February 2015

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the second issue of the Acumatica ReportsNewsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month which happened to be Saturday in both January and February.

Jogging in the Cold
Brrr it’s been a cold Winter. I started jogging a few times a week which has been great, but some days very cold. I keep covered, but my nose gets pretty cold since I haven’t figured out a good way to keep my face covered. I also have to be extra careful since the sidewalks are full of snow and I have to resort to running in the street. Hopefully Spring isn’t too far around the corner. I’m looking forward to jogging in a t-shirt and shorts like I did year-round growing up in San Diego.

This Past Month
This past month on augforums.com I started a two year journey to review 104 different out of the box reports inAcumatica. So far it has been a great learning experience and I’m glad that I’m doing it, but of course it can get tedious at times. So, I pinned a sign up above my desk that says “One Week at a Time” to keep me motivated.

This exercise is teaching me a lot of little Report Designer tricks, but the most interesting thing has been beginning to understand how the Data Access Classes (DACs) are related. I started to build a DAC schema so I can document my understanding. Each week, as I review a report, I include a screenshot of the DAC for that report. However, the screenshot is coming from my central schema location. So, the goal is that, when I’m done, I’ll have one giant DAC schema that I can publish.

Here are the posts from this month:

1. Acumatica Out of the Box Reports – Two Year Journey
2. Acumatica Reporting Spotlight: Trial Balance Summary
3. Acumatica Report Reviews: Trial Balance Detailed
4. Acumatica Report Reviews: Transactions for Period

As always, feel free to leave a comment on any of the posts.

This month 11 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 24.

Acumatica Partner Summit
Acumatica had a special partner summit this past week in Long Beach California specifically for the latest Acumatica5.0 release. I wasn’t able to go, but it looks like some of the slides were posted online. I was especially interested in this slide because it mentions Power BI (click the slide for the full slide deck).

Is Acumatica one step closer to making OData available so we can use it in Power BI, Power Pivot, etc.? I hope so. It would be a great step forward for reporting in Acumatica as I talked about in last month’s newsletter.

RenovoFYI
I haven’t done much with the financial report writer inAcumatica (which is called Analytical Report Manager or ARM), but I did learn a little bit this month about some of its limitations. For anyone who desires advanced financialreporting, RenovoFYI is definitely something worth taking a look at.

Acumatica Report Store
Next month I plan to open an Acumatica Report Store at augforums.com where I will publish simple reportsthat are designed to complement the existing out of the boxreports in Acumatica. Each report will be $50 and will be available for purchase on Gumroad.com. I will also create a product landing page for each reportat augforums.com.

My first report will be something along the lines of what David Victory asked for on the LinkedIn Acumatica ERP Software User Group. For the full discussion thread, click on the screenshot below.

On that same discussion thread, Richard Duffy from Acumatica chimed in with the following comment. It looks like my report store is going to have some tough competition!

This whole idea of selling pre-made reports has been tried before:

• TheReportStore.com
• TheIntelligenceStore.com
• MPolino.com/gp/Analytics

However, all three of the sites listed above don’t have a lot ofreports so maybe this kind of business model isn’t very successful. For now I’m operating on the assumption that the three sites above are sparse because they didn’t hit a “critical mass” of reports. My goal is to come up with at least 100 reports which I think will “legitimize” my store. That’s why I only want to charge $50 per report so I don’t feel the pressure to create something that is too comprehensive, otherwise creating 100 reports will take me forever. I’m not looking to hit a home run with each report, just some consistent line drives.

Comprehensive custom reports typically take several hours to create and cost hundreds of dollars. That’s the kind of thing that I plan to handle on the consulting side of my business. The $50 reports that I will publish in my reportstore will be focused on meeting simpler reporting needs.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about my report store. Do you think there is a market for it? Are there any changes that you would make? Please feel free to respond directly to this email with any thoughts.

Until Next Month…
Thanks for reading. And look for another issue from me on Tuesday, March 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman