Click here for ways to listen offline and at 2x speed
Click here to listen to this episode on YouTube
Daryl Bowman
Location: New Holland, Pennsylvania
In this episode, we’ll hear from Daryl Bowman, an IT consultant at a Pennsylvania accounting firm. He was on the ground floor of their Acumatica implementation and now has 3 Acumatica certifications. We’ll hear about topics such as PDF file sizes to Amazon S3 storage costs and unique experiences with Acumatica customizations.
About Daryl Bowman (3:08)
Daryl is from New Holland, Pennsylvania, and has worked at Gehman Accounting for the past 5 years. Not long after he left high school, he entered with an interest in IT and learned the systems on the job.
Soon it became clear that their legacy accounting solution wasn’t meeting their needs, and Daryl got to be part of the search for a new solution – Acumatica – as well as its in-house implementation. Working on both their on-premises Acumatica instance as well as a few implementations for Gehman clients, Daryl earned his certifications as an Acumatica developer.
Daryl goes on to give an overview of how Gehman Accounting has made use of key Acumatica features. For example, they’ve made good use of the Financial Management tools and the built-in CRM, as well as a few workflow customizations that have been added in. This discussion leads to one interesting feature they’re using – cloud storage for files and attachments.
Using Amazon S3 for Attachment Storage (18:23)
Back in 2017, Daryl found a setting in the system configuration that caught his eye: External storage in AWS. After enabling and configuring the feature, Gehman has been using it ever since, with good and reliable results. It’s also noted that, if a company is using the SaaS version of Acumatica, they would need to ask support to modify their web.config file to enable access to this feature.
Amazon S3, short for Simple Storage Service, offers a scalable environment that allows businesses to grow without fretting over storage constraints. Its inherent flexibility means companies only pay for the storage they use, without the burden of long-term contracts or fixed capacities. This makes it an economical choice for both small startups and large corporations, ensuring they don’t waste resources on unused storage.
With the capabilities of Amazon S3, businesses can seamlessly store, retrieve, and manage their documents without worrying about physical storage limitations or escalating costs. Now, all of Gehman’s scanned documents in PDF format, email attachments, and more are stored there, measuring over 600GB with some 650,000 objects.
Configuration and Caveats (32:11)
Next, Daryl and Tim discuss details on how the S3 storage integration is configured, and how that can affect Acumatica development and upgrades. Notably, the discussion centers around having both a Production and a Test environment and, since there is no similar separation on the Amazon side, there could be the potential to delete production data, in theory. Fortunately, until now it hasn’t proven to be a problem, since only developers (in this case, only Daryl) work with data in the test environment. But it is a subject for further research and testing.
Benefits from Using Amazon S3 (39:45)
Moving storage to a cloud service like Amazon S3 translates to significant savings since storage space within the Acumatica tenant is limited and purchasing additional space is expensive. Illustrating his point, Daryl shares that with a usage of over 600GB of storage, their anticipated month-end cost is a mere $8, of which only a portion is attributed to their production Acumatica implementation. Additionally, it avoids potential problems, such as system slowdowns, when system database sizes swell. Both Tim and Daryl agree that transactional databases are not ideal file storage solutions.
In addition to the major cost savings, hosting files and attachments on S3 also enhances business continuity. Since the database tables are not burdened with large data objects, they are more compact. Backing up the database is a much faster process, and – more importantly – system restores can be performed quickly as well. This minimizes downtime if and when a catastrophic failure should occur.
Daryl Bowman’s Side Hustle – Deft Strokes Development (44:54)
The episode takes a personal turn as Daryl Bowman delves into his entrepreneurial journey with his recent venture, Deft Strokes Development Co. He relates his reasons for establishing the company, from first opportunities for Acumatica consulting coming through LinkedIn to keeping his Acumatica skills sharp and focusing on his unique selling proposition: the ability to deliver quick and uncomplicated Acumatica customizations.
Daryl’s initiative aims to outpace traditional VARs by offering swifter solutions that don’t compromise on quality. The Acumatica VAR community is tied up in selling, which limits their ability to quickly cater to client needs. Some customizations can cost thousands of dollars and take from 6 months to a year and a half to come to fruition. Daryl offers a faster and more client-centric approach.
Wrapping Up (51:47)
Tim and Daryl conclude by talking a little more about the future of Deft Strokes Development Co., and the benefits of having a core, steady job along with a side hustle. Daryl has the stability of his job at Gehman, and since his customization work doesn’t present a conflict of interest, the opportunity to enjoy a different activity and extra income.
Daryl’s experience using cloud storage with Acumatica is beneficial to many companies who are looking to optimize their technology expenses. This discussion also highlights the need for caution to ensure that development environments don’t interfere with production data. As always, we see the need for more capable Acumatica developers to ensure the continued growth of the product and the community.