October Tour Reflects Aggressive Outreach to the SMB Market for Digital Transformation
Acumatica, the world’s fastest-growing cloud ERP company, continues its national roadshow this month to help educate small- and mid-size businesses about digital transformation and the operational benefits of the company’s recent 2018 R2 product release.
The development priorities for 2018 R2 were exceptional usability, increased customer satisfaction, and compliance with new industry and governmental regulations for today’s SMB market needs. Sectors that can take advantage of R2 include manufacturing, distribution, construction, retail/ecommerce, services, healthcare, software and more. Acumatica R2 also provides improved dashboarding capabilities largely based on customer feedback and inputs. Together these product advances provide a superior user experience not only for Acumatica customers, but for their customers as well, facilitating a truly connected business.
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Acumatica’s eight-city roadshow kicked off with events in Chicago, Columbus and Anaheim the first week in October followed by Dallas, the Seattle area, and Atlanta the week of October 8. The tour concludes the week of October 15 in New York City and Orlando. Visit Acumatica’s events link to register for the roadshow closest to your location.
A few of the exciting R2 features being showcased at these events include:
- The new “side panel” where the user elects to display other screens or dashboards in a new window on the right side of the transaction screen. That panel can display the customer record, the sales representative’s record and even a customer dashboard. The user can select any of these options and update the current information, such as an address change, without having to leave the original transaction screen.
- User-defined creation enhancements allow the addition of attributes, such as a prospect’s industry or the mailing date of an invoice in real-time on a screen.
- Pop up, on-line notifications improve the current note functionality – an example of improved usability is when a vendor’s contract is up for renewal, the purchasing manager creates a note on the vendor’s record, and when a user is about to purchase from that vendor the expiration note pops up.
- Push-to-mobile notifications to smart phones are based on a “business event” – one use case would be changing an opportunity in CRM by assigning it to a sales representative. As soon as that change is made in Acumatica, the system sends a notification to the sales representative’s device and that person just needs to swipe the notification and details of the new opportunity are available.
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Acumatica 2018 R2 includes Financial Management enhancements so multi-entity companies can close books independently of one another. It also supports updated Tax Calculation Integration, providing a choice of sales tax calculation providers, and offers additional functionality to support deferred revenue recognition for ASC 606 compliance. Advances in the Project Accounting module support connected businesses by allowing salespeople to work collaboratively with project managers to create quotes and convert them to projects. CRMÂ upgrades include a deeper Outlook integration linking email activities with any contact in the system and GDPR Compliance Tools to simplify and safeguard the handling of personal data. Portals have been enhanced so organizations with multiple companies and branches can better control information that is visible to specific customers.
Exceptional industry specific solutions continue to differentiate Acumatica from its competitors. R2 Distribution Management offers several ease-of-use improvements, including improved discount functionality to save time in sales, order management, purchasing, and accounting. New landed cost enhancements streamline purchase receipt processing and provide additional landed cost allocation capabilities. The purchase return process improves control over returns, including the needed accounting transactions and shipping improvements that match freight costs to shipments and reduce operating costs.
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R2 Manufacturing Edition makes improvements to Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), equipping manufacturers to consistently and cost-effectively set accurate and reliable delivery dates. Integration with the Project Accounting module aggregates cost tracking over multiple production runs so businesses can determine profitability for large jobs and contracts. The bill of materials includes additional revision status controls and production management provides additional processing screens for streamlining processes.
R2 Field Service Edition includes allocation and prepayment features to support industries involved with selling and installing custom items. Enhanced purchase order integration works with new service order statuses to ensure that materials are available when appointments are scheduled. Additional cost tracking provides field service companies with insights regarding service order profitability.
R2 Commerce Edition supports additional sales order processing workflows for an omnichannel experience, and R2 Construction Edition includes project management features such as conversions from RFIs to change order requests, quote creations linking to CRM and to a project, and improved automatic processing that connects bills to lien waivers.
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