Dear Reader,
Welcome to the first issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. I plan to send these out at the end of every month with updates related to www.AUGForums.com.
Go Bucks!
Things got pretty crazy here in Columbus Ohio this month on January 12th when Ohio State crushed Oregon in the National Championship. I live 10 minutes from the student union so I jumped in my car with 2 minutes left in the game and drove past crowds of students while honking my horn. On the way back I had to take a detour since the crowd had blocked the main street. Then the SWAT team got involved and tear gassed the whole crowd, clearing the street and making it look like a war zone. The students moved to the main grass area on campus and celebrated there instead. Some even broke into the empty stadium on campus (the game was actually played in Texas) and took down one of the goal posts. I thought that was a pretty clever idea. Overall though, things were pretty civil. Just a lot of happy people who were proud of their team for overcoming so much and winning the championship.
The Humble Beginning
I started blogging about Acumatica back in April of 2013 (click here for my first post). This past Fall, I decided to turn my Acumatica hobby into a business. It took me about a month to get the website put together but, onJanuary 1st 2015, I finally launched www.AcumaticaReports.
Right now there are two parts to the website: Community and Consulting.
Why Reporting?
You might wonder why I decided to focus on reporting in Acumatica. Basically, it’s the area that I enjoy most and I believe that it’s best if you can work on things that you enjoy. Also, I think there is a market out there for companies who are looking for good quality reports. At least that’s what I’m banking on. Time will tell…
This Past Month
I added 5 posts to the Community section of the website:
- Logging in to Acumatica Report Designer
- Building your first report in Acumatica Report Designer
- Acumatica .rps Versus .rpx File Types
- Acumatica 5.0 Report Designer New Features
- Acumatica Report Designer – Report Versions
I will continue to add one post every week on Thursday afternoons. Please checkout the links above and leave a comment. I need your help to build the community.
This month 14 people subscribed to the newsletter. Not bad for a brand new website.
Next Month
I plan to begin a long journey to write a short review of each existing out of the box report that is available in Acumatica 5.0. There are over 100 of them so this will take quite a while. But I think it’s the best way to learn tips and tricks for using the Report Designer application.
Starting next month, each week on Thursdays I will review one report. With just over 100 reports to review, it should take about two years. We’ll see how it goes. I might be able to combine multiple reports into one post or post more than once per week. But I’m in this for the long haul, so even if it takes two years so be it.
Recent News
- January 22nd – Acumatica launches Acumatica 5.0 (click here) :: The latest version of Acumatica looks great. Lots of new features and, more importantly, lots of bug fixes and stability improvements.Acumatica is starting to look like a mature ERP product. While there wasn’t much change in the area of reporting in this version, I’m expecting big improvements in the next release.
- January 26th – Solver launches BI360 4.5 (click here) :: On the announcement phone call, the cloud connectors to the BI360 Data Warehouse were announced for Salesforce, NetSuite, Intacct, andAcumatica. Acumatica was highlighted as the only cloud product available for live BI360 reporting because of the on-premise deployment option. It’s nice to see Acumatica stand out from the cloud crowd.
- January 27th – Microsoft launches new Power BI preview (click here) :: I’m a big fan of the Power BI products from Microsoft. The new Power BI has been radically redesigned (click here). It got pulled out of SharePoint and has been given its own platform which will allow for more cool stuff. Another big change is the introduction of a free entry level version with a data capacity of 1 GB per user (plenty of space for starting out). Also, enterprise pricing got reduced by 75% (click here). If Acumatica can pull off OData in the next release, then Acumatica will be in a perfect position to take advantage of Power BI once it graduates from the “preview” phase. To help increase the OData priority for Acumatica, please vote on the feature request.
My Recent Client Work
So far I have created reports for three different clients. I have to say that I’m blown away by how easy it is to deploy custom reports to a cloud ERP product like Acumatica. I’m used to dealing with on-premise ERP products where there are always tedious technical issues to work through when deploying custom reports. So far with Acumatica, it has been a very pleasant experience.
Until Next Month…
Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think of the firstnewsletter by replying to this email. And look for another issue from me next month.
Sincerely,
Tim Rodman