Accounting Software for Big Business: What Do You Need & What’s Popular?

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Accounting software has become a vital tool for big businesses. Generally, these companies have access to dedicated finance teams to manage their bookkeeping tasks, such as capital planning, financial reporting, budgeting, tax time preparation, and others.

Enterprise accounting software can simplify these tasks. It offers a wide range of features, including customizable workflows for approvals and automation to generate invoices and income statements.

By outsourcing mundane bookkeeping activities to accounting software, your accountants will have time for more vital tasks and expand your established business.

Keep reading to learn how to find the right accounting software for big business and what features to look for. Also, stick around as we discuss our experience with it.

What is Accounting Software for Big Business?

Manual accounting in large enterprises takes time and effort. You need to record numerous daily transactions, like sales, payables, receivables, and invoices, which is time-consuming and ineffective.

The process is even more intensive for retail and e-commerce businesses. They need to maintain optimal inventory levels for maximum sales with minimal salvage.

MineralTree research shows that automating invoices and payment processes can save your business an average of one hour per day.

That’s why big businesses need comprehensive accounting software, also known as enterprise accounting software, for complex accounting needs.

Big business accounting software typically handles cash flow, inventory, and tax management and seamlessly integrates with your company’s other CRM and ERP systems.

There are several advantages of using accounting software for large businesses:

Plus, accounting software reports generate insights into sales trends, inventory levels, revenue growth, and more. These details help you in making educated decisions for strategic business planning.

Essential Corporate Accounting Software Features

Certain features are necessary for a product to rank highly on this list and be called the best enterprise accounting software—for example, features like tax compliance, invoicing, record-keeping, budgeting, and more are all essential for everyday business operations.

We’ll now discuss each of them in detail, what they offer, and how they work.

Invoicing

To keep cash flowing, you must bill your customers on time. Enterprise accounting software makes this process effortless.

It provides customizable templates, so you can create invoices that match your product and company style. It also allows payment links in the invoice statements to accept digital payments directly from the invoices.

The software automates generating recurring invoices and notifies clients with follow-up reminders to receive timely payments. To do this in NetSuite, navigate to the ‘Billing’ section on the homepage and select ‘Billing Operation Schedule’. Then, input invoice details into the editor and set up the schedule for recurring invoice generation.

Automating invoice generation and follow-ups results in shorter credit-to-cash cycles. This enables you to seize new opportunities and investments as they arise, helping your business grow quickly.

Some accounting software matches your invoice numbers with past transactions and vendor or client agreements for automatic invoice reconciliation.

For businesses operating across countries, enterprise accounting software supports multi-currency conversion. You can bill your clients in their currency; the tool mediates the currency conversion and pays in your preferred currency.

Tax management

Tax season is a real stress, even more so for complex businesses with outlets or customers spread across the globe.

They need to adhere to tax laws in different countries. However, accounting software makes all of this much more manageable.

The software automatically handles complex tax calculations, so you can relax knowing that you’re paying and collecting the appropriate taxes every time a transaction happens.

Take Netsuite, for instance. All the tax calculations are automated, from VAT and GST to sales taxes. The tool can display the detailed tax breakdown on relevant invoices.

Accounting reconciles your records and ensures you follow countrywide tax laws during payments. It also sets reminders for essential tax deadlines to avoid overdue payment penalties.

Moreover, some advanced accounting software goes beyond operating traditional finance tasks. Their tax planning tools identify tax-saving opportunities and optimize your tax strategies. For example, they track all your bills and expenses, so you can claim tax refunds and reduce the tax paid.

Reporting and analytics

Enterprise accounting software offers pre-built and customizable reports that provide real-time visibility into the company’s financial performance.

Some software also has data visualization tools. Analyzing historical finance trends helps you make informed decisions in pricing, vendor orders, customer services, and overall business strategy.

With reporting capabilities, you can effortlessly generate balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. By analyzing these statements, you can evaluate profit margins, asset utilization, and financial stability.

Based on our tests, NetSuite accounting software offers hundreds of reports across various categories, such as tax, banking, invoices, vendors, and more. These pre-built reports come with filters you can tweak to glean specific results.

These customizable filters also help you spot any financial problems by allowing you to closely examine specific transactions.

Suppose you find odd numbers in the yearly income report. In that case, you can narrow down your search by filtering out data for specific dates to pinpoint the exact issue.

Budgeting and forecasting

Every company estimates its annual budget. This refers to businesses using historical and real-time data to predict future budget requirements.

Now, why should you do an accurate budget estimation? Estimating the logical budget plan optimizes resource allocation and helps set appropriate financial goals.

Moreover, manually creating budgets and spreadsheets is a major challenge for many companies. That’s where enterprise financial software comes into play. They streamline budgeting and forecasting processes while also maintaining accuracy.

The software calculates the current year’s financial performance and estimates the budget for the coming year. It considers your business’s income, revenue, expenses, investments, taxes, and other important factors for effective budgeting.

Another cool thing about enterprise accounting software is it monitors your spending. It alerts you whenever you are overspending or not making payments on time. This way, you don’t need to manually track your spending habits or miss out on any payments.

Integration capabilities

Big businesses engage with multiple payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, along with CRM tools such as Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and others. They also employ dozens of software tools to streamline sales, marketing, human resources, and other departments.

Integrating accounting software with these tools is crucial for maintaining centralized and unified records. This integration ensures every payment or every sale made, is automatically recorded in the accounting software.

Moreover, connecting accounting software with HR systems streamlines wages and tax management.

Overall, enterprise accounting software must be compatible with your business’s other tools. If it doesn’t support direct integration, it should provide APIs to connect with them.

If we take online retailers, accounting software should integrate with their stores. So accounting software like Netsuite has a connector module that seamlessly integrates with eBay, Shopify, Amazon, and others.

Zoho Books also integrates with various third-party apps such as Slack, PayPal, Google Drive, and Zapier. If you already use another Zoho product like Zoho CRM, integrating Zoho Books with it is simple and effective.

Payroll

Payroll gets complicated as the staff count grows. Enterprises with big teams need to record and calculate paychecks based on various factors, such as currency, overtime benefits, taxes, bonuses, and additional incentives.

Moreover, agreeing upon different pay structures for contractors and full-time employees adds complexity. Calculating and managing their wages manually is time-consuming and prone to errors.

Accounting software with payroll features automatically calculates payroll. Every paycheck released is reconciled with internal data and offer agreements to ensure your employees are paid correctly.

Some software also has features to accurately collect and file local payroll taxes that comply with country-specific tax laws.

However, not all accounting software offers comprehensive payroll features. If your organization has a complex payroll structure, you’ll need accounting software that seamlessly connects with external, dedicated payroll systems. Otherwise, you might prefer accounting software with built-in payroll features.

How to Choose the Right Accounting Software in 7 Steps

The right accounting software for large businesses manages your finances, from basic billing to country-specific tax calculations.

Our tests indicate that the following considerations are helpful while hunting for the perfect accounting software. But remember to consult your accountants, as they are professionals and know the particulars of your business.

Understanding Business Needs for Accounting Software Selection

Different accounting software is built for various purposes. Some focus on providing all-in-one accounting solutions, and others prioritize features based on business size and industry. While some make accounting budget-friendly, others provide tailored features through customizable enterprise plans.

So, first and foremost, think of what you want to achieve from the software—like reduced accounting costs, improved efficiency, accurate and reconciled records, or others.

Also, consider the features your accounting team would highly value in the software. These include invoicing, payroll, inventory management, a vendor portal, and more.

So, as you know more about your business, you’ll be able to judge the right features and benefits you need in the software.

It’s time to explore the popular accounting software options in your industry. No software offers an exact version tailored to your business. But you can consider the one that’s popular in your industry and offers most of the features and benefits you listed.

Next, estimate a budget you can invest in accounting software.

How to Budget for Accounting Software Costs?

Any business’s primary goal is to make profits. It can achieve this through cost-saving measures and boosting sales.

With the right accounting software, you don’t need to employ big teams. A smaller, efficient team can effectively handle your accounting using the software, reducing the labor costs involved.

However, large enterprise accounting software isn’t free. Depending on the features you choose, there are various pricing plans.

Tips to find the exact software pricing:

If you choose cloud accounting software, you should also check if it offers a pay-as-you-go model, meaning you’ll pay only for the resources you use.

When you add up all the hidden costs, add-ons, and customization fees, the sum you pay is the total cost of owning that accounting software system.

Ease of Use for Different Accounting Software Services

Large companies prefer sophisticated solutions. However, advanced accounting software can’t organize all its complex features into a simple UI.

In this case, it should at least have in-depth documentation and resources to help users easily understand and navigate the software.

Ideally, a perfect interface should be easy enough for someone with no accounting background to use while also offering features that help accountant professionals streamline comprehensive tasks.

With all the features neatly arranged and just a few clicks away, you shouldn’t need much time to pick up the software.

On the NetSuite interface, all homepage windows are draggable, making it relatively drag-and-drop friendly. Core features like billing, vendors, customers, reports, and more are easily accessible from the homepage menu bar.

Why cloud-based accounting for large enterprises?

Usability is about how many users access the software and whether they access it from a single system or anywhere.

SaaS accounting software runs on the Internet. Having cloud systems means storing your data and applications on third-party servers of cloud providers so you can access them from anywhere, anytime.

With cloud platforms, you and your tech staff don’t need to worry about keeping the software up to date. The service providers take care of it. Moreover, data safety, continuous availability, and seamless integrations are all the concerns of service providers.

Cloud-based systems are highly flexible and can adapt to changing inventory levels, compliance laws, and customer demands.

On the other hand, desktop accounting tools are installed directly in your systems. The entire data and applications are accessible only on those devices, so you don’t need Wi-Fi to access them.

Small businesses prefer desktop accounting tools as they find them cheaper and more straightforward, while complex business structures need the scalability offered by cloud-based accounting.

Therefore, if you run a big business, look for a cloud service with stringent security features and safe and continuous data backup policies. Security is the top priority, given that you’ll be dealing with sensitive finance data.

Evaluating Scalability and Integrations for Accounting Systems

The software provider generally takes your inputs and specifies what and how much it can handle, such as transaction volume, number of monthly invoice generations, storage limits, and historical log retention period.

But no business ever wants to stay the same. It keeps growing, so the accounting software capacity should scale up, too. The scalable accounting software will have the following factors.

Enterprise plans

In the initial stages, you’ll probably start with the lower tiers of the software based on your existing needs. But as your company grows, you might consider upgrading to a higher pricing tier.

If you’re already running a large business, it’s worth checking out the accounting software enterprise plans. They are the highest-level offering from a software provider.

Enterprise plans offer highly customizable options that can be tailored to your business. In this plan, you can ask the provider’s experts for certain features your business requires.

An enterprise plan typically contains

Not every software enterprise plan offers the above features, but many do. So, consider accounting software with enterprise plans.

Moreover, accounting software like QuickBooks offers specialized editions based on your industry. It has enterprise editions for manufacturers, wholesalers, contractors, retailers, and others.

Integrations

Running a business involves using multiple software and systems. We have different tools for different purposes, such as CRM to track sales and customers, payroll software for automated payments, and HR software for hiring purposes.

Integrating these tools with accounting software establishes automatic data flow between them, keeping all the records updated and in sync.

For example, connecting your accounting software with CRM systems automatically gathers purchase info from CRM and generates error-free invoices.

Finally, make a list of all the important software you use. Check if the accounting software offers direct integration with them. If not, check the API availability and third-party services that help you integrate.

Cloud accounting

No matter how big your business is, your next goal might be to spike your sales by another 10%. Your accounting software should be able to handle that growth, too.

Using cloud-based accounting software is one of the best ways to scale your finance operations. Research proves that 67% of accountants prefer cloud accounting over on-premise accounting systems.

For small businesses, desktop accounting software works for a while. However, as they scale, cloud accounting software becomes essential for handling complex transactions and storing large amounts of data.

Cloud software is comparatively expensive but worth its perks. You can direct some tasks, like adding storage, connecting other tools, and updating the software, to cloud service providers; they will handle the work for you.

Overall, having a cloud-based accounting software means the ability to adjust to changing demands and stay functional in the long run.

How to Ensure Accounting Compliance & Other Legal Considerations?

Complying with current tax laws and policies saves you time and money. Ignoring them can lead to severe fines in the near future. It’s even crucial for big businesses, as they deal with huge amounts of money, and penalties can also be huge.

Maintain accurate information

Accounting software helps businesses maintain compliance by recording accurate finance numbers.

Matching receivables and payables with the entries in your bank statement is a big part of maintaining precise information. Accounting software’s reconciliation tools do this job. With daily reconciliation, you can be relaxed and backed up for any instant IRS audits.

Moreover, some accounting software has built-in audit trails to spot errors and prevent fraud.

Overall, multi-step verifications, approval workflows, and reconciliation features are mandatory in the accounting software to identify and resolve any discrepancies.

Identify compliance requirements

Different industries can have different compliance standards. Non-profit organizations need compliance in fund management, while risk management features like credit risk, compliance risk, and market risk are needed for private bank institutions.

Retail businesses want to comply with customer data protection, advertisement, and pricing laws. For example, manufacturers and wholesalers in the US cannot discriminate on price when selling to individual retailers and large-format retailers.

So first, identify the compliance requirements for your industry and region, then choose the accounting software that can be tailored to those standards.

Globalization capabilities

The accounting software should support the tax laws of all major countries. Though your primary business is based in the US, you might have international transactions due to global staff or international vendors.

So, look for accounting software with multi-currency support, especially if your business operates in different countries. Typically, it should adhere to currency conversion laws and transaction fees.

Moreover, accounting software with multi-language support allows users from different regions to adopt the software quickly.

Data privacy laws

As you deal with sensitive finance data, you’re tasked with keeping it safe and shielded from malicious intent.

You can achieve this by adhering to famous data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. They set rules for right-to-access, data collection, and deletion activities. So, choose the accounting software that ensures you follow such data security standards.

To our knowledge, NetSuite and Quickbooks are the popular accounting software that follows standard data privacy policies.

The best accounting software also provides several ways to secure data, including role-based access, approval workflows, two-step authentication, and daily backups.

How Simple or Complex Should Your Enterprise Accounting Software Be?

The complexity of accounting software depends on the size and type of your business and who uses the software.

Small businesses and solopreneurs prefer simple accounting software. It is easy to use and has a low or no learning curve.

But if you own a big business, you will benefit from enterprise accounting software. The table below helps you understand what accounting software suits your business.

Decision Time

Now that you know all the crucial factors for selecting the perfect accounting software for big businesses.

In short, document your business requirements, calculate the budget, and decide between SaaS and desktop accounting. Then, explore the top accounting software options that offer the core accounting features discussed before.

Moreover, checking other users’ thoughts about the tool is essential when choosing software. Read the user’s comments on top reputable review platforms like G2, Capterra, and others to learn how the software performs in the real world.

Listening to your team members’ opinions is also vital to gaining diverse perspectives before finalizing the software choice. Discuss with your accountants, customer support, and marketing teams to ensure seamless integration with their existing tools.

Additionally, collaborate with your development team if the software needs API integration support to connect with your existing systems.

Without proper awareness of the tool, your team can make irreversible accounting mistakes. So, give them adequate training and time to get used to the tool.

Also, make sure the chosen software maintains robust data security standards. It should follow data privacy rules from standard laws like GDPR or CPRA.

NetSuite is the top recommendation from our tests. It is a cloud-based accounting choice for large enterprises that are spread worldwide. It supports over 217 countries, 190 currencies, and 27 languages.

Overall, if you follow all the above steps thoroughly while checking compatibility and data security standards, you’ll find the perfect software your finance operations would ever need.

The Best Large Business Accounting Software

Using accounting software for big business is one of the best ways to streamline finance operations and lighten the burden on accountants.

But with dozens of options, it’s hard to find the best large business accounting software. To help you explore other popular enterprise accounting software, we have included the top 3 accounting software for big businesses in the table below.

These recommendations are from our own research that we conducted to pick the top accounting tools.

The Best Accounting Software For Big Business – The Verdict

No accounting software is the best for everyone. Large businesses that employ 250 or more people need comprehensive accounting solutions to automate various bookkeeping tasks. This frees up your time so you can focus on business expansion.

Accounting software also ensures accuracy and compliance in your financial records, saving you time and money in the long run. Overall, accounting software is vital for any type of business.

The insights we’ve provided in this guide will clarify how to select the right accounting software for your organization. We’ve also mentioned the top recommendations from our tests.

Large businesses can consider Netsuite for their accounting. The tool offers flexible pricing, account reconciliation, tax management, key core integrations, and more.

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