In September, Acumatica launched the 2018 R2 release. It’s really quite impressive the amount of investment and development that Acumatica is putting into these twice-a-year releases. In spite of the frequency of the releases, the modern architecture of the system lends to more stable and well-tested releases. As a result, there are very few required fixes to issues from previous releases, which means more new features that fit the needs and requests of users.
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The following are a collection of new features and functionality that I believe will be particularly interesting to you, an Acumatica user:
Generic Inquiry
People using an ERP solution spend a lot of their time trying to find the fields or data with which they need to interact. Acumatica has always had a principle of trying to reduce the effort it takes to find and learn things from their system by making it easier to gain access to information.
One of the features that proves this principle is Generic Inquiry, which started out as an ad hoc tool to query data and has now become a foundation for understanding the data and reporting on the system. One of the great features in 2018 R2 is that they improved the use of Generic Inquiry, not just for those building queries, but also for those using queries.
For example, if you’re in a query created from a view and you click on an invoice, it can open up a side-panel without having to go to the screen itself so that you can find the information you need and use it without moving away from the screen you’re on. This makes it much easier, not only to find data in the system, but then to do something with that data once you’ve found it.
Generic Inquiry also makes report writing easier. Instead of writing everything into the report, you can use general inquiry to generate the data and then pull items into a more formatted report.
Building off this functionality, you now have the ability to pass parameters back and forth between the system and a spreadsheet when you export to Excel. Therefore, if you export all of the history for a particular client to an Excel spreadsheet, your spreadsheet will still automatically update when anything changes within the system for that client. However, there’s more! Now, from within Excel, you can access drop-downs and have the ability to look up data. You can also make edits in the spreadsheet and it will automatically pull that those updates into the client record in Acumatica.
Financial Management
Acumatica is continuing to build out quality financial functionality. Now, you have more control than ever over who can do what when it comes to closing out periods, thereby supporting more highly structured financial departments.
Mobile Notifications
You’re not going to enter an Accounts Payable voucher, or anything equally data intensive, on a mobile device, so Acumatica has focused on improving the mobile experience in ways that make sense for mobile users – and that means notifications. In 2018 R2, you can now receive a notification on your device and drill back into whatever triggered it to better understand what action to take next.
For example, if your CEO wants to know anytime your cash balance goes below half a million dollars, you can set up that notification within your system so that they receive the alert and can take action.
Mobile notifications are applicable across a broad swath of your organization and can enhance usability for a wide variety of stakeholders.
Multi-Company with Multi-Currency
Traditionally in the midmarket, organizations that have multiple companies with multiple currencies have struggled to find a solution that enables them to house them in a single database and run transactions across them. For the last four years, Acumatica has been working toward accomplishing this within the solution. In 2018 R2, they have taken two steps closer to achieving true multi-company, multi-currency, inter-company transactions with company based calendars, enabling you to keep separate calendars for different companies within the tenant and close periods by company.
Sales Tax
For the first time in this release, Acumatica is now supporting integration with multiple sales tax solutions. You now have the option to integrate with Vertex or Avalara, depending on the options and pricing that fit your business requirements.
Company and Brand Selector
The company and brand selector tool has been updated and is much easier for organizations with a large number of companies to find and access the proper companies within their Acumatica instance.
User Defined Attributes
A very cool new feature that doesn’t look flashy but has tremendous value is the ability to add user defined attributes to different documents. We are continuing to see Acumatica take things that used to require a developer or consultant and simplify them so that they can now be handled by a non-technical end user. This not only enhances day-to-day usability, but also simplifies the upgrade process.
To begin taking advantage of all of these exciting new features in Acumatica 2018 R2, contact us today to discuss an upgrade!