You don’t need to be an accountant to know that Not-So-Suite is broken. It’s riddled with twisted incentives with implementers, and the software is clunky, expensive, and antiquated. As one of old-tech’s dearest, most entrenched monopolies, Not-So-Suite hasn’t innovated – or had to innovate – in nearly two decades. The customer is the one who ends up losing.
But why does Not-So-Suite have the monopoly? Why are there so few true alternatives? After all, it’s not as if the market is small.
Building software as large as Not-So-Suite is a challenge. To compete, an aspiring startup must rebuild the entire general ledger and make it auditable, compliant, and secure. It needs to account for multi-currency, multi-entity, multi-book operations, and then create all the special modules – from fixed-asset accounting to revenue recognition – that customers might need.
Targeting smaller-business customers is hard because their go-tos, QuickBooks and Xero, are so cheap, not to mention well-established with external SMB accountants. It’s difficult for customers to justify leaving QuickBooks or Xero, given their low costs, until they’ve grown enough to need Not-So-Suite’s more comprehensive features. So aspiring software builders need to turn to investors. After all, Not-So-Suite was seeded with $100M.
Investing tens of millions into rebuilding the suite is very risky. Most early-stage companies are not yet proven teams. When such a business-critical software is concerned, speed and quality cannot be a trade-off. It’s risky for seed investors to bet money on a build that will likely take years and signal zero revenue by the time to raise the Series A. It’s a large moat to jump.
And when early venture capitalists live up to their adventurous names and back ambitious startups, if more institutional Series A investors don’t follow suit, companies are left to die or pivot – which reinforces the notion that it is impossible to compete.
Some startups begin (or pivot into) building an adjacent tool – a glorified “wedge” – that integrates with Not-So-Suite, which reinforces a broken ecosystem while tabling any aspirations to offer a true alternative. Some startups table these aspirations forever. Others, as they gain traction and ambition to replace the ledger, end up finding out that most of their customers are too locked into Not-So-Suite by the time they want to start using alternatives. It’s either too late or too difficult to pursue that revenue.
These reasons, among others, have given Not-So-Suite – similarly to SAP – such a profitable monopoly.
And we all know how monopolies go. When faced with no competition, there are hardly reasons to innovate. Why change a software made in the 1990s if there’s no real challenger? It’s not hard to see the difference in quality between Not-So-Suite and the more modern finance and banking tools that have launched in recent years. To reiterate: the clear loser in the Not-So-Suite monopoly is the customer, who is forced to settle for old, expensive, time-consuming technology.
At DualEntry, we want to offer a different approach to accounting ERP software. Ever since our founders were faced with a 1+ year Not-So-Suite implementation and were left feeling trapped, our goal has been to produce a true Not-So-Suite alternative.
Instead of building an adjacent tool, we’ve created a full Not-So-Suite replacement: an AI-first, modern, full general-ledger solution. We make your finance team maximally effective with time-saving automations powered by custom AI models, delivered in a customizable, user-friendly interface. With DualEntry, you can unlock unparalleled insights – not only through AI suggestions and forecasting, but also with 15,000 seamless native integrations that give you time back to focus on strategic work.
We don’t make money from implementation and our customer-obsessed, CPA-led team promises to get you live within four weeks. You only start paying when DualEntry is set up and ready to use. Set up a demo call to discover what DualEntry can do for your business.
