an Independent Acumatica Consultant focused on reporting in Acumatica.
5 Sections on this Page:
1. How It Works
2. My Sherpa Portal
3. My Background
4. Why Reporting Tools?
5. A Word to VARs
Are you looking for help with the reporting tools in Acumatica? Or even 3rd party reporting tools like Velixo, Excel, and Power BI?
If so, then you’ve come to the right place.
My name is Tim Rodman and I focus exclusively on creating and modifying reports using the reporting tools in Acumatica:
Dashboards, Generic Inquiries, Pivot Tables, Report Designer, and the ARM Financial Report Writer
I also do a significant amount of work with Velixo, Microsoft Excel, and Power BI.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
How It Works
I do everything on a prepaid hourly basis
After you purchase hours (using a credit card), I then consume those hours for Zoom calls or working offline on reports
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
My Sherpa Portal
I document my work in the My Sherpa portal. This includes write-ups, screenshots, backups of reports created, recordings of any Zoom calls that we have, etc.
You can access the My Sherpa portal and see some sample data by logging in (click here) and going to My Info -> My Sherpa in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Once you become a client, this sample data will get replaced automatically with your data.
I like the term “sherpa” because it refers to mountain people in Tibet who are famous for helping people climb Mt. Everest. I view myself as an “Acumatica Sherpa”, helping Acumatica Customers to reach the “Mt. Everest” of value that they can achieve with Acumatica by helping them to achieve better reporting.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
My Background
I grew up in East County San Diego, running around most of the time without shoes on and wearing shorts year-round. I loved the outdoors: swimming, camping, playing sports, etc.
In Junior High I got into video games. I rarely read the instructions. It was more fun to figure things out by tinkering. Little did I know, but I was using a similar learning technique to the one that I use today working with Acumatica. I have to admit that I read the instructions a lot more now, but there is still no substitute for tinkering.
In High School I dropped video games, gave away my Sega Genesis, and picked up sports. I like focusing on one thing at a time, getting good at the one thing that I’m focusing on, similar to how I now focus on the reporting tools in Acumatica. I started with Basketball my Freshman year and found that I got better grades during Basketball season. So I kept adding sports. By Senior year, I was taking 5 AP classes and playing varsity in 3 sports: Cross Country (Fall), Basketball (Winter), and Track (Spring).
I really enjoyed playing sports. If I could do High School again, I think I would drop an AP class or two so I could sleep more and be a better athlete.
I left San Diego in 1999 to go to UCLA for college and graduated in 2003 with a Major in Applied Mathematics, a Minor in Accounting, and a Specialization in Computer Programming.
In addition to my Computer Programming classes, I worked about 20 hours per week during my junior and senior year on a homegrown open source project called ClassWeb (using PHP, Perl, and MySQL) which ran the class websites for all of the Social Science departments at UCLA.
UCLA has since moved from ClassWeb to Moodle (click here), but my experience working on ClassWeb did a couple of major things for me.
First, it spoiled me by getting me accustomed to the simplicity of an HTML front-end delivered centrally by a webserver with a SQL backend (exactly like Acumatica). I would make a change to the code and it was instantly available to the thousands of people using the UCLA Social Science class websites. Being a simple HTML front-end, ClassWeb even worked on my Palm Pilot (remember those?) before handhelds had become a big deal.
Second, my experience working on ClassWeb honed my PHP skills which have turned out to be very useful here on AUGForums.com which runs on WordPress, a PHP-based Content Management System.
After UCLA, I went to work at Deloitte in downtown Los Angeles as a Financial Auditor. My plan was to work at Deloitte for two years while paying off student loans and passing the CPA exam, then enroll in a two year Bible school program (click here).
Working at Deloitte was a great experience. I got to see a number of different companies in a number of different industries. My favorite enagement was a few days at the Hyatt in Monterey Bay, California. Their offices were too small so we got to work out of our rooms on the golf course, my first taste of “remote” work.
I learned two things about reporting at Deloitte, two things which continue to stick with me to this day as a Consultant focused on the Reporting Tools in Acumatica.
First, Accountants love Excel. Excel has an unmatched level of transparency and trustworthiness. It’s transparent. There’s no “mystery” or “magic” in that you can see how the numbers are being calculated. It’s trustworthy. Excel has been relied on for decades to deliver financial analysis in organizations of all sizes and industries.
Second, Accountants don’t like change. How did we do it last year? How did we do it last month? That’s all I need to know! When it comes to reporting, I saw first-hand how many Accountants spend hours regenerating reports because that’s how they’ve always done it, rather than taking the time to automate that reporting and save time on an ongoing basis.
As an auditor, I would frequently ask for reports and the Accountants didn’t know how to get them out of their system. Or, the best they could do was to print them off and have me re-key the data into my Excel spreadsheet using the USB 10-key attached to my laptop 😊
I didn’t know at the time that the systems were called “ERP” systems, but I longed to understand how they worked. Mastery of those systems seemed to be a key difference between the clients who had their act together and the clients who were a disaster.
One year into my two year Deloitte plan, I was finding it too difficult to pass the CPA exam while working full-time, especially during busy season and the newly-acquired Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) engagements.
So I quit Deloitte and worked part-time as a temp in an Accounting department. It was perfect, getting me out of the house in the morning to work, then allowing me to study in the afternoon where I would frequently park on the side of PCH above Sunset Beach (click here) and study in the passenger seat of my truck. With that schedule, I was able to pass the CPA exam.
While working part-time as a temp, I worked at a company that had just implemented a new ERP system called Sage 500 (MAS 500) using a VAR named NexTec Group for the implementation. I chatted with the NexTec consultants a few times and eventually went to work for them in 2005, replacing my mornings working for the temp agency with mornings working for NexTec Group.
I worked for NexTec for about 10 months before going into the Bible school program. My two years in the Bible school program were well spent. That was an experience that I am very greatful for. I worked for NexTec during my semester breaks and, after completing the two year program, I came back to NexTec full-time.
During my first week at NexTec in 2005, Josh Thipgen (click here) grabbed me and told me that he needed help with a report. He showed me how to connect to the Sage 500 (MAS 500) database so I could write a SQL query. I was blown away by how simple it was as I realized that an ERP database was no different from the ClassWeb database that I had worked with in college. It just had more stuff in it. That was a very memorable and exciting moment for me.
In 2011, my wife and I moved to the Midwest and I went to work in-house for a manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio called The Robbins Company. Robbins was large enough to need a full-time ERP person, doing around $300 million in revenue my first year there. They were a NexTec client and I had been onsite prior to their go live for training and during their hectic go live weekend for assistance with data conversion.
I went to work for Robbins full-time several months after they went live. Robbins used Sage 500 (MAS 500), which I had become pretty familiar with. I spent almost five years there and I learned a lot. I did a lot of work in SQL, helping to fit the ERP system to the business better.
As an ERP implementation consultant, you are constantly moving through the chaos of an implementation. The goal is to “get live”, then move onto the next implementation. Working in-house at Robbins, I got to experience what happens after the implementation.
I found that, after the dust settled on the new ERP system, there was a constant hunger for reporting. It was at Robbins that I discovered Power BI, the importance of “one version of the truth”, and the difference between “Reporting” and “Business Intelligence (BI)” on the technical side. For simplicity though, I still refer to everything as “reporting”.
I liked working with Sage 500 (MAS 500) because so much of the business logic was in SQL Stored Procedures. I didn’t have to learn Visual Studio and become a full-blown developer.
But there was one thing about Sage 500 (MAS 500) that I never liked. I never liked the client/server architecture. You had to login with a Windows client to use the system (yuck). My years working on ClassWeb in college had spoiled me. I wanted an ERP system that used the same web architecture as ClassWeb.
After a few years, it became very clear to me that Sage 500 (MAS 500) wasn’t going anywhere. It was a dead product. At this point, I was also clear that I really liked ERP, so I wanted to learn an ERP product that had a future.
Ever since I discovered ERP in 2005, I had been looking for a web-based ERP product. I saw NetSuite, but it seem like a “black box” in that I couldn’t find a way to get “under the hood” and learn about how it worked. I saw TinyERP / OpenERP / Odoo, but I was hesitant to bet my career on an open source product.
Then, in 2012, I read about Acumatica on an ERP blog that I was reading at the time. What intrigued me was the combination of web architecture with the ability to deploy either on-prem or in the cloud. The deployment options meant I could get “under the hood”, something I wasn’t able to do with NetSuite.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
By early 2013, I had connected with Mike Garverick (click here), an Acumatica VAR in San Diego. Over the phone, Mike sounded like my cousin Chris who lived on his sailboat next to the San Diego airport. So an instant “San Diego bond” was formed. Mike added me to his Acumatica University, which was pretty primitive at the time, but it allowed me access to download Acumatica and install it on my computer.
As I sat down to install Acumatica for the first time, I thought, “hey, I should probably take some notes”. So I took some notes in Word. I quickly realized that my Word notes were probably destined to get lost on my computer, like all of my other Word documents. I wanted something that I could search easily.
For me, nothing performs search better than Google. So, I decided to move my notes into a blog. You are reading a post on that blog right now.
In April 2013, I started blogging about Acumatica at PerpetualAcumaticaLearner.WordPress.com (it’s still there). I didn’t think of it as blogging at the time, more as taking notes publicly so I could find them via a Google search.
In January 2014, I got fancy, bought a domain, and moved the site to PerpetualAcumaticaLearner.com (a dead URL now).
In January 2015, I moved the site to AcumaticaReports.com because, even back then, I wanted to focus on reporting in Acumatica.
Sometime after that, I learned that it was a bad idea to use a trademarked name like “Acumatica” in a URL because the trademark owner could take your domain.
So I moved the site to TimRodman.com for a few years because I couldn’t think of anything better. TimRodman.com got kind of annoying. It was a little too arrogant for my taste because it gave the impression that this Tim Rodman guy knows everything about Acumatica which isn’t the case.
I started the Acumatica Forums on TimRodman.com in May 2017 because blogging was getting too lonely and I wanted more interaction. Also, there weren’t any official Acumatica forums out there at the time. There was a forum site at Forum.Acumatica.com (you can still see the landing page) back in 2013. It was run by Gabriel Michaud, but it eventually went offline because there wasn’t much activity. I tried to get Jon Roskill to revive the forums the first time I met him at Acumatica Summit 2016 in Orlando, but that didn’t go anywhere.
When starting forums, no one likes to be the first person to participate. So I created a few dummy users as muppet characters (Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, Beaker, Gonzo, Scooter, Rowlf, and Animal). I would ask questions as these muppet characters and then respond to them as Tim Rodman. That helped to get things started.
Then, in the Summer of 2019, I moved the site to AUGForums.com. I was getting tired of “Mr. Know-It-All” TimRodman.com. At the time, Acumatica User Groups were getting traction and I was communicating with Joel Gress (Atlanta) and Doug Hollenback (Denver). They were focused on their in-person gatherings, but they wanted an online gathering place as well. So I moved the site again, this time to AUGForums.com (Acumatica User Group Forums) where it lives today.
What’s in a name? For me, I think I’m done searching for the perfect URL. AUGForums.com might not be the best name, but hopefully it’s recognizable at this point.
Backing up a bit, Acumatica was essentially an evening hobby for me in 2013 and 2014. In July 2014, the same month that we were in the process of selling our house in Cleveland, Ohio, Acumatica announced that they were opening an office in Columbus, Ohio (click here). By 2015, my wife and I (and now 2 kids, both born in Cleveland) were settled in Columbus while I continued working for the manufacturing company in Cleveland remotely, driving up there one day a week. In the evenings, I was continuing to learn Acumatica and blogging about the experience.
In September 2015, I went to work for Acumatica. It seemed to make sense. I had been learning the Acumatica product and Acumatica had recently opened an office in Columbus, my new city. It was fate.
At Acumatica, I was on the Implementation Assist team where we would “parachute” into various implementations and do whatever was needed. It was a great “trial by fire” way to learn Acumatica.
A few weeks after starting at Acumatica, a nuclear bomb dropped on me. My dad was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 59. From October 2015 until my dad passed away in April 2020 (click here), he became the most important thing in my life, BY FAR. You don’t realize how important someone is until you start to lose them. In the beginning, my dad’s decline was so rapid that we didn’t think he would last more than 1-2 years. We had just settled in Columbus and moving again seemed too daunting. In hindsight, that was a mistake, something that I regret. For about 5 years, I averaged over 70 days a year in California, getting as much time in San Diego with my dad as I could. Those 5 years were intense, especially the last 1-2 years. After my dad passed away, I read a book called Orphaned Adult and copied/pasted portions that I liked to this notes page (click here). I especially identify with the 7 paragraphs starting with “My mother’s death was completely different” and ending with “that we did not get the opportunity to do more”.
I mention my dad because working remotely became the only “career thing” that mattered to me. It’s the only way that I was able to log so much time in California while still “living” in Ohio. When I started at Acumatica, my team was remote (Utah, Texas, Ohio). Because of my dad, I adopted the remote lifestyle as well.
At the beginning of 2017, my team at Acumatica was abruptly brought back into the office. These kinds of decisions are common at startup software companies (like Acumatica at the time) where the focus is on “short sprints” and the mindset is to “ship it”, worrying about bugs later. New ideas are tried on as frequently as Lady Gaga changes her wardrobe. I wasn’t happy about the move to pull us back into the office. I didn’t want to change jobs again. But working remotely was all that mattered to me so I could get to San Diego as often as possible.
So, in April 2017 I left Acumatica (click here) and went to work for an Acumatica OEM partner called Eldermark, focused on selling Acumatica to senior living facilities. Since Eldermark was in Minneapolis, they wouldn’t be able to change their minds and pull me back into the office. Eldermark was a great lesson in what a business development role looks like and I eventually realized that I’m a much better fit for a technical role.
In August 2018 I went to work for Aktion Associates (click here), an Acumatica VAR focused on implementing Acumatica for Construction, Distribution, and Manufacturing companies. Aktion was great. I liked their “low drama” company culture and stable leadership.
Then COVID hit. My wife and I both work remotely and we have two young kids. We decided to split time with the kids, with me working mornings and my wife working afternoons. I went down to part-time at Aktion (they were very accommodating) and my wife worked just enough to be full-time so we could have medical benefits. I’ve been really happy with the decision to split time with the kids. It’s one of those things that I think I’ll look back on with no regrets.
A few months into working part-time as an implementation consultant for Aktion, I was struggling. It’s difficult running implementations part-time because of the highly communicative nature of project management.
That prompted me to start thinking about going out on my own for a couple of independent reasons:
1. I was already part-time and planned to stay that way for the entire 2020-2021 school year.
2. I always wondered in the back of my mind if I could drum up enough work through AUGForums.com by focusing on the reporting tools in Acumatica. The 2020-2021 school year seemed like a good time to try it.
I considered it for a couple more months and then gave my boss a heads up about a month before making the leap.
On November 30, 2020 I became an independent Acumatica consultant, focused on the reporting tools in Acumatica. I recorded this podcast episode (click here) after my first day. It felt like what I imagine jumping out of an airplane feels like. I carefully prepared my parachute, but will it open?
I waited a couple of months before creating this page that you are reading now. I wanted to make sure that my move to go independent was going well before broadcasting it to the world.
So, how has it been going? It’s been awesome! I knew that I liked reporting, but even I have been surprised by how much I enjoy focusing on the reporting tools in Acumatica.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
Why Reporting Tools?
First, I’m not exactly sure why, but I really like reporting. As you can see above, I’ve “discovered” that multiple times in my career so far.
I like the technical nature of reporting, it’s like solving puzzles. There seem to be new discoveries waiting around every turn. The more you analyze data, the more you discover questions that you hadn’t even considered before.
Multiple times in my career I’ve considered going full-time into Data Analysis, Business Intelligence, or even something like building Machine Learning algorithms. But my fear is that would take me too far away from business processes.
When doing “reporting”, you always discover some problems with the data. These problems require an understanding of how the data was captured, how the business processes work to “pipe” the data into Acumatica. The business processes often need to be tweaked to enhance the data quality, leading to better reporting.
When analyzing “business processes”, you always run into the need for more information to help you understand what is really happening, not just what people think is happening. Although I personally am not a big fan of the phrase “what you can measure, you can manage” (click here), I do believe in being informed by reporting when making decisions, including decisions about how to improve business processes.
When I do “reporting” for a company, I’m not only looking at their data “as is”, but “as it could be”. My background working with business processes and my understanding of how data moves through Acumatica put me in a position to suggest business process improvements when I see them in order to strengthen the reporting that you get out of Acumatica.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
I view “reporting” and “business processes” as two sides of the same coin.
Reporting is a fundamental reason for having an ERP system like Acumatica. What’s the point of putting data in if you can’t get information out? I believe that frustration over lack of reporting in an ERP system is one of the top reasons why companies make a move from their old ERP system to a new ERP system like Acumatica. I like to help companies stay on Acumatica as long as possible by helping them to extract the information they need to better run their business.
Reporting is not rocket science, but it’s not simplistic either. There are multiple reporting tools available in Acumatica to choose from: Dashboards, Generic Inquiries, Pivot Tables, Report Designer, and the ARM Financial Report Writer. There are also 3rd party reporting tools to consider like Velixo Reports, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and DataSelf. Which one should you use for a specific need? Well, as us consultants like to say, “it depends” 😊
Once you select a reporting tool, then you need to build the report. Depending on the report, sometimes creating the report is easy and sometimes creating the report is difficult. Just getting the data can be somewhat of an art form. You might need to get creative and employee a technique like the Wyatt.ERP Technique (click here).
I find that building a report is very much a back-and-forth process. I like to put something in your hands as quickly as possible because a picture is worth a thousand words. Often, after I create a report for someone, they respond with something like, “this is what I asked for, but now that I see it, it’s not what I want”. By working according to the How It Works section above, I’m able to accommodate this back-and-forth process efficiently.
Most Acumatica consultants have some level of familiarity with reporting tools. But, even consultants like me, who have an affinity for reporting, struggle to keep “in reporting shape” when working on so many other things in Acumatica. Acumatica is a very broad system with various industry editions, vast customization capabilities, and many 3rd party products that plug in to the platform. As an Acumatica consultant, it’s very easy to become a “jack of all trades, master of none”.
I am focusing exclusively on the reporting tools in Acumatica so I can hone my skills specifically in that area. I want to move my knowledge from my “head” down to my “fingers”. I want to continue to develop my “reporting muscle memory” so I can quickly handle various common reporting situations and more easily adapt my foundational skills to new situations, delivering better reporting solutions faster.
I’m not a reporting geek, working in a dark cave for days at a time without showering while spinning my propeller hat, unaware of business processes and the importance of people in making Acumatica a success in your organization.
But I’m not a “jack of all trades, master of none” either. By focusing on reporting, I avoid getting stuck supporting the broad range of capabilities in Acumatica while spreading my knowlegde a mile wide, yet only an inch deep.
I’m simply an Acumatica consultant who focuses on the reporting tools in Acumatica. That’s what I’m good at and that’s what I enjoy.
Please contact me if you would like to work together:
A Word To VARs
I am not a VAR and I have no plans to become a VAR.
I do not sell software. I only sell “hours” and pre-packaged training courses. I bring an independent consultative approach to reporting in Acumatica. I only work on reporting, building expertise exclusively in reporting and avoiding the “jack of all trades, master of none” situation that is common in our industry.
Here on AUGForums.com, I value “independence” and “transparency”.
Those of you who have been around ERP software publishers for a while know the importance of “independence”. An ERP software publisher is only an acquisition or an IPO away from shrinking your margins and becoming very difficult to work with.
Acumatica has been a great company to work with so far, but we don’t know what the future holds. That’s why I built an “independent” community here on AUGForums.com. I have crafted my career around Acumatica, spending years to build my Acumatica skillset, and I’m invested in the Acumatica product for the long run. I don’t get a big payout if Acumatica changes ownership. I’m commited to the Acumatica product regardless of any changes in ownership or management that might take place at the Acumatica company.
I also value “transparency” here on AUGForums.com and in the work that I do. Love it or hate it, the reality is that we now live in a transparent world, just ask Edward Snowden. Acumatica Customers are not confined to seeing the Acumatica world through the exclusive lense of their VAR like they were with their legacy ERP product. There is a lot of information out there and it’s only a Google search away, as Nicole Ronchitti likes to say (click here).
If an Acumatica Customer comes to me directly, I will work with them. But I’m not a competitor to you. I’m one person with limited bandwidth and a focus on the reporting tools, a very specific area in Acumatica. If anything, I like to think that I help strengthen your client’s relationship with you by helping to make them a happier Acumatica Customer, delivering better reporting to help stave off one of the primary reasons (lack of reporting) for your client wanting to implement a new ERP system.
I do not poach clients. First, I can’t because I’m not a VAR. Second, I’m very familiar with a client’s desire to switch VARs for “greener pastures” and I frequently provide assurances to Acumatica Customers that all VARs deal with the challenges of both implementing and supporting Acumatica for their clients, regardless of who the VAR is. There are going to be bumps in the road. It’s the nature of the business.
A VAR is like a car dealership. Honda, Toyota, Ford, etc. don’t sell directly, but rather through their dealership network. Acumatica does the same thing by selling through their reseller channel.
But, when I need an oil change or new tires, I don’t take my car to the dealership. I daresay, most people don’t. For certain things, I might take my car to the dealer. For other things, I might take my car to get serviced elseware. It’s the same thing with Acumatica.
Not all Acumatica work is done by VARs. Companies hire additional employees to help with administrating Acumatica, writing reports in Acumatica, etc. Companies might even use temp agencies to bring some temporary ERP skills in-house for a period of time.
I’m no different than a temp agency. I bring Acumatica reporting tools skills into an Acumatica Customer temporarily.
Bottom line, I do not replace VARs.
That said, I also do Acumatica reporting subcontract work for VARs. You might need reporting expertise or you might just need additional bandwidth. If I do subcontract work for you, then you are my client, you pay me, and I will interface with you (not your client). You bring me the reporting requirements and I produce the reports, delivering everything through the My Sherpa portal mentioned above.
If you need me to interface directly with your client, then the client will need to pay me directly. I’m trying to avoid the complicated scenario of multi-tiered relationships, working under a VAR’s brand, a VAR’s email, or a VAR’s ticket system. I’m attempting to interface with one company for getting my requirements, delivering results, and billing / payments. That’s how I work.
However, if I do work directly with you for your client (who doesn’t know that I exist on the backend), my commitment to you is that I will not work with that client directly on future work without your permission. I respect your relationship with your client and I respect the multi-tiered relationships that exist in our industry.
Please contact me if you would like to work together: