Acumatica’s 2018 R1 was released about a week ago and is now available. This release continues the momentum from last year’s Acumatica 2017 R2 update and adds a new Construction Edition, Distribution Edition, and Acumatica Business Intelligence. The new release will feature added functionality and improvements in multiple areas, including Usability, Financials, CRM, Field Services, Project Accounting, and Distribution.
Here’s a breakdown of Acumatica 2018 R1 improvements:
Usability
From the start, usability has always been a key component of Acumatica’s ERP business software. It’s designed to be intuitive and efficient, allowing users to pragmatically address their business management needs. Acumatica 2018 R1 enhancements improve the user’s experience even more.
For example, to help you streamline your operations, you now have the ability to manage your account activity through email notifications sent whenever there is updated data or a set of other pre-defined conditions are met.
Acumatica has also heightened generic inquiries capabilities. Creating, filtering, and displaying inquiries is now even easier, and accessing your data and presenting it to reporting functions for analysis is simple and effective.
You’ll also have the ability to easily configure and display dashboard components on all web-enabled mobile devices. Taking your business on the road and accessing necessary information anywhere, at any time, ups the usability factor and the value you receive from Acumatica’s cloud ERP solution.
Financials
Companies can now be distinguished from branches. Define separate legal entities with independent balance sheets and separate tax reporting requirements; Acumatica’s inter-company accounting allows for easy financial tracking and reporting between related companies. You can now also divide transactions into various accounts or branches during reclassification – split transaction amounts and transfer portions to other accounts, subaccounts, or branches.
CRM
The flexibility of Acumatica’s CRM and ERP business software has increased by allowing users to create multiple quotes for a single opportunity. Once the customer accepts an offer, a sales order and invoice can be created based on the quote. Acumatica 2018 R1 also strengthens integration with Salesforce so that users can choose to export leads, contacts, business accounts, opportunities, stock and non-stock items, and sales prices to Salesforce by predefined scenarios.
Field Services
Acumatica’s Field Services Edition – part of the Acumatica cloud-based ERP system that integrates seamlessly with CRM, sales, inventory, purchasing, accounting, and financial reporting applications – has user-friendly improvements.
The new Acumatica 2018 R1 features standardized service contract billing. This means you can define the services that will be covered in the billing period with the number of appointments or hours, the standard fees, and the overage prices. The customer will receive an invoice including the covered amount and the overage amounts at the end of each defined billing period. Also, keep track of your field technicians and their work in real-time through their mobile devices using GPS location on Bing Maps. Among other things, this allows your dispatchers to schedule vehicles by location and priority.
Project Accounting
Acumatica 2018 R1 provides Project Accounting and management improvements that you’ll benefit from immediately. New change order functionality allows you to control changes to the project scope, including customer and internal requests. You’ll be able to create a change order with all the documentation, including the revenue budget, cost budget, commitments, and class. As well, define your workflows and approval processes and release change orders with full business intelligence visibility and audit trail control.
Additionally, the progress billing and pro forma invoices that were introduced in 2017 R2 have been enhanced to support time and material, tasks, cost codes, and retainage for the construction industry.
Acumatica’s Platform
As an all-encompassing cloud ERP solution, Acumatica provides our customers and partners with a customizable platform. This customization extends to our dashboards, which provide you vital data at your fingertips in a flexible format. Now, Acumatica 2018 R1 provides increased dashboard granularity by allowing you to filter on specific parameters to display a limited range of data (e.g., sort leads by owner or sales by product or branch).
Furthermore, customers can now monitor their resource utilization and warnings. To manage routine demands and plan for resource requirements, administrators are now able to view resource limits associated with their license, display resource warnings, drill down for detail, and monitor current resource utilization.
Acumatica Construction Edition Release
Announced in January, Acumatica’s new Construction Edition is now generally available.
Based on the benefits of true cloud, real-time, and high value, Acumatica Construction Edition will give both residential and commercial contractors one system – accessible through any mobile device – to handle every project accurately and cost-effectively.
Acumatica’s New Distribution Edition
Acumatica continues to add to extend their cloud platform with industry-specific functionality. One example is their newly announced Distribution Edition (available April 1, 2018), which provides even more streamlined order management processes. Wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, retailers, and service companies can utilize Advanced Distribution, Advanced Inventory, Order Management, Purchasing, Requisitions, Advanced Financials, and more at bundled pricing. Integrated Financials and Inventory with robust ERP functionality are a critical function in Distribution users overall supply chain management.
Acumatica Distribution Edition is ideal for retailers, distributors, wholesalers, manufacturers and service firms. The Distribution Edition provides:
reduction in or elimination of delays through automated sales order processing and shipping order generation
robust APIs to support centralized fulfillment of omnichannel sales from POS terminals, commerce sites, EDI processes, telesales, and contracts
accurate, company-wide inventory data supporting proactive, responsive replenishment operations and minimizing inventory costs
efficient management of distribution processes with real-time visibility of available inventory, inventory in transit, reorder quantities, and inventory costs
optimized quoting, acceptance, sales order entry, and fulfillment processes
Acumatica Business Intelligence with Reporting, Dashboards and Data Analysis
Acumatica reporting and business intelligence capabilities aid you in future-proofing your business through real-time visibility into data from multiple sources, helping you with decision making and growing your business. These self-service BI tools are easily accessible and provide insight into every aspect of your business. And best yet, it is all part of the Acumatica platform that you get with Acumatica ERP.
To provide transparency at every level of your business and empower decision makers with the information they need to make a successful decision, Acumatica now offers a complete set of reporting and data analysis resources, including:
Standard and custom reports: Over 250 reports come with the system, including standard reports for every module, such as Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, Cash Flow, and Depreciation. Reports can be generated in a variety of formats, so users can deliver reports in the format that best suits their needs. In addition, users can modify existing reports or create new reports to meet virtually all business requirements with Acumatica’s Business Reports Designer. Here’s a complete list of available reports from Acumatica.
Dashboards: Acumatica reporting, dashboard, and data analysis tools make dashboards easy to build and modify. Every user can have real-time and customizable dashboards – a type of self-service and all-inclusive business information center.
Generic inquiries: Use generic inquiries to extract the data you need for use in reports, dashboards, or external applications. Wizards help you select the data you need and there’s no coding required! Plus, all generic inquiries can be modified and reused.
BI and Analytics: Take data analysis one step further with business intelligence capabilities in Acumatica. Aggregate information from external sources, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Excel, and combine these with Acumatica to make more informed strategic and tactical decisions. Generic inquiries let you expose Acumatica data to Microsoft’s Power BI or with other certified third-party BI applications.
Third-party products: Over 100 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) develop products that enhance Acumatica’s capabilities, including reporting, analysis, and business intelligence functions.
Want to learn more about Acumatica Cloud ERP? Contact IIG today to elevate your business!
