Acumatica 5.0 will launch at the partner summit this coming Summer. I had a random thought that, since Acumatica is already so closely aligned with Microsoft, maybe they should follow Microsoft’s lead when it comes to naming new versions of Acumatica. Microsoft uses the year of the release in many of their products (eg. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Microsoft Excel 2013, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012). Also, Acumatica seems to have slipped into releasing new versions once a year anyways, so using the year as the version would work well.

What do you think? Should we lobby for the next version to be called Acumatica 2014?

Yesterday was my first day back in the office in four weeks. Our holiday travel plans took us to California for three weeks where I used PTO on some days and worked remotely on other days. Then the cold spell last week halted our flight, extending our stay in California by another week. No complaints from us though since I was able to continue working remotely without having to burn vacation days.

So, when I finally got back into the office yesterday, I was surprised to see a package on my desk from Acumatica. Inside was a cool wooden box with a bottle of wine and a card inside. I can only assume that someone from Acumatica saw this blog and then got the address of my company from my LinkedIn profile. I was tickled by the gesture. As APAL, I get the satisfaction of knowing that I am investing my time in a cutting-edge ERP product that I expect will pay dividends in my career later on down the road. In the meantime, it’s still nice to get something tangible. Thanks Acumatica!

I think this recent TV commercial does a good job of illustrating why it’s good to have the option to run your own private cloud.

I was doing one of the exercises for the F130 Advanced Accounts Payable (V3.0) course today (I know, I’m still not done re-taking the courses, grrr). I was supposed to enter the word “Certification” in the Description field on the Bills and Adjustments (AP301000) screen, but I accidentally entered “Certificatin” instead. However, because I’m using Google Chrome, the spelling error was highlighted with a red line underneath it. It jumped right out at me. Then it dawned on me, I now have a spell checker built into my ERP system! The best part is that I didn’t have to install anything for Acumatica, it’s already available as a feature of my browser. This is yet another great example of why web-based applications are so great (and I’m sure there are more examples to come).

This is a pretty nice feature to have. Imagine if you are an accountant and you are typing a wordy record note on journal entry line to explain why that particular debit or credit is being made. Or maybe you are a salesperson entering your notes from a call with a customer into the CRM module. Or maybe you are doing an inventory physical count and you want to enter a record note on a line that is going to cause a large discrepancy in order to explain the details behind why the inventory can’t be found. In all these situations, you might find yourself writing a few paragraphs and it would be nice to have a spell checker. Before today, I never even thought of the benefit of having a spell checker built into an ERP system, but now I can think of many scenarios where this would be beneficial.

Come to think of it, I rely on the same Google Chrome spell checker while I’m writing this blog post because I’m writing this post in my Google Chrome browser. So, if I need to add a word (like “Acumatica”) to my spell checker dictionary while writing my blog post, that word is now added to the dictionary in my Acumatica ERP spell checker as well because it’s the same spell checker!

Here is a screenshot of the Google Chrome spell checker catching my “Certificatin” spelling error:

Recently, on November 18th, Acumatica announced that it had raised $10 million in funding. At first $10 million didn’t look like that much to me because Xero, a SaaS ERP product aimed at smaller companies, announced on October 14th that they had raised $150 million in funding. However, the problem with Xero is that they are still not profitable, while Acumatica CEO Yury Larichev claims to be already profitable with the comment, “We do not need more funding because we are already making money.” However, the latest funding will enable Acumatica to continue its aggressive growth strategy (they are on track to grow 350% again this year).

Another comment in the announcement caught my attention. An early Acumatica investor says, “We see Acumatica growing to more than a billion in revenue in less than 10 years.”

When I saw the one billion revenue number, it got me wondering about the other major players in the ERP market and how much they do in annual revenue. According to the graphic below from Gartner, here is a breakdown of the market share for the worldwide ERP market. I decided to focus on SAP, Sage, and Microsoft since they are the major players that I’m most familiar with.

SAP

SAP is the cadillac of ERP products. They provide the most sophisticated (and expensive) solution. It looks like their most recent annual revenue number is about $18 billion (I multiplied 13.165 by a recent exchange rate of 1.37 USD per EUR). I excluded the consulting dollars because Acumatica doesn’t provide consulting, instead choosing to rely on their partner network (which I think is a great idea).

Sage

I’m most familiar with Sage because most of my ERP experience is with the Sage 500 product. Sage is a UK-based company that has a number of different business software products. It looks like their most recent annual revenue is about $2.2 billion (I multiplied 1.376 by a recent exchange rate of 1.63 USD per GBP).

Microsoft

Microsoft doesn’t publish revenue for the Dynamics division which includes their CRM and ERP products, but it looks like a good estimate is between $1.2 billion and $1.7 billion.

Acumatica

Bottom line, if Acumatica can get to the point where they are doing $1 billion in annual revenue, they will become one of the major players in the ERP market. This is especially true due to the following facts:

• Acumatica is one software product, while both Sage and Microsoft rely on a number of different software products in their portfolio in order to reach their revenue numbers.
• Sage and Microsoft got to where they are today by acquiring existing products while Acumatica has organically grown their one product from scratch.

November wasn’t a very perpetual month for this endeavoring PAL. My wife and I had our second child and we have been adjusting to life with two kids. So Acumatica took a backseat (as it should have).

However, in this post I’d like to revisit the previous post on my experience with Acumatica on iPhone. Thanks to Gabriel for commenting on the post and setting me straight that indeed Acumatica does work on the iPhone. I tried using my iPhone to connect to the Acumatica Partner Portal which runs Acumatica of course and which I have access to thanks to ARCVAR. Just as Gabriel said, the Partner Portal works fine on my iPhone. So, of course the problem is not with my iPhone, but with my local laptop installation of Acumatica.

At first I was tempted to try and figure out what was wrong with my laptop version of Acumatica. I concluded that it must have something to do with my installation of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). When I initially installed Acumatica, I didn’t do anything more with IIS other than to turn it on because I wanted to get things up and running as soon as possible. I do know that getting a web server like IIS configured correctly requires a good deal of expertise, especially when you start considering the need for strong security due to the fact that a web server is under constant attack. Since I have a local laptop installation of Acumatica that I don’t care to make available on the internet, I didn’t really care about securing my IIS. However, I didn’t consider that I would run into functionality problems with Acumatica due to my lack of IIS configuration.

The first time I noticed a problem was when I tried to use the new Excel Connectivity feature in Acumatica 4.1. It didn’t work for me on my laptop Acumatica installation. I can’t remember the exact error, but it had something to do with me not configuring a public certificate for https (which I don’t really know how to do).

My inability to use my laptop Acumatica installation on my iPhone is now the second time that I have run into a problem due to my lack of IIS configuration. And, I won’t be surprised if I run into more issues in the future.

So, I decided to try and learn a thing or two about IIS configuration. Maybe I could even get it configured so that I could use my laptop Acumatica installation on my iPhone. I opened up the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager program located under Administrative Tools on my Start menu and this is what I saw:

I

I stared at this for a few seconds and then it dawned on me, “this is why why people like SaaS!” This is a perfect concrete example of why SaaS makes sense. Of course, I could spend a few hours going through the different IIS configuration options and using Google to help me understand things. But, my wife and I just had our second child. I don’t have time for this. I want to get back to learning Acumatica. Someone already got Acumatica working on the iPhone as evidenced by the Acumatica Partner Portal. Why should I waste time reinventing the wheel?

Now, of course, there comes a certain point when it makes sense for a company of large enough size to bring their Acumatica installation on premise and invest in people who know how to make it work properly. But, for a guy like me who just wants to learn the product or for a business who just wants to get up and running quickly, why not go with the SaaS option?

So, needless to say, I won’t be spending anymore time on trying to get my laptop Acumatica installation to work with my iPhone. But, at least I know that it works and that’s good enough for me.

Update 06/16/2015: Now, with TryAcumatica.com, I rarely use my local laptop installation of Acumatica.

One of the many benefits to using software that is web-based is that you do all your work in an internet browser and internet browsers are pretty flexible. There are lots of them to choose from and most of them have a pretty extensive list of features.

For me, I prefer Google Chrome. It’s fast (this is the most important feature), all my bookmarks and browsing history sync with the Chrome app on my iPhone, it’s minimalistic design makes more room for viewing webpages, it has one field for typing in a website or doing a Google search, etc. One of the features that is also prevalent in most major browsers (including Chrome) is the ability to do tabbed browsing.

Now, since Acumatica runs within Google Chrome for me, I can take advantage of tabbed browsing in Acumatica.

Duplicate

Right-click on a tab and choose Duplicate to make a copy of your tab to another tab. Some ERP systems don’t even allow you to have the same screen open more than once. With Acumatica, you can duplicate a screen as many times as you want. Maybe you need to run the same report for five different customers. You can quickly duplicate the report screen five times and then run each report simultaneously rather than waiting for each report to finish before starting the next.

Open in new tab

You can right-click on a screen name in Acumatica and choose Open in new tab in order to open the screen in a new tab. That way you can keep open whatever screen you were working in.

Drag to new window

If your Google Chrome browsing window is getting too cluttered, you can drag a tab to a new window. Just hold down the left mouse button and drag your desired tab down. You will see the window turn into a funny see-through window. Once you let go of the left mouse button, the window will become its own standalone window on the bottom of your screen. You can use this method to group similar screens together.

Ctrl->Tab

You can hold down Ctrl on your keyboard and press the Tab key to alternate between Google Chrome tabbed windows. Of course, holding down Alt and pressing Tab will move you through each window, such as Journal Transactions and Invoices and Memos in the screenshot above. But Ctrl -> Tab will move you between tabs that are within the same window.

A couple of weeks ago I took a trip home to meet my nephew who was just born a couple of months ago. My wife and daughter had flown out a week ahead of me so I made my trip solo.

My connecting flight in Philadelphia was supposed to take off around 9:00p, but we didn’t end up leaving until around 2:00a. Note to self, don’t take US Air ever again. We had two planes fail on us before the third one finally came through.

However, because I had my laptop with me, I was able to take advantage of the situation and continue my Acumatica learning. I found a comfortable seat in the corner of the terminal next to a power outlet, put my headphones in, and went to work. It really did make the whole experience less frustrating since I knew that I was being productive.

Note: If you are looking for an Acumatica partner in Philadelphia, checkout The LLB Group.

Sergey has a nice post up about how to easily translate all the field labels in Acumatica into another language:
http://blog.acumatica.com.sg/2013/08/translating-acumatica-changing-field.html

I’ve never worked on an ERP translation project, but Sergey’s post makes translation in Acumatica look very simple.

On the topic of Acumatica reporting, I came across this nice little YouTube overview video from Acumatica.

Acumatica gives every screen a unique ID. This might not seem like a big deal, but I think it is.

In order to see the screen ID, just put your mouse over the name of the screen and the ID will appear (GL633500 in the example below):

or you can see the screen ID in the URL path in the address field of your web browser:

No matter how you determine the screen ID, the important point is that there is a screen ID. This might not seem that important, but it sure helps a lot when you need to refer to a specific screen. For example, the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable modules both have a screen with the name Recurring Transactions.

When you are referring to one of the screens in an email, it might be helpful to include the correct screen ID (the one for Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable). Or, better yet, you could just include a link to the correct screen (replace localhost and AcumaticaERP with your paths of course):
http://localhost/AcumaticaERP/(W(1))/?ScreenId=AP203500. When a user finds the screen by entering the screen ID, they can also see the path to the screen because the navigation page adjusts to show which module and which area of the module the screen is in.

Again, this might not seem like a big deal, but I think that it helps a lot when writing documentation or communicating with colleagues about Acumatica. I often hear people get lazy when talking about screens in an ERP system and the name they use is not the actual screen name, but some creative variant. Having screen IDs helps to set the record straight and prevent misunderstanding, especially among new employees who might spend hours looking for a screen name that doesn’t exist before asking someone for help.

SAP employs the same technique for giving screens an ID (eg. FD01 or XD03). I’m glad that Acumatica does too.

I’ve been slacking lately. A few nights ago I spent the evening looking around the database tables to see what kind of reports I could create using Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel, but I neglected to look at any formal training material.

Last night I watched the video on inter-company transactions, but fell asleep near the end. Plus, I didn’t follow along and do the transactions in my copy of Acumatica so I need to watch the video again and this time complete the exercises.

We are going on a little vacation tomorrow so I won’t be able to finish off inter-company, the last piece of the Financial module training, until later next week. Then I will finally be able to schedule the Financial module exam with an Acumatica instructor.

I downloaded the WordPress app for my iPhone so I hope to make a couple of posts while we’re on vacation with thoughts about Acumatica.

A very nice feature in Acumatica is the ability to attach files. It’s surprising that more accounting systems don’t offer this feature. Actually, sometimes they claim to offer this feature, but they don’t actually store the files in the database (they just store a link to the file). Not only does Acumatica store the files in the database, but you can control who has access to the file, keep track of versions on the file, and do some other cool stuff. Suffice to say that this is much better than storing paper in a filing cabinet or storing scanned .pdf files on a windows shared drive by department, etc.

In Acumatica you can attached files to many different types of screens (maybe even all of them?). All you do is click the Files -> Add file… button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Once there, you can either upload a new file or link to a file that has already been uploaded. It looks like the maximum file size is 25 MB on my demo system, but I’ll bet there is a setting somewhere that will allow you to increase the allowable size.

Once you upload some files to a screen, you can easily see how many files there are and what they are by clicking on the Files button again.

If you click on the of the [Edit] links in the screenshot above, you will be taken to the File Maintenance screen. Here you can view the versions of the file (if you replace the file with a new version, it keeps track of all the previous versions), who has access to the file, and even what screens in Acumatica are referring to the file. In the example below, I uploaded a file to an AP Bill, then I used the Link to existing file feature to add the file to another AP Bill. When you look at the File Maintenance screen you can see all the AP Bills that are referring to the file:

A HUGE advantage of storing files in Acumatica is that you don’t need to clutter up you email servers with large files. Simply upload a large file to the most relevant Acumatica screen, then send the web link around in email. This keeps your email profile from getting really big and it enhances security since email is not very secure. Anyone who wants to access your file will need the appropriate permissions in Acumatica to do so. And, since Acumatica is licensed for unlimited users, you don’t have to be concerned about leveraging this feature for everyone in your organization. A link would look something like this (you could make the link text whatever you want and still display the blue hyperlink to the file):
http://localhost/AcumaticaERP/(W(3))/Frames/GetFile.ashx?fileID=9eba0e2d-a4c4-4012-9f0e-682c571dd4a3

This is yet another benefit of having an ERP system that is web-based.

ps. (for the geeks)
It looks like the files get stored in the UploadFileRevision table. I ran “EXEC sys.sp_spaceused UploadFileRevision” and noted the table size to be about 209MB. Then I attached a 10MB file, ran the SQL command again and noted the table size to be about 219MB as expected.

I first noticed the difference in the navigation pane between version 3.0 and 4.0 since I’m watching training videos which were recorded in version 3.0, but I also wanted to point out that there is quite a difference between the buttons on the screens.

In version 3.0, the buttons were a lot more wordy and they took up more space (sorry for bad resolution, this is a screenshot from a video):

In version 4.0, the buttons take up much less space because the words have been removed. If you forget what a button does, you can hover your mouse over it and the button help will be displayed.

I’m currently going through the F130 Advanced Accounts Payable (V3.0) course and noticed that I have the same problem with the Recurring Transactions screen that I was having in the Accounts Receivable module. In Accounts Payable the screen ID is AP203500 and in Accounts Receivable the screen ID is AR203500.

The problem is that the bottom part of the screen is cutoff and I can’t add documents to the recurring schedule. Maybe it’s my browser (chrome)?

So, in order to get around this, I just used the Add to Schedule option on the document itself to add the document to the schedule.

But, I am wondering if I will see something else like this on another screen. We’ll see…

Since I’m watching videos which were recorded using version 3.0, I noticed that the navigation pane on the left-hand side of the screen used to look like the Microsoft Dynamics ERP navigation panes in version 3.0.

Now the navigation pane has been reinvented to look like this:

Interesting move to go away from the ribbon look and feel that so many Microsoft-friendly products are moving towards.

I created an Excel Pivot Table with a list of all the Acumatica 4.0 screens.

In order to view the Pivot Table, please click here.

Here is my SQL code for the query that feeds the Pivot Table:


SELECT MainModule.Title[Main Module],SubModule.Title[Sub Module],
Pane.Title[Pane],Category.Title[Category],
Screen.Title+' ('+Screen.ScreenID+')'[Screen]
FROM dbo.SiteMap Screen
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.SiteMap Category ON Screen.ParentID = Category.NodeID
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.SiteMap Pane ON Category.ParentID = Pane.NodeID
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.SiteMap SubModule ON Pane.ParentID = SubModule.NodeID
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.SiteMap MainModule ON SubModule.ParentID = MainModule.NodeID
WHERE Screen.ScreenID IS NOT NULL AND Screen.ScreenID NOT LIKE '%000000'
AND MainModule.Title IS NOT NULL AND MainModule.Title<>'Acumatica Company'
-- AND Screen.ScreenID='WI000020'
ORDER BY MainModule.Position,SubModule.Position,Pane.Position,Category.Position,Screen.Position


So far I have completed the training guide steps for a sample company’s General Ledger setup. This was the first 35 pages in the training guide.

I wanted to jot down a few comments/observations/etc.

• The buttons are a good size, but they are only icons so they don’t take up too much space. If you want to see the text for a button, just hover your mouse over it. The buttons look modern and remind me of the look and feel of Gmail.
• The navigation pane is on the left. You can easily drag it left and right in order to re-size it, or you can click the << icon to collapse it altogether and free up more space.
• The general modules are on the top of the screen and the detailed navigation within a module is within the navigation pane on the left.
• Every screen has its own screen ID! For example, the Journal Transactions screen ID is GL301000. I think that this is a big deal. I was first introduced to this idea with SAP because every SAP screen has a unique ID. This is important because it gives the user community an easy way to communicate, even if you have a customized system. When you refer to a screen, you don’t have to say, “The screen that you get to by clicking Finance on the top of the screen, then clicking the Work Area icon on the left-hand side, then clicking on Journal Transactions.” All you have to say is “screen GL301000” and everyone knows what you are talking about. In fact, you can easily navigate to a screen by putting the screen ID in the URL on top of your browser. For example, to browse to the Journal Transactions screen, simply click on http://localhost/AcumaticaERP/?ScreenId=GL301000. If you want to navigate to another screen, simply replace GL301000 in the URL with the screen ID of the screen that you are trying to reach.
• The help file uses a Wiki concept WHICH IS A BIG DEAL. Many times in the past I have wanted to change what the help file in an ERP system says about a field on a screen. Maybe we want to add more explanation about a field. Maybe we want to put in a link that takes you to a page on our company SharePoint site. Maybe we want to hijack a field, rename it, and use it for a completely different purpose. This is yet another advantage of a web-based application. It doesn’t use a locked down Windows help file. It uses a Wiki which can be customized to look exactly the way we want it to look. This can help tremendously with getting all your existing users on the same page and getting new users up to speed. There is no more need to develop a documentation guide outside of your ERP application. Now you can develop the guide directly within the application and your documentation guide will know what screen the user was on when they asked for help. Did I mention that this is A BIG DEAL?
• The screens respond very fast. I was expecting there to be a lag when clicking around, especially since I am running all the server components on a laptop, but it turns out that the speed is very good.
• I was able to complete some of the setup steps by importing from Excel. This is a very nice feature. Just open the Excel file, map the Excel columns to the Acumatica fields, and click import. Very easy to use and very powerful.
• I was able to connect to the Acumatica installation on my laptop from my iPhone. I could login and could click on some of the links, but the navigation pane wasn’t working for me. I’ll look into that later.

I’m sure that I will have a lot more to say as time goes on, but I wanted to jot down my initial impressions.

When I first tried to connect to the Acumatica URL (http://localhost/AcumaticaERP for me), I got this error:

At first I thought I should go back and revise my Installation Success post, but, after some quick Googling, I realized that this was a problem with my IIS installation. I’m not very familiar with IIS so it came as no surprise to me to I missed something during the IIS installation.  The simple instructions here solved the problem for me:

Now I am able to login successfully using the default user (admin) and password (setup). It forced me to change my password which is good. There are a lot of configuration options to look through…

Wow, that was a very pleasant experience. The whole installation process only took about 15 minutes and the wizard was very intuitive. Also, I took a look back at the installation file and noticed that it is less that 148 MB. Yes, you heard that right: 148 MB!

This is a very big deal. The size of the installation file and the smooth installation process tells me that the code base is very efficient and I’m dealing with a modern ERP application. I didn’t have to go setup any ODBC connections, install any patches to fix some bug caused by an old known issue from the 1980s, or make a dangerous security change to my laptop to compensate for a poorly written installation routine.

Suffice to say, the PAL is off to a great start with Acumatica!

After 6 patient days of waiting, I finally have my hands on the installation media. I’m going to attempt to do the installation on my own by going through the 52 page installation guide.

First, a review of the computer that I will install Acumatica on and a little overview of the requirements listed in the installation guide. Yes, I know that Acumatica is a “cloud” application, but the “cloud” is just a bunch of computers (nothing too special). What makes a “cloud” application special, in my opinion, is that it is web-based. This allows you to interact with the application on multiple devices and, even more powerful, to more easily integrate the application with other applications. So, I’m not at all concerned that I will be installing Acumatica on my local computer. I still get to harness its web-based capabilities. Also, going through the installation process will help me to learn some of the technical aspects of Acumatica.

My Computer

Taking a look at the system requirements, I’m going to need the following:

• A web browser. I’ll be using Google Chrome which is supported (version 23 or later)
• A windows operating system. A few different ones are supported, including Windows 7 which I’ll be using.
• 4 GB RAM recommended. Looks like I’m ok here.
• 500MB of available internal hard disk space. This won’t be a problem for me, plenty of space available on this laptop.
• Microsoft .NET framework version 4.0 or later. Hmmm, I don’t really know what I have (.NET always confuses me). I’ll give the installation a try and see if it fails.
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 or later, depending on the underlying operating system. I think I’m ok here. I turned on IIS using these simple instructions.
• Microsoft Windows Installer version 3.1 or later. I’ll ignore this since I’m pretty sure I have it.
• Critical system patches and updated for Microsoft products. Ok, this looks like something the lawyers put in. I’m going to ignore this too.
• There are a few different versions of Microsoft SQL Server that are supported. I have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed on the laptop.

Sorry about all the technical stuff. I didn’t intend for this post to get so technical. Basically, there isn’t anything weird in the requirements list. This is all standard Microsoft stuff and the technology is very modern.

Now I’m going to tackle the installation…