERP solution quickly without wasting time.
Personalisation
You can personalise it for your industry and business needs. You can define KPIs for your industry’s performance measures and track them. NetSuite ERP also allows you to define processes and workflows according to your operations.
Scalable
It is a scalable solution that grows as your startup grows. Also, it helps you grow. So, you are never left behind and do not need to change the solution when you grow because it walks alongside you.
You can add more users as you hire more employees. You can add more modules or capabilities to meet your business requirements.
And your growth is not limited to one region or country. NetSuite ERP’s accommodation of international tax, legal, and accounting regulations helps you with international expansion. It supports many currencies and languages to give you the functionalities you want.
One source of truth
NetSuite ERP gives you one source of truth with its unified database for all processes. You do not need to copy data from one application to another, saving time and making it error-free.
Its business intelligence tools, personalised dashboards, and analytics features give unique insights into your business. Thus, you clearly understand end-to-end processes and keep them up-to-date. These real-time data insights help you make strategic decisions for your success ahead.
Mobility
NetSuite ERP provides the mobility that your business needs. You can cater to your business’s multi-location presence. You can access your system whenever and where ever you want to, without delay of any kind. The cloud-based feature of NetSuite ERP also ensures the security that you need to keep your data safe and confidential.
Coordination
It improves coordination and communication between departments. All your business departments have access to the same data. This data stays up-to-date in real-time, accurate, and complete. Thus, you can discuss the data with other teams and use it.
Also, with integrated business functions, you can stay updated on other teams’ work, like the inventory team knows when the order is delivered to the warehouse. Or the payment team receives an alert when payment is due or occurs, or you must send a reminder to the client.
Thus, you can coordinate better with NetSuite ERP. And better coordination leads to better control of your business.
Cloudiotech’s support in your startup business’s growth
When building your startup, you need proper technology for complete support in operations. NetSuite ERP gives you a clear view of your activities and performance. You also have the view of impending bottlenecks, which can be resolved to ensure your growth. Customised dashboards and pre-built reports give more insights to attract investors to invest.
Cloudiotech is a leading provider of services related to NetSuite solutions. We help you implement, integrate, customise, and configure NetSuite ERP. We also fully support your employees in learning how to use NetSuite ERP.
We provide NetSuite consulting services to help you focus on your core business challenges and processes. Our NetSuite ERP consultants study your business needs and, accordingly, provide customisation. We provide you with all kinds of technical support to help you use the solution effectively.
Want to know how NetSuite ERP helps you grow your startup business?
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