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Paul Gilfoy
Location: New York City, New York
In this episode, Paul Gilfoy, an Acumatica developer and consultant, shares his journey of learning and implementing Acumatica customizations. He discusses various aspects of Acumatica development, offers valuable advice on simplifying customizations, and provides insights into the mindset of service-oriented Acumatica Value Added Resellers (VARs) compared to those with a selling focus.
About Paul Gilfoy (4:15)
Paul Gilfoy is an experienced Acumatica developer and consultant in the New York / New Jersey area. He fell into development “accidentally” through his positions at two companies, helping them implement Acumatica internally. Currently, he specializes in helping businesses optimize their processes through Acumatica implementations and customizations as part of the PriceKubecka team. With a passion for simplifying complex scenarios, Paul aims to streamline operations for maximum efficiency.
Learning to Simplify Acumatica Customizations at Bungalow 5 (6:04)
Paul shares his experiences while working at Bungalow 5, a furniture wholesaler, and explains how he learned to simplify Acumatica customizations. He started with Bungalow 5 after their IT team departed, leaving behind a failed Acumatica implementation and a troubled website integration. He highlights the importance of understanding the existing processes and business needs before implementing customizations. This approach helps in avoiding unnecessary complexity and focusing on delivering real value to the business.
Different Ways to Learn Acumatica Development (10:04)
Paul emphasizes that there are different paths to becoming proficient in Acumatica development. Some learn by diving into the code and experimenting, while others benefit from formal training and learning resources. He encourages learning through hands-on experience, which often involves asking questions and seeking help from the Acumatica community, including on AugForums.com.
Why It’s Good to Reduce Customizations, and How to Do It (14:08)
Paul advocates for reducing customizations whenever possible. He believes that customizations can often lead to complications, making system upgrades and maintenance challenging. To simplify customizations, Paul suggests evaluating whether a customization is genuinely necessary, considering alternatives, and aiming to achieve the desired outcomes with minimal changes. Many times, with careful analysis, the standard Acumatica feature set can meet the functional requirements of a business process.
Additionally, it’s important to analyze those requirements to ensure that they’re optimal for your business. Many cling to their processes because that’s how they’ve always done it. As such, an adjustment to a process could prove to be more effective than a customization to accommodate it.
Finally, some processes are critical to a business but difficult to implement in Acumatica. Paul advocates the 80 / 20 rule – automate the 80%, and the 20% that’s too “out-of-the-ordinary” and costly to implement can be handled with spreadsheets or other manual processes.
Striking the Balance Between Developer and Consultant (27:28)
Spinning up a full Visual Studio environment for Acumatica development is a line that neither Paul nor Tim have wanted to cross. Visual Studio brings a suite of tools geared toward professional development and testing and has its place for extending Acumatica and adding new functionality. However, going down that “rabbit hole” means a long track of study and learning to truly understand the environment, the C# language, and Visual Studio tooling. It also means that your focus could easily slide to simply coding business requirements, rather than having an active voice in business process management, where the greater good can be accomplished.
Paul has spent his time as an Acumatica developer using a different approach. While not shying away from the Acumatica source code, he focuses on customization projects, preferring to develop in Visual Studio Code (a lightweight code editor) and deploy them to developer environments within AWS instances. This approach helps him achieve results quickly and reliably without descending into an overly complex solution for a business problem.
PriceKubecka – Implementing Acumatica Internally (33:48)
Paul discusses his beginnings with PriceKubecka, a CPA firm, and their internal implementation of Acumatica. He highlights the value of using Acumatica to enhance efficiency and streamline processes within a professional services environment. They took a unique approach to accelerate their Acumatica implementation, getting the bare minimum accounting functionality up and running and going live with that. That first step was getting them off QuickBooks and on to Acumatica.
They next decided to implement the Project module. Although professional services firms like PriceKubecka might not normally use this functionality, going with the Project module would align them with more of their clients, many of whom are in the Construction industry. Using that functionality on a day-to-day basis internally (as Paul put it, “drinking our own Kool-Aid”) will give them practical experience they can then use to help customers.
Why PriceKubecka Wants to Enter the VAR Space (37:41)
PriceKubecka’s transition into the VAR space is driven by a service-oriented mindset, which is common among CPA firms. Paul explains that they aim to provide value to their clients by recommending Acumatica as a solution for collecting and organizing meaningful and reliable business data while also ensuring they fully leverage Acumatica’s capabilities. Instead of focusing solely on selling software, PriceKubecka aims to act as a resource that supports businesses in maximizing their ROI from Acumatica.
Lessons Learned from Implementing a Time Clock in Acumatica (41:20)
Paul discusses their implementation of a time clock in Acumatica and the lessons learned from the process. The feature was added within the Employee Time Activity screen, allowing users to track their time accurately.
One lesson learned was that it was important to involve end-users in the development process to ensure the tool meets their needs effectively. Paul says it’s important to launch a new feature before it’s 100% ready (a Minimum Viable Product approach) so users can test it and give their feedback on how it could better fit into their workflow. This eliminates wasted development time and encourages greater user adoption.
Acumatica VARs with a Service Mindset vs. Those with a Selling Mindset (51:18)
Traditional Value-Added Resellers (VARs) are focused on sales and increasing the number of implementations as quickly as possible, as a matter of survival. This often results in clients not realizing the full return from their investment, as the VAR is in a hurry to move on to the next project.
Paul contrasts that with how CPAs view the client relationship. They are most interested in what benefits the client and how they can get full value from their Acumatica investment. Their business model is built around billing for their time and offering a valuable service, which lends toward a more personalized approach. Paul believes that a service mindset leads to better outcomes for both the VAR and the clients.
Wrapping Up (1:03:10)
Paul finishes up by telling a little about how the team at PriceKubecka is becoming more familiar with Acumatica. Velixo is also highlighted as a valuable tool, helping accountants work with data in Acumatica from the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet.
In closing, Paul provides valuable insights for businesses navigating the world of Acumatica customizations and VAR partnerships. He emphasizes that learning Acumatica development involves a combination of experimentation, learning resources, and community support. By simplifying customizations and adopting a service mindset, businesses can fully leverage Acumatica’s capabilities to optimize their operations and achieve long-term success.
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