QuickBooks vs Business Central: A Comparative Guide

Most micro businesses and small enterprises choose QuickBooks as their first accounting system, and its reasons are simple. It’s easy to use, quick to implement, can handle your simple business processes, and includes integrated payroll and payment processing. Because of its broad user base, most accounting professionals are already familiar with it, making training and adoption costs lower for your business.

However, QuickBooks can hold back any growing business because of its inability to support your complex processes and needs. If your organization operates in different countries and languages, needs to comply with strict government-mandated data security regulations, processes bulk transactions from multiple users simultaneously, or is looking for integration opportunities, then you’d be disappointed to know that QuickBooks can’t handle these.

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For these reasons, most small to mid-size businesses naturally transition to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as their next business management software. Business Central goes beyond basic accounting. It provides you with a robust financial management solution that connects your critical processes around finance, sales, supply chain, operations, and project management. Because it’s a Microsoft solution, it natively integrates with many other Microsoft 365 and Azure solutions.

If you’re in the market for a financial management software, below is a side by side comparison between QuickBooks and Business Central.

	QuickBooks	Business Central
User Base	Microbusinesses, startups	​Small to mid-sized businesses
High-Level Features	Financial management and reporting. Inventory. Sales and Customers. Purchasing. Employee Engagement. Limited Security.	Financial management. Customer Relationship Management. Human Resource Management. Supply Chain Management. Warehouse Management and Inventory. Project Management. Service Order Management. Manufacturing.
Pros	​Cloud or on-premises. Quick to implement. Easy to learn. Wide user base which lowers your training and user adoption costs. Highly affordable for startups and small businesses. Provides basic and simple accounting features that fit the requirements of most microbusinesses.	​Cloud or on-premises for deployment options. Advanced financial management functionality. Native integration to Microsoft 365 and Azure. Robust reporting functionality. Integrates to hundreds of ready-made third party apps or by developing custom solutions with Power Platform. User roles are permission-based. Drag-and-drop fact boxes, data fields, tables and grids using Business Central’s Designer capability. Accommodates up to 300 simultaneous users. Accommodates international supply chain operations and accounting in multiple languages. Offers multi-currency transactions in inventory and general ledger functionalities. Superior audit trail, requiring records to be reversed rather than deleted. Runs in the world’s most secure and scalable cloud platforms, Azure. New features are already included in the monthly fees.
Cons	​Limited to basic accounting, inventory, and payroll. Limited reporting functionality. Price increases with updates and advanced features. Accommodates up to 30 simultaneous users only. User roles are activity-based. Transactional audit trail that can be circumvented or even deleted. Does not natively support multi-lingual capabilities. Relies on single-file storage model that can impact application performance as your file grows.	​Sometimes regarded as expensive by some businesses. Needs the specialized skill of a Dynamics partner to implement, optimise, develop, or support your Business Central. Takes about a month to get up and running using an out of the box Business Central.

We hope you found this blog helpful in choosing the right solution for your business.

If you need further guidance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by calling 403 744 5358 or emailing us at info@systemasolutions.ca.