So far I have completed the training guide steps for a sample company’s General Ledger setup. This was the first 35 pages in the training guide.
I wanted to jot down a few comments/observations/etc.
- The buttons are a good size, but they are only icons so they don’t take up too much space. If you want to see the text for a button, just hover your mouse over it. The buttons look modern and remind me of the look and feel of Gmail.
- The navigation pane is on the left. You can easily drag it left and right in order to re-size it, or you can click the << icon to collapse it altogether and free up more space.
- The general modules are on the top of the screen and the detailed navigation within a module is within the navigation pane on the left.
- Every screen has its own screen ID! For example, the Journal Transactions screen ID is GL301000. I think that this is a big deal. I was first introduced to this idea with SAP because every SAP screen has a unique ID. This is important because it gives the user community an easy way to communicate, even if you have a customized system. When you refer to a screen, you don’t have to say, “The screen that you get to by clicking Finance on the top of the screen, then clicking the Work Area icon on the left-hand side, then clicking on Journal Transactions.” All you have to say is “screen GL301000” and everyone knows what you are talking about. In fact, you can easily navigate to a screen by putting the screen ID in the URL on top of your browser. For example, to browse to the Journal Transactions screen, simply click on http://localhost/AcumaticaERP/?ScreenId=GL301000. If you want to navigate to another screen, simply replace GL301000 in the URL with the screen ID of the screen that you are trying to reach.
- The help file uses a Wiki concept WHICH IS A BIG DEAL. Many times in the past I have wanted to change what the help file in an ERP system says about a field on a screen. Maybe we want to add more explanation about a field. Maybe we want to put in a link that takes you to a page on our company SharePoint site. Maybe we want to hijack a field, rename it, and use it for a completely different purpose. This is yet another advantage of a web-based application. It doesn’t use a locked down Windows help file. It uses a Wiki which can be customized to look exactly the way we want it to look. This can help tremendously with getting all your existing users on the same page and getting new users up to speed. There is no more need to develop a documentation guide outside of your ERP application. Now you can develop the guide directly within the application and your documentation guide will know what screen the user was on when they asked for help. Did I mention that this is A BIG DEAL?
- The screens respond very fast. I was expecting there to be a lag when clicking around, especially since I am running all the server components on a laptop, but it turns out that the speed is very good.
- I was able to complete some of the setup steps by importing from Excel. This is a very nice feature. Just open the Excel file, map the Excel columns to the Acumatica fields, and click import. Very easy to use and very powerful.
- I was able to connect to the Acumatica installation on my laptop from my iPhone. I could login and could click on some of the links, but the navigation pane wasn’t working for me. I’ll look into that later.
I’m sure that I will have a lot more to say as time goes on, but I wanted to jot down my initial impressions.