Dear Reader,

Welcome to the fourteenth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

Acumatica Summit 2016

At the beginning of the month I went down to Florida for Acumatica Summit 2016. This was my first software conference and I made a lot of rookie mistakes like:
Going into the week sleep deprived
Expecting to run into people (there were over 600) instead of making arrangements ahead of time with specific people that I wanted to meet

Next year will be on my home turf of Southern California and I plan to apply what I learned this year so I can make the experience next year even more profitable. That being said, this year was still a great experience and it made me even more optimistic about not only the Acumatica product, but the Acumatica ecosystem as a whole.

I wrote up some more of my impressions on the blog which you can checkout if you click here.

Acumatica 6.0 and Power BI

My favorite overall thing about Summit was meeting people, but my favorite product thing was the demo of Power BI in Acumatica 6.0.

In Acumatica 6.0, you will be able to embed Power BI tiles directly into Acumatica dashboards. That’s huge because it delivers the “feel” of Power BI being inside the Acumatica product which is critical for many users. I can’t wait to get my hands on a build of Acumatica 6.0.

We will also get pivot tables in Acumatica 6.0 which I think will be a big deal because you will basically be able to add drill down to Generic Inquiry screens.

Here are some pictures that I took of the screen onstage during the 6.0 demo at Summit: click here, click here, click here, and click here.

One More Thing

I discovered a potentially cool use for Power BI this month. Power BI can read from Exchange which means I can use my Outlook calendar as my timesheet during the week and then have Power BI create my timesheet at the end of the week so I can put it into Acumatica. Of course, I can get my historical timesheet data with OData from Acumatica so the Exchange/OData combination gives me a nice backwards/forwards view of things.

I’m still experimenting with it in real life. If it goes well, I hope to write some blog posts on it.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Thursday, March 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twelfth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

Acumatica and Power BI Webinar

On December 10th, I got to participate in a Microsoft Power BI webinar that showcased the combination of Acumatica and Power BI. I gave a 30 minute demo in the second half of the webinar.

To view the demo, click here and scroll to the 25 minute mark.

It was a fun experience to see behind-the-scenes how Microsoft puts on a webinar and to work with an industrial-strength webinar software product.

Acumatica Summit

The Acumatica Summit is only a month away and I’m busy preparing for it.

I will be doing two sessions:

1. From Data Hell to Bliss: Getting the Most out of Your Acumatica Data(listed under the Product Overview section on the Acumatica Summit Website)
2. Distribution Basics (listed under the Day 3 – 5 section on the Acumatica Summit Website)

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue onSunday, January 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the eleventh issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email normally goes out on the last day of every month, but I’m a little late this month because I was recovering from eating too much turkey.

Blog on Pause

After much debate, I decided to press the pause button on the blog. For more about that decision, click here.

Although the blog is on pause, I plan to continue this monthly newsletter. I’m not exactly sure how, but I will do my best.

Acumatica Power BI Content Pack

Microsoft has been running a series of webinars (click here for full list).

Next Thursday (December 10th) they will have a webinar specifically for the Acumatica Power BI Content Pack.

I will be presenting together with Ajoy from Acumatica and Theresa from Microsoft.

If you are interested, you can register by clicking the following link:
https://info.microsoft.com/CO-PowerBI-WBNR-FY16-10Dec15-AcumaticaPowerBI-Registration.html

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Friday, January 1st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the tenth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

I’ll keep it short…

The month of October flew by, but it was enough time to make my decision on whether or not to continue blogging at augforums.com.

Look for a post this coming Wednesday on the blog about what I decided to do and why.

Some Statistics

This month 1 new person subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 81.

This month there were 654 visitors to augforums.com and 1,399 page views as of 10:26pm last night.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Monday, November 30th.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the ninth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

I became an Acumatica employee on September 17th. This is a BIG change for me. To read more about it, click here (if you could respond to the two questions on the bottom of the post, that would help me a lot).

Because of this change, I will be hibernating on the blog for the whole month of October before I even consider whether or not to continue the blog going forward. I’ll let you know what I decide in the next newsletter at the end of October.

For now, my days consist of diving into the Acumatica application so I can get up to speed as quickly as possible and be a contributing member of the team. It’s a lot of information and it feels like I’m sitting underneath something like this:

Guest Posts

In order to keep the blog from sitting empty for a whole month, there will be a few guest posts in October from others in the Acumatica community. If you also are interested, please reply to this email and let me know.

Not Empty Handed

I don’t want to leave you empty handed in this newsletter so I wanted to include a few rough draft screenshots from Power BI. These were done as a quick mockup to see what it would look like to display AR or AP Aging buckets with drilldown capability into customers/vendors. This really deserves a post, but I don’t have the time right now.

There is A LOT more Power BI stuff where this came from on my list of post ideas. It just takes time to write the posts.

Some Statistics

This month 5 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 80.

There were 938 visitors and 1,998 page views as of 11:45am today.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Saturday, October 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the eighth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

The weather has been beautiful here in Columbus this month. Lots of sunny days with white puffy clouds slowly moving across the sky. We have been able to take a good number of trips to the local pool and the Columbus zoo. Ohio State started this week so I made sure to stay away from our local Target because it was full of parents making sure that their kids’ dorm rooms are stocked with the basic necessities. I hope that you also had a good August. It’s time to get ready for Fall.

An Announcement

On September 17th, I will be joining the Acumatica team, filling the role ERP Solutions Consultant. I decided to look for a new job a few months ago and considered a number of different options. But joining Acumatica seemed like the best place for me at this time. I’m really looking forward to using the Acumatica product full-time and bidding farewell to Sage 500, my ERP best-friend since 2005.

I moved to Columbus last August, one year ago. The week after I moved here, Acumatica held Acumatica Partner Summit 2014 in Denver, Colorado. There were a lot of announcements that came out of it (click here for my summary). One of the announcements was the opening of a support center here in Columbus.

It was a strange feeling for me at the time to realize that the ERP product I had been learning and blogging about for over a year was now opening an office in the city that I just moved to. It’s even stranger to realize that I will be joining that office almost exactly one year after it opened.

The augforums.com blog will continue (I hope), but I imagine that the pace will be a little slower since transitioning to a new job always takes a lot of energy. But I promise to do my best to keep the posts coming and to maintain an independent perspective even though I will now be employed by Acumatica.

This Month’s Blog Posts

The beautiful weather here in Columbus kept me from my goal of one post per week, but I still managed to type a few posts:

1. Sage vs. Acumatica – Sage held their summit this month so I took the opportunity to write a post comparing the Sage and Acumatica companies from my perspective. Interestingly enough, the article prompted a responsefrom Walter Goodfield who works for one of the largest Sage partners in the US. Walter lives in Cleveland and we’re going to have lunch when I’m up there this week. I’m hoping that we can continue to trade blog posts comparing Sage and Acumatica in the future. I think that it would be a great learning experience.
2. Try Excel Online For Free – I got some good feedback from people last month with the Excel Online Web App and Acumatica post, but I realized that many people don’t have access to a version of Excel Online that they can use to reproduce the steps that I went through in the video. So, in this post I show how you can get a trial version of Office 365 and Excel Online. However, I think that Excel Online might get pulled into Power BI at some point. Melissa Coates hinted that something is up, although she isn’t exactly sure what it is yet.
3. What is Power BI? – Speaking of Power BI, I attempted an explanatory post for those who still don’t know what it is. At over 1,800 words, it’s a long one, but there is a lot to say about Power BI. This post only scratches the surface, but hopefully it’s a good introduction.

Some Statistics

This month 6 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 75.

We finally broke the 1,000 visitors barrier this month! There were 1,107 as of 3:20pmtoday.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Wednesday, September 30th.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the seventh issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

I spent the entire month of July in Southern California with my wife and two kids visiting family. I work remotely so I was able to continue working from California without burning too much vacation time. It was a little challenging to start work at 5:30am instead of 8:30am every morning, but I got used to it.

This Past Month

This past month was all about Power BI for me. I even spun up another website atPowerBITutorial.com to collect email addresses from people who would be interested in a tutorial. For now I’m staying focused on augforums.com and will only build a Power BI tutorial if there is enough interest, but I am learning that the buzz around Power BI is very strong and the community that is forming around it is very large.

I didn’t think that Microsoft was going to launch Power BI until the Fall, but they surprised me and launched a week ago on July 24th. It’s amazing to see how far they’ve come in such a short amount of time. It’s also interesting to see the new agile development strategy that Microsoft is employing. It think that this strategy is going to be imitated by many software companies in the years to come.

If you are wondering how Microsoft Excel compares to the new Microsoft Power BI, then you have to checkout this recent post by Rob Collie (click here).

I also finished reading the book Data Visualization For Dummies on my new Kindle and really liked it. The main thing that I took away from the book was that user acceptance is the most important thing when it comes to dashboards. Companies spend tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on data warehouses and fancy dashboard software, but many people still revert back to their spreadsheets. Why? Because the end users weren’t involved enough in the process. You can’t measure a dashboard by how nice it looks or by how much information it contains. “How much is it actually being used?” should be the main question. Of course, there are a lot of factors involved with this, but focussing on user acceptance is the goal of the whole thing.

The main author of Data Visualization For Dummies is Miko Yuk. In the dedication section at the end of the book she writes, “To my best friend Ryan Goodman for his unparalleled support, like-minded passion, and a high tolerance for crazy”. Miko and Ryan even just started a podcast together (click here). I’ve seen some of Ryan Goodman’s blog posts in the past and noticed that he lives in San Diego. So, I reached out to him and we were able to grab lunch when I was in San Diego this month visiting my parents and sister. My two key takeaways from lunch:

1. Most visualizations are done on ERP data. Big Data gets all the publicity because it’s more “sexy” and simpler to understand, but ERP data feeds most visualizations in the real world. This opinion agrees with what I learned from a Tableau expert who sat next to me on a recent plane flight. He told me that Tableau was actually started by people at Pixar who wanted a better way to view Accounting information. You can’t get any closer to ERP than Accounting.
2. Visualizations are very important, but they don’t take much time to build. What does take time is understanding the underlying data, combining it together, and adding the underlying calculations. This is the real skill and this is what Rob Collie has been preaching for years over at PowerPivotPro.com. And this is why Excel and Power BI skills are so important.

This Month’s Blog Posts

I prematurely ended my two year journey through the Out of the Box reports (click here) and now am exclusively focused on the Acumatica / Excel / Power BI trifecta.

There were two blog posts this month::

1. Acumatica Most Popular in VAR 100 – For those who don’t know what the VAR 100 is, it is the most authoritative annual publication on the top 100 Mid Market ERP consulting companies. Acumatica got a big shout out in this year’s report.
2. Excel Online Web App and Acumatica – If you want to see how you can take your OData-enabled Excel reports and display them within Acumatica, you’ll want to check out the video on the bottom of this post.

Some Statistics

This month 5 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 69.

We didn’t reach 1,000 visitors this month like I was hoping for in last month’snewsletter, but we’re getting closer. There were 888 as of 11:15pm today.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Monday, August 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the sixth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

I have been enjoying the Summer weather here in Columbus, although it has been raining a lot. Hopefully July will bring more sun. My wife and I took our kids (1 1/2 and 3 1/2) camping for the first time this past weekend. They had a great time and so did we. Our son enjoyed getting muddy and throwing sticks into the campfire while our daughter enjoyed running around and eating s’mores. We went to a place called Hocking Hills State Park, about an hour from Columbus. It was very beautiful and had a lot of cool things to see.

This Past Month

I have been getting more and more into Power BI and data visualization this month. Being from an Mathematics and Accounting background, I have always been a numbers person. But I am realizing more and more how important the presentation is. There is so much data available these days that you really have to be careful about “data overload” in your reports. The presentation of a report has a lot to do with how much it will actually get used.

The blog has suffered a little as a result, but I think I’m heading in the right direction by learning more about data visualization. Currently I am reading a book called Data Visualization For Dummies on my Kindle and I have more data visualization books in the queue. Summer is a great time to sit back and get some serious reading done.

Power BI

Microsoft has been adding new features into Power BI at a very rapid pace. It is still in preview mode, but there is a new version expected this Summer with the goal of officially launching in the Fall. Acumatica is positioned to take advantage of all that Power BI has to offer because of the new OData functionality in Acumatica 5.1

At first I was skeptical about Power BI because I know that Excel has way more functionality. But Microsoft is investing heavily in Power BI and it is even easier to use than Excel so it has a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see how Excel and Power BI fit together moving forward. The nice thing is that you can use Power BI functionality in Excel so you can get comfortable with it. Then, once you are comfortable, you can leave Excel behind and go full Power BI.

If you would like to learn more about Power BI, there was a very informative webinar put on this month by my friends over at PowerPivotPro.com. The presentation is about 20 minutes with a lot of Q&A afterwards. Click here to see a recording of the webinar

Post Summary

I wanted to summarize the posts that I’ve done since the Acumatica OData announcement. Even though Summer has slowed me down a little, I do plan to continue along these style of posts, especially with Power BI.

1. My essay on why the recent OData feature in Acumatica 5.1 is important. I talk about Excel and Power BI as reporting tools, but OData can be consumed by virtually any modern reporting tool.
2. What role I think the Acumatica Report Designer should play in an organization. I classify Acumatica Report Designer, Crystal, and SSRS as “old school” reporting software. They still play a role, but a lot has changed in the past 2-3 years. Power BI, BI360, Adaptive Insights, MicroStrategy, Domo, Qlik, and Tableau all fall into what I consider to be the “new school” of reporting software. Business Intelligence software is no longer just for big companies.
3. How to create a Generic Inquiry in Acumatica (the equivalent of Smart List in Dynamics GP). The last thing I do in this video is check a box. That little check box is what got added in Acumatica 5.1 and it is what allows you to connect to the data from Excel, Power BI, etc. Since Generic Inquiry is within the Acumatica application and not a SQL query outside of the application, it picks up security and only shows you the data that you have access to.
4. Here is a super simple example of building an Excel report in Acumatica from an OData connection. This is nothing fancy at all, but at least you can see how easy it is to connect to Acumatica data from Excel.
5. Carrying on from the previous link, I create a simple dashboard in Excel. Again, very simple here. You can do a lot of advanced things in Excel and you can get even more advanced when you start to use Power BI features. If you have ever heard of Analysis Services, OLAP, or Multi-Dimensional Cubes, that is what Power BI brings to the table. The nice thing about Power BI is that you get the power of those things, but the interface is Excel so you don’t have to be a computer programmer to use it.
6. Here I talk about BI360 and compare it to another Excel-based 3rd party tool that works with Acumatica. This post was basically taken from the notes that I took when evaluating these two products for the company that I work for. We use Sage 500 ERP, but BI360 works with both Sage 500 ERP and Acumatica ERP.

Some Statistics

This month 7 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 64.

This month, for the first time ever, the number of visitors to augforums.com surpassed 800 and the number of page views surpassed 2,000. Let’s see if we can hit 1,000 visitors in July!

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And check your inbox for another newsletter issue on Friday, July 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the fifth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

This Past Month

Things are heating up over at augforums.com. The big news from last month has allowed me to begin focusing on Excel reporting with Acumatica data. I’m very passionate about this and it’s fun to blog about it.

Of course there is also Power BI reporting and I will get to that after a few more Excel-related posts.

Whether it is Excel or Power BI, both tools are a very welcome option for Acumatica users. The more partners and customers I talk to, the more I hear the same thing about how limited and difficult to use the Report Designer is. This is no surprise. It took years for Microsoft to get SSRS to a reasonable level of maturity and Microsoft has a lot of resources at their disposal. I don’t know much about the guts of how a report writer program works, but my impression is that they take a long time to develop. For example, Excel has been in existence for 30 years and it is constantly being tweaked and enhanced. Connecting to Excel and Power BI with OData allows Acumatica to skip a few decades of development time.

However, there is one major downside to Excel. It can be difficult for a customer who just invested in a web-based product like Acumatica Cloud ERP to be convinced to use a desktop tool like Excel for reporting. They want something web-based for reporting. Keep an eye on the blog this week. I’m going to introduce a simple web-based Excel option. Satya Nadella is taking Microsoft in a web-based direction and I think that we can expect this web-based Excel option to only get stronger. BI360 is even headed in the same direction with their web-based reporting. This combines the best of both worlds. Report producers get to use Excel (a desktop application), while report consumers get to use their web browser, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc. The consumers probably won’t even realize that what they are using was made in Excel. If you find your company in this situation in the future, then know that you are experiencing the Producer/Consumer Dynamic.

My most popular post this month was on building a simple dashboard in Excel. There is a LOT more where this came from and I plan to do many more posts like it in the future.

Here are all the Excel-related posts from this month:

1. Acumatica Reports – Report Designer (5%) and Excel / Power BI (95%)
2. Creating an OData Connection by building a Generic Inquiry screen in Acumatica ERP
3. Connecting to Acumatica data from Microsoft Excel
4. Building a simple Dashboard in Excel using Acumatica ERP OData

Of course, I’m continuing my two-year journey through the out of the box reports. It’s boring, but it does give me some insight into the Data Access Class (DAC) relationships. Here are the out of the box report posts from this month:

1. Acumatica Standard Reports: GL Recurring Transactions Detailed
2. Acumatica Standard Reports: Open GL Documents
3. Acumatica Standard Reports: GL Reversing Batches
4. Acumatica Standard Reports: Cash Account Summary

This month 15 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 57.

Why Videos

You might have noticed that all my Excel-related posts this month have had a video at the bottom. I’m going to try to continue this because I think it’s a lot easier to show something in Excel in a video rather than try to write about it.

Reporting is all about communicating what you think the data is telling you. It’s weird, but the way that data is presented is even more important than the data itself. It’s all about visualization.

Speaking of Visualization

I went home to San Diego this month for my mom’s 60th birthday. On the flight home I sat next to a guy (named Guy) who does big data marketing analysis for a company that maintains a database of thousands of characteristics about millions of U.S. companies. He analyzes the data in a popular statistical software language called R. Then he presents it using Tableau. He really knows his stuff and is even going to be one of the presenters at the next Tableau user conference. We had a fascinating two hour conversation about data analysis and I plan to devote an entire blog post in the future to what we talked about.

I also did some research about a company called Domo this month. They are the complete opposite of what I am trying to do on this blog. I am trying to educate people how they can build their own reports. Domo wants to go into companies, wow the top-level executives, and get them to outsource all the work to Domo, taking all the thinking out of it. As much as I don’t like it, I have to admit that it’s actually a very smart strategy because the decision makers at companies don’t know much about how reports are made, especially where the data comes from. They just use reports and they like the fancy-looking dashboard reports that Domo shows them. It’s all about the visualization, all about the presentation. Domo probably gets this better than anyone else since they are run by a very savy marketing guy named Josh James. He really knows how to make things look slick and he has a proven track record with a product called Omniture .

An Announcement

One thing I have realized about all this exciting OData stuff is that you still need to build the OData connections.

In my experience, most people think about the data in their ERP system in terms of the names of the screens and the names of the fields on the screens.

It would be cool if you could have an OData connection for every screen in Acumatica, with all the fields having the same names as the fields on the screens.

So, I decided to see if there is an interest out there for this.

But building all those OData connections would take you a long time or cost you thousands of dollars if you were to have a consultant do it.

I would make all of these OData connections available in a package for $500.

This would be a lot of work though on my part so I would only do it if there is enough interest. I would only do it if there were at least 30 customers lined up.

If you are a partner, I would ask that you buy the package for each one of your customers.

Anyways, if this sounds interesting to you, please respond to this email and let me know. Like I said, if there are 30 willing customers out there, I would do it.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And look for another issue from me on Tuesday, June 30th.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

Big News

The big news that I mentioned last month (which wasn’t supposed to come until May) ended up coming today.

I did an extensive write-up on it and why I think that it’s important: check it out

This Past Month

I added 8 posts to the blog this past month:

1. Microsoft Excel and Power BI with OData
2. GL Recurring Transactions
3. Acumatica University – Now Available to All
4. GL Register Detailed
5. Acumatica Report Designer Training Course
6. GL Register
7. New Reports Coming in June
8. GL Edit Account Distribution

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

This month 4 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 42.

Until Next Month…

As you can see, a short newsletter this month, mainly because I spent all my energy on the “big news” post.

Thanks for reading. And look for another issue from me on Sunday, May 31st.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the third issue of the Acumatica Reports Newsletter. This email goes out on the last day of every month.

House Explosion

We had a lot of excitement in our neighborhood this month.

Two weekends ago I was taking a nap at home when, all of a sudden, I woke up to a loud noise. The whole house shook and my wife thought something big had landed on the roof.

We went outside and quickly discovered that all the neighbors had heard the same thing. We all thought that a transformer had blown.

I hopped on my bike and rode in the direction of the noise. But it wasn’t a transformer.

Six blocks away from my house, a house had exploded. The cause: natural gas.

The street was full of smoke and debris was scattered everywhere.

It was the warmest day so far this year and many people on my street were out when the explosion happened: adults walking, kids playing.

But no one was out on the street where the explosion occurred. And the owners of the house were on vacation. So, amazingly, no one was hurt or killed. It definitely makes you stop and think.

This Past Month

I added 9 posts to the blog this month:

1. Customers Generic Inquiry
2. Acumatica Report Reviews: GL Edit Detailed
3. Sales Order Lines Generic Inquiry
4. Acumatica Report Reviews: GL Edit Summary
5. Sales Order Details By Terms
6. Acumatica Report Reviews: GL Budget Edit
7. YTD Period Sales Analysis By Customer
8. Acumatica Report Reviews: Transactions for Account
9. Period Sales Analysis By Customer

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

This month 14 new people subscribed to the newsletter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 38.

Acumatica Report Store

Some of the posts from this past month are actually reports in my new Acumatica Report Store.

The goal is to add one new report per week.

How many times have you needed a report and wondered, “I’ll bet someone created this already” ?

Every year, companies spend a lot of money to create custom reports from scratch, reinventing the wheel rather than building on top of existing templates. I want to solve this problem with my Acumatica Report Store.

You can browse the gallery of reports in the store and find one that seems close to what you’re looking for. Then you can customize it further to meet your specific needs, or take advantage of my consulting offering and have me customize it for you.

So, the store feeds into the consulting and the consulting feeds back into the store.

This process will provide me with many learning opportunities that I will continue to share on my weekly blog post, makingaugforums.com the central place for all things related to reporting in Acumatica.

If there is enough interest, I might even create a starter course at some point for anyone who is interested in Acumatica reporting.

Acumatica Mobile

This month I got to see more details on the Acumatica mobile functionality in 5.0 and I can understand why people are excited.

Native mobile applications are a more pleasant user experience than a browser on a phone or tablet. A native mobile app has more control over how things are presented and what information can be accessed on the device (camera, microphone, GPS location, etc.).

A native mobile app is also more responsive. Since the presentation layer is local to your phone and doesn’t have to download all the objects from the internet, it’s snappier and responds to you faster.

Why don’t I apply the same reasoning to desktop computer applications? Doesn’t this reasoning justify on-premise Windows applications instead of browser-based Cloud ERP products like Acumatica?

Well, the problem with Mobile web browsers is that they aren’t anywhere near as advanced as Desktop web browsers.

On a Desktop web browser, Acumatica is able to only reload the parts of the webpage that need to be reloaded, solving the speed/responsiveness slowness problems associated with older web applications.

Also, on a Desktop web browser you can do things like simply drag a file onto a web page in order to upload it.

Web browsers on phones and tablets just aren’t as advanced as web browsers on desktop computers. I think that they will get there someday, but, until they do, native mobile apps will continue to provide a better user experience.

There is a dark side to native mobile apps though. The main problem is that they are traditionally built on a completely separate platform with a completely separate collection of computer code. You traditionally needed a completely separate team of developers for the iPhone app, then another team of developers for the Android app.

After a year or so, what started out as one web application can quickly become three separate, fragmented applications because they are built by three separate teams and no amount of inter-team collaboration can ensure a 100% consistent user experience across all three applications (Desktop, iPhone, Android).

This isn’t a big deal for a simple application like GroupMe or Twitter, but it is a big deal for ERP applications because the business logic that they contain can be very complicated. Also, it is critical that exactly the same business logic is applied regardless of the device that you are using (computer desktop, phone, tablet, etc.).

So, why is the new Acumatica 5.0 Mobile framework such a big deal? Well, it isn’t a traditional mobile app. It’s more like a web browser that works well on a mobile device.

The only thing that the Acumatica Mobile app does is render the visual pieces. This solves the slowness/snappiness problem.

But you avoid the dark side of separate development platforms because all the business logic reads directly from the regular screen in Acumatica.

In fact, the screen has to exist in regular Acumatica because that’s where all the development happens. Then you create a tiny little pointer file that tells the Acumatica Mobile App to make the screen mobile enabled. No iOS developers, no Android developers, no fragmented computer code.

You are guaranteed to have exactly the same experience whether you are on your Desktop web browser or the Acumatica Native Mobile app.

What does this have to do with reporting in Acumatica? Well, most data entry happens at a keyboard. But phones and tablets are very popular for reading information, especially for executives who often find themselves on the road.

So, reporting benefits the most from anything mobile.

And the Acumatica Mobile App is going to make it easier to deliver critical business information to mobile devices.

Big News Coming in May

I started my Acumatica Report Store focused on reports created in Acumatica Report Designer, but then I learned about some BIG Acumatica news coming in May. Because of this news, I have changed gears and am now focused on adding Generic Inquiry reports to the store. I’ll explain why in the May newsletter.

But, trust me, it’s going to be BIG.

Until Next Month…

Thanks for reading. And look for another issue from me on Thursday, April 30th.

Sincerely,
Tim Rodman

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

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.com. The website doesn’t look like much now, but I will slowly and methodically continue to add content so that it can become the #1 destination for all things related to reporting in Acumatica.

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:

1. Logging in to Acumatica Report Designer
2. Building your first report in Acumatica Report Designer
3. Acumatica .rps Versus .rpx File Types
4. Acumatica 5.0 Report Designer New Features
5. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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