One of my favorite features in Sage 500 is Business Insights Explorer. Recently though, I was pleased to discover that Acumatica has a similar feature.
Each module in Acumatica has an Explore section in the Work Area area. For example, in the Accounts Payable module, there are five menu options available in the Explore section: Vendor Summary, Vendor Details, Bills Pending Payments, Checking Pending Printing, and 1099 Year Summary.
However, you have the option to add your own menu options using the Generic Inquiry feature located at System -> Customization -> Manage -> Generic Inquiry.
Just create a title for your inquiry and fill out the tabs on the bottom. I’m going to create a simply list of vendor invoices by filling out the following information in the Generic Inquiry screen:
As long as you fill out the Site Map Location and Site Map Title fields, your new custom inquiry should be available on the Acumatica menu like this (after you save it of course):
In my Vendor Invoices inquiry, you can now just input a beginning and ending invoice date, then click the Refresh icon, and the list of invoices will appear in the grid below. Since Acumatica knows what each field is, it makes the file attachment and record note icons available for each record in the grid. It also gives you a hyperlink on the Reference Nbr. and Vendor fields which allows you to click the link and automatically be taken to the actual invoice or vendor screens.
In conclusion, this is a very flexible and powerful feature that allows you to create data inquiry screens on the Acumatica menu that are customized to fit your company’s specific business needs.
Thanks Tim for the reply, have a nice day!
Hi Tim!
Do you know if it by now is possible to add a Total in a inquiry? The example mentioned earlier:
I meant how to total with a group? Like there’s a Total at the end of the inquiry.
For example:
Product | Sold Quantity
———- ——————-
Item A 100
Item B 250
Total 350
Hi Joni,
It still isn’t possible in the Generic Inquiry, but there are now Pivot Tables in Acumatica 6 which would allow you to apply totals if you are grouping.
Tim
I’m assuming you mean adding a total to a column without grouping? If so, that’s not available as far as I can tell, although that would be a nice improvement.
I’d like to make a few comparisons between Sage 500 Business Insights Explorer and Generic Inquiry. I’m comparing to Sage 500 Business Insights Explorer only because that is the tool that I’m most familiar with.
Acumatica is still a very young product though and I would expect this inquiry feature to become more feature rich over time, especially since Acumatica is so focused on providing a solid platform. With other ERP products, the development team would move on to extend into other modules and industry verticals. However, I expect Acumatica to continue to revisit features like Generic Inquiry with a view to continually improve them. This is the benefit of Acumatica’s approach to rely on their partner community for broadening their product. This allow their development team to focus on going deeper with the core technology features.
I meant how to total with a group? Like there’s a Total at the end of the inquiry.
For example:
Product | Sold Quantity
———- ——————-
Item A 100
Item B 250
Total 350
As far as I can tell, I don’t think there is a way to do this yet.
When I say “COUNT or SUM on a grouping” I mean that it has to be at the grouping level. So, if you were looking at invoice lines, you could group on invoice number and SUM the amount or COUNT the lines for each invoice, but you can’t do a grand total.
Dean,
You could export the inquiry screen to Excel which will maintain a live link back to your data with the ability to refresh it within Excel and then build a pivot table in Excel since pivot tables are really good at doing grouping. The Excel data link will also respect the filters that you had applied in your Acumatica inquiry screen at the time that you exported it to Excel (I just learned this by watching the video below):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yGdmq7OI-lc
Is there a way to add a total?