AI is no longer just for big companies. Small businesses are using it to save time, sharpen marketing, improve customer service, and make everyday decisions. Adoption is moving quickly, too: by 2024, surveys estimated that 20% to 40% of U.S. businesses were using AI tools. Among respondents to the Federal Reserve’s 2024 Small Business Credit Survey, nearly 40% of small businesses were already using AI or planned to start soon.
How are small businesses putting AI to work?
Some owners rely on AI features already built into familiar software, including billing platforms and accounting solutions.
Others use widely available tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini to draft and polish blog posts, emails, and social media content.
Some invest in paid tools such as Claude to research ideas, solve problems, and tackle more complex work.
Industry-specific uses are catching on, too. One business uses AI software to track caregiver visits to clients’ homes. Another uses it to forecast HVAC service demand based on local weather. More advanced firms are building custom models or adding AI-powered features to products for their own clients.
Why are some owners still cautious?
Not every small business is ready to dive in, and that hesitation is understandable. Owners have real concerns about accuracy, confidentiality, intellectual property, and the time it takes to learn something new. Others are interested but simply do not know where to begin. And some are not convinced they need AI at all. As one respondent put it: “I hope not. We make cheeseburgers.”
It’s time to get started
AI does not have to be overwhelming—or reserved for companies with massive budgets. The best approach is usually to start with one real business problem, choose the right tool, and build from there.
Ready to save time, work smarter, and grow with confidence? Reach out to Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh. We help small businesses turn technology into practical results with guidance that fits the way they actually work. Together, we can identify the right opportunity, take a smart first step, and help your business do more, better.
Business resilience used to mean backup supplies and emergency plans. Today, it means being able to adapt quickly when supply chains stall, customer expectations shift, staffing needs change, or cyber threats escalate.
For small and midsized businesses, that kind of adaptability can feel out of reach. Resources are limited, and every technology decision has to prove its value.
The good news: resilience does not require enterprise-sized budgets. It starts with creating the flexibility to pivot when circumstances demand it.
Flexibility Is No Longer Optional
SMBs are used to doing more with less, but many still rely on technology built for predictability. Legacy systems, fixed infrastructure, and disconnected applications can turn small changes into major projects.
Cloud services change that equation by helping businesses enable users, migrate workloads, optimize operations, and scale capabilities as needs evolve.
Whether supporting remote work, scaling collaboration tools, or strengthening security, the cloud helps SMBs respond faster without rebuilding their technology foundation each time something changes.
Resilience Starts with Options
Resilience is about preserving the ability to respond. The more options a business has, the easier it becomes to make thoughtful decisions under pressure instead of scrambling for temporary fixes.
Scale resources up during busy seasons and back down when demand stabilizes.
Enable employees to securely access systems and applications from virtually anywhere.
Deploy new tools, applications, and services faster.
Strengthen backup, recovery, and continuity strategies.
In practical terms, flexibility creates breathing room. When you are running a business, breathing room matters.
The Human Side of Cloud Adoption
Cloud flexibility isn’t just about infrastructure. It helps employees stay productive, teams continue serving customers, and business owners spend less time reacting to technology constraints.
No one starts their small business with a plan to troubleshoot a server problem at 10 p.m. Technology should support the work that moves the business forward—not compete with it for attention.
Cloud Adoption Doesn’t Have to Happen All at Once
Cloud adoption can happen in phases. The best place to start is where the value is most immediate – maybe in the area of collaboration, security, backup, remote access, or application modernization.
This approach turns cloud adoption from a one-time project into a practical business strategy aligned with real priorities, measurable outcomes, and a realistic pace of change.
A More Resilient Future Starts with the Right Foundation
Cloud flexibility won’t remove uncertainty, but it can change how the business faces it… from reacting under pressure to responding with confidence, agility, and control.
For SMBs, resilience is no longer just about surviving disruption. It’s about building the flexibility to keep serving customers, protecting momentum, and growing stronger no matter what comes next.
Don’t Wait Until Disruption Forces the Decision
If your technology environment is slowing your ability to adapt, act before the next disruption exposes the gap. Identify where flexibility would make the biggest difference first, whether it be for remote access, security, application modernization, backup, or business continuity and recovery.
Do not wait until outdated systems limit your options. Connect with Noobeh’s team today to explore cloud solutions that fit your business goals, budget, and pace of change. Let’s make your business a resilient one, capable of handling whatever comes next.
If you’re a business owner using QuickBooks accounting software and thinking it is time for a change, you aren’t alone. While QuickBooks Enterprise works really well and has for a long time, there always comes a point where a growing business simply needs more. Change for the sake of change makes no sense, but if the systems or software are holding the business back, change becomes a business imperative.
Choosing the next business accounting system can feel a little like standing at a fork in the road with three signs: keep QuickBooks and try to improve reporting, upgrade to something like Intuit Enterprise Suite, or close your eyes and jump into a full ERP with both feet. The wrong choice can create years of frustration; the right one can give the business room to grow without adding unnecessary complexity.
Surprise! There is no universal answer for the “right” accounting system.
The right choice depends on what is actually causing the pain: reporting gaps, finance process issues, or deeper operational complexity.
Option 1: Stay on QuickBooks and add Fabric
This is usually the best path when accounting is still working, but the company needs much better reporting. Maybe the business has ServiceTitan, Jobber, Cin7, HubSpot, spreadsheets, and QuickBooks all telling part of the story. Noobehteam helps businesses use Microsoft Azure and Fabric to pull that data together so Power BI can show the bigger picture.
Possible Option 2: Move to Intuit Enterprise Suite
This may make sense when the finance function itself is starting to feel stretched. The company may need multi-entity financials, stronger approvals, better controls, consolidated reporting, more AP/AR automation, or budgeting and forecasting that go beyond the basics. The team at Mendelson Consulting are among the few who can really help make this evaluation with you (years of financial system and QuickBooks experience and backed by actual CPAs).
Option 3: Move to a full ERP
A full ERP starts to make sense when the business has outgrown simple accounting-centric tools entirely. That usually happens when global entities, multi-currency, multi-entity consolidation, inventory, manufacturing, supply chain, or operational workflows become too complex to manage around the edges.
That is when a system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central enters the conversation. Where Intuit Enterprise Suite may provide a “next step” for finance teams, Business Central could likely be the superior (read = longer-term) solution due in part to the tight integration with applications and services the business likely already uses.
A simple decision framework
Factor
QuickBooks + Fabric
Intuit Enterprise Suite
ERP
Role
Accounting + analytics
Light operational finance platform
Complete Finance and Operational Platform (Full business system)
Cost
Low to moderate
Moderate
Moderate to high
Implementation
Fairly Fast
Medium
Medium to long
Flexibility
Very high
Moderate
High
Operational depth
Limited
Moderate
Very deep
Reporting power
Very high (Fabric)
Moderate, but higher if Fabric is added
High
The question to ask first
Do we mainly need better insight, better finance scale, or a new and modernized business system?
If the problem is visibility → Fabric
If the problem is finance scale → Enterprise Suite
If the problem is finance and/or operational complexity → ERP
The bottom line
The modern SMB stack is not always about picking one perfect system. More often, it is about building the right combination of operational tools, accounting or ERP software, a data platform like Microsoft Fabric, and dashboards in Power BI. Start with the business problem first, then choose the system path that solves it with the least unnecessary complexity. What’s truly important is to look ahead a little bit and consider what the next likely issue will be, and to address is now rather than facing another purchasing decision later.
The best choice is usually the one that solves today’s bottleneck without creating tomorrow’s burden. That may mean improving reporting, scaling finance, or moving to an ERP, but the decision should start with the business problem and not the software label.
Not sure which path makes sense?
Connect with our team at Noobeh and lets discuss your top-of-mind challenges. It may not require a formal assessment to get the improvements started. If things sound a little more complicated, the next step would be a short systems assessment by Mendelson Consulting specialists.
List the tools you use today, the reports leadership actually needs, the manual work your team repeats every month, and the workflows that are starting to break. Once we help reveal those gaps, the decision becomes less about software buzzwords and more about choosing the platform that solves the real problem.
In every corner of the franchise world, businesses are talking about growing value. Customers are pursuing lower prices and are spending less, and the competitive marketplace often pushes businesses into a race to the bottom. With pressures coming from all sides – rising labor and supply costs, inflation and the cost of capital, changes in consumer spending habits – franchise operations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves and delight customers while supporting profitability and growth.
For franchise organizations, the opportunity is to move beyond price-based competition by using operational data and cloud-enabled platforms to make faster, better-informed decisions that improve customer experience and protect margins.
Value is not simply a discounted price. For customers, value is often found in product or service quality, fast and friction-free transactions, and experiences completed without errors. New bundles, add-ons, online and mobile ordering, and third-party delivery partnerships can also improve value perception while opening new revenue streams by reaching new customers and serving existing customers more effectively.
The challenge is understanding where changes can improve value for customers, the business and stakeholders. Close monitoring of operational and financial data helps businesses identify the adjustments needed to achieve those results, but complex data collection, integration and reporting often make it difficult to expose the information stakeholders need.
Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh Cloud Services understand that many franchise organizations face challenges identifying, collecting, combining and reporting on operational and financial data. Working with Microsoft Azure, and with team members and partners experienced across a wide range of financial and operational systems, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh help businesses build flexible, agile and massively scalable foundations for data collection, storage and analysis.
From standardizing accounting systems and processes to establishing data lakes and flexible foundations for data analysis and financial reporting, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh offer the services, solutions and partner ecosystem needed to support new, established and fast-growing franchise operations.
Small business owners around the country are finding increasing value in working with Noobeh to leverage the benefits of Microsoft Azure platform and Microsoft Fabric, with practical scenarios that deliver real benefits without enterprise-level complexity.
Eliminate Spreadsheet Chaos
As an example, Azure data platforms and Microsoft Fabric can replace “spreadsheet chaos” with a centralized analytics environment. This approach eliminates file version issues and totally eliminates the need for manual consolidation. Also, where Excel isn’t exactly a real-time reporting engine, this new approach could be.
For finance, sales, project management, and operational teams drowning in spreadsheets, Microsoft Fabric lets you store all your data in one place, have dashboards that refresh automatically, and virtually eliminate the wrangling of manual spreadsheets.
Automating data collection from apps already in use
Many businesses have adopted web-based applications and services for their businesses, which has created more data silos where valuable information is stored. A typical small business might use a variety of online tools like:
QuickBooks / Xero
Shopify / WooCommerce
HubSpot / Mailchimp
Square / Stripe
ServiceTitan / Jobber
In many cases, Noobeh can use the Microsoft platform to connect to these systems so you can select and pull data automatically and on schedule, replacing manual exports to get updated data. This approach allows you to build a live business “control panel” without having to pay to develop custom application integrations.
Imagine having a unified business dashboard that could provide your business with a single source of truth, showing sales performance, cash flow and invoice status, inventory levels, progress on projects or jobs, various important operational KPIs, or even marketing funnel metrics.
When Microsoft Fabric and Azure Data Infrastructure Work for Small Business
For Noobeh clients, getting started with Microsoft Fabric and Azure data infrastructure services doesn’t take a lot of engineering to get started. If your business struggles with scattered, inconsistent, or manually managed data, Noobeh can deliver the solution with Microsoft Fabric and Azure platform services. There’s a solution for when you use multiple SaaS or SaaS and desktop applications, or even just multiple desktop applications, and you need combined reporting. There is a solution for leadership who wants a unified business dashboard, and there is a solution when there is interest in future AI but no clean data layer yet.
With Noobeh and Microsoft Fabric and Azure data infrastructure, you don’t need a dedicated data team. Fabric’s low-code tools, Power BI and Copilot make it all available, and Noobeh helps you get it going.
Computers are tools that no business can operate without. From the simplest of organizations to the largest of corporate enterprises, computers are the tools that enable the work. Yet business IT often operates without enough thought or attention paid to data access and governance, where applications or services are installed or implemented by non-technical users that don’t always understand the implications of their actions. IT isn’t just about computers and servers, routers and switches. It’s about the user environment, workflow, data, security, applications, infrastructure and more. The resources which provide the foundation for whatever it is the business does – this is the area of IT.
When businesses need to implement new applications, IT must install or secure or protect the solution. When a business needs to set up databases or analytics infrastructure, it is in the realm of IT to provide those resources. Very little happens in a business without the support of information technology.
Too often, small and growing businesses minimize the importance and strategic value of closely managing their information technology when it comes to building longevity and reducing risk in the organization. IT departments and MSPs face a constant struggle to keep up with demand while fighting a battle against ungoverned expansion of applications and services in use.
According to Wikipedia, “Shadow IT refers to information technology systems deployed by departments other than the central IT department, to bypass limitations and restrictions that have been imposed by central information systems. While it can promote innovation and productivity, shadow IT introduces security risks and compliance concerns, especially when such systems are not aligned with corporate governance.”
When a business elects to implement a solution outside of the existing IT environment, or in the current environment but without consideration of implementation standards or resource availability, it reduces the time-to-benefit of the solution and new risks are introduced. Additional costs may also accompany this activity due to requirements to buy more infrastructure to adequately support the solution, or through closing gaps exposed in an improperly secured deployment.
Noobeh helps businesses manage and protect their IT environment more efficiently, providing the change control and governance needed to turn IT into a strategic business advantage.
Mendelson Consulting’s cloud services team powered by Noobeh has the experience of helping businesses establish a solid foundation suitable to support business sustainability, improvement and growth. Leveraging the security, flexibility and massive scalability of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 Fabric and framework, Noobeh helps businesses improve their infrastructure, reduce IT break/fix and administrative costs, and take advantage of the power and interoperability of the Microsoft technology stack. Noobeh helps businesses keep their systems managed, protected, and ready to handle whatever comes next.
Whether it is migrating applications from on-premise to cloud, providing remote support and management of computers and devices, licensing and administration of Microsoft 365 services, or setting up database, data warehouse or data lake infrastructure for analytics and AI, the Noobeh cloud team at Mendelson Consulting deploys and supports strong foundations for growing organizations.
J
Cooper Mann Consulting 