Every once in a while, a current client will communicate to me their possible desire to make a bookkeeping platform switch, either as a temporary or permanent solution.

For temporary solution purposes, the client may want this to be able to provide or have access to their books due to sudden needs arising from, perhaps they hired a consultant to review their books or they want to review their books themselves before submitting the financial statements to their CPA.

For permanent solution purposes, the client typically wants a more powerful bookkeeping software to satisfy their change in needs such as flexibility in ongoing multiple user accesses due to hired employees or traveling requirements by their business and thus the ease of logging in to their bookkeeping platform from around the world, or even perhaps the client wants more powerful reporting or inventory-tracking solutions, etc, etc.

But, whatever the case, it is always helpful, like anything else you plan on purchasing for a long-term solution, to do your research first and have a reality check as to your specific future needs.

For temporary solution requests, I simply do not typically work these. This is because I am a strong adherent to the integrity of financial information and thus engaging in what I call, platform-hopping, can be dangerous for different reasons, one of which can simply be migratory issues between the different platforms and thus what specifically will 100% get transferred over (including, for example, all of your lists, open receivables, payables, purchase/sales orders and payroll data) and troubleshooting why the financials between the old and new systems don’t agree with each other.

For the permanent solution requests, the client should understand the future costs of the new bookkeeping platform and analyze if any ongoing costs can really be justified and afforded.

Also proper research into the new system beforehand should predict that this is something your business will actually benefit from right now. In the small business world, where cash is a never-ending precious commodity, purchases should be made on an as-needed basis and not necessarily on a “will grow into hopefully” basis.

Overall, unless your business is booming or there has been major staffing/structural changes internally (one of which could be layoffs), I would typically caution against switching entire (base) bookkeeping platforms in the small business world.