Unlock the Power of Acumatica's Analysis Tools for Data-Driven Decision Making

Acumatica is packed with tools that help businesses track, analyze, and act on their data. Are you using them to their full potential? Many users rely on standard dashboards and reports, but with a bit of customization, you can make Acumatica a powerful decision-making engine for your organization.

Here’s a breakdown of how to get more value out of Acumatica’s core analysis features and how to supercharge insights with native integrations like Power BI.

Making the Most of Generic Inquiries

Generic inquiries are a core component of Acumatica’s reporting capabilities. They allow users to create custom, filterable views of data directly from the Acumatica database. These inquiry screens resemble Excel spreadsheets, where you can sort, filter, and rearrange data in real time.

Users can customize their view by dragging columns, applying filters (such as showing only orders above $5,000), and saving these configurations for future use. These personalized views are unique to the user, but with the right permissions, they can also be shared across teams. For businesses running frequent ad hoc analysis, generic inquiries offer a quick and intuitive way to zero in on key information without exporting to external tools.

Customization goes even deeper. With access to the inquiry editor, users can add entirely new data fields so they can track business-specific metrics directly within their inquiries.

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Customizing Dashboards for Actionable Insights

Dashboards provide a visual snapshot of your organization’s data. While Acumatica offers a variety of prebuilt dashboards by department or role (finance, sales, CRM, etc.), these dashboards can be tailored to your needs with the built-in design tool.

Whether you're adjusting alert thresholds, changing chart styles, or creating entirely new widgets, the process is intuitive. For example, after adding a discount field to an invoice inquiry, you can build a KPI tile that displays total discount value for the current month and highlights it in red if it exceeds a specific threshold. Drill-down capabilities allow users to click into these widgets to view the underlying data, making dashboards both informative and interactive.

You can also build dashboards from scratch. The process involves choosing a name, setting access permissions by role, and selecting where in the Acumatica menu the dashboard should appear. From there, users can design widgets using any inquiry view as a data source, no development experience needed.

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Enhancing Context with Side Panels

Side panels provide quick access to related data alongside your main screen, eliminating the need to click away to a separate window. These panels update dynamically as you navigate through your data. For instance, clicking on different customer invoices on the left side of your screen will instantly update the side panel to show invoice details or a related dashboard on the right.

Side panels can be customized to display forms, inquiry views, or dashboards. They’re especially useful for users who want more detail without disrupting their workflow or switching between modules.

Going Further with Power BI Integration

For businesses that want deeper analytics or need to pull data from multiple systems, Acumatica’s native integration with Microsoft Power BI is a game-changer. Power BI enables users to build highly interactive dashboards and reports that combine Acumatica data with external sources like survey tools or marketing platforms.

Once your Power BI dashboard is ready, it can be embedded directly into Acumatica using a simple link. This keeps everything in one place, and users don’t have to switch platforms to get the insights they need. Whether embedding a single tile or a full multi-tab dashboard, Power BI adds a new layer of strategic analysis to Acumatica’s operational reporting.

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From Insight to Action

Using Acumatica’s analysis tools you can create a customized, responsive reporting environment tailored to your business goals. Whether you want to streamline operations, identify trends faster, or make smarter decisions with real-time data, these tools provide the flexibility to get it done.