In March 2022, Acumatica released the first of its biannual product updates. Themes of the newly released features encompassed working smart on the go, unlocking global markets, and going broad and deep with industry-leading capabilities.
Here are 4 key components that highlight Acumatica’s 2022 Release 1 (R1):
1. Enhanced Usability
In general, the 2022 R1 version of Acumatica looks and feels the same as the previous version, however there are some updates to enhance usability and increase performance.
New Dashboards
Consistent with their theme from the 2021 R2 release of introducing new native dashboards, Acumatica has rolled out more new dashboards in this latest version. For example, new manufacturing dashboards have been introduced such as Engineering, Manufacturing Overview, Production Meeting, and Production Manager. Acumatica is clearly committed to their vision of introducing new dashboards with each update.
RELATED INSIGHT: Introduction to Acumatica Dashboards
New Search Capabilities
There are new search feature enhancements which have been added that allow for the ability to search by either “Contains” or “Starts With”. By navigating to Site Preferences under the System Management menu, there is a new Table Settings feature with a Search Condition field that can be set to either “Contains” or “Starts With”. This new capability allows you to filter the search results more quickly within Acumatica.
PRO TIP: By keeping the Search Condition set at “Starts With”, you can still easily search by “Contains” by simply putting an asterisk (*) in front of your keyword in the general search field.
2. Enhanced Mobile App Features
The ability to easily configure your mobile user experience is now available. Workspaces, KPIs, and Favorites have now been updated to display on the main screen in the Acumatica mobile app.
Up to this point, it's been tricky to figure out how to fine-tune what's in the mobile app and how you can see certain pages and hide others, even if you have security rights to those pages. With Acumatica’s latest version, you can easily customize your mobile app to display what you need to know.
Under the Customization menu in the desktop version, there is a new addition under Profiles called Mobile Workspaces. Here you can determine what is visible in the mobile app by simply clicking the appropriate checkboxes and the app will display the menu options that meet those criteria. You can also easily add workspaces in this menu as well.
Also added to the mobile app is a new KPI feature. To customize your KPIs, you can simply add or rearrange their order within the app itself.
The Recently Visited section has also been added in this latest product release. Here it will show you all of the items you’ve recently seen and you can revisit them with just the click of a button.
3. Blanket Sales Order Processing
Acumatica has had the concept of blanket purchase orders but, with 2022 R1, the system now has the concept of blanket sales orders. A blanket sales order represents a framework for a long-term agreement between you and your customer. The capability allows you to ship large volumes over a long period of time to the same customer. You can also ship to the same customer with multiple ship-to locations as well, so in this way you can have one order that delivers to multiple customer locations within that same order.
The benefit of utilizing a blanket sales order is that quantities entered on the blanket order do not affect item availability and thus can be used for monitoring, forecasting, and planning purposes.
RELATED INSIGHT: Acumatica Tools for Improved Data Retrieval
4. Enhanced OCR Capabilities
There have been updates made to the AP document recognition screen that increases usability within Acumatica. What this will do is if you have multiple PDFs and you want to create them as bills, for example, you can now drag and drop them in mass into a new Incoming Documents screen.
With OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, the system will read the PDFs and use machine learning to better identify the vendor and the items beneath them to create AP bills automatically vs. creating them manually from scratch.
BONUS: Additional Functionality
There is some additional functionality that's now available in the new release as well:
Acumatica now has a native connector to the Amazon marketplace. Within the Commerce menu, there is the ability to identify your connection settings with Amazon as well as indicators for FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) and FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) order types.
For FBA, you can link a unique order type, receive accounting details, and the invoice will be created in Acumatica. For FBM, being the merchant, you will need to have the information in place to create an order. Once the order is created, there is then a shipping exchange between Amazon and Acumatica – when the shipment goes out, it is properly updated in Amazon to associate that connection.
There are now native integrations with DocuSign and Adobe for electronic signatures. Under eSign Accounts, you will need to assign the account (whether it's DocuSign or Adobe) available through this native integration. To use either one of these, you will need to have a license directly with the provider.
This integration will then allow you to create e-sign envelopes with reminders, prepare documents for signature, send documents for signature, manage documents via eSign Central, and check status of documents.
Up to this point, Acumatica has been laying the groundwork for enabling multiple currencies across companies. Businesses could transact and capture the unrealized gain or loss for the currency and have it posted to the general ledger, but there hasn’t been the ability to have different currencies across companies in the same tenant.
Acumatica has pushed forward this ability of multi-base currency in the latest release. This aims to accomplish being able to file taxes across multiple countries, produce financials for multi-base currency entities, consolidate real-time reporting, and simplify tasks across the organization.
RELATED INSIGHT: Acumatica's Automated Notifications and Alerts
Work Smarter, Not Harder
The focus of Acumatica’s new feature launch is the enhancement of key components that increase functionality of the platform. The enhancements will help users work smarter, not harder, no matter their location.
If you have questions or require assistance with utilizing these new updated Acumatica tools, contact SVA Consulting at technicalsupport@svaconsulting.com. We are here to help.
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