Recapping the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch

Didn’t Have Time to Attend the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch? Get the Facts Here.

The Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch event on September 16, 2020 added exciting new innovation, features, and functionality to the Acumatica Cloud ERP that you will want to know about.

Key Highlights & What You Need to Know Now

• Commerce Edition adds new support for Shopify and an even more amazing customer experience
• Acumatica Point of Sale brings the full omni-channel experience to retail
• Acumatica AP Automation uses machine learning and AI to reduce AP bill entry by hours
• Electronic Banking integrates with 11,000+ financial institutions to speed up reconciliations
• Advanced Expense Management automates expense receipt creation from bank feeds
• Quality Management tracks production outputs and moves products to market faster
• Workflow Engine / Visual State Automation makes it fast and easy to modify and create workflows
• Cross Company Sales eases the process of selling and invoicing within your company, such as from one branch to another

Start planning how you will use the latest advances in Acumatica ERP when you read this quick recap of the 2020 R2 Launch event.

Usability Enhancements

The demos kicked off this year with highlights to the latest UI updates that help Acumatica users work smarter, not harder. R2 users will enjoy these changes:

• All dashboards in Acumatica now automatically refresh, without intervention
• The new Address Lookup tool helps you quickly complete contact details for leads
• Recently viewed work is quickly accessible, helping to ensure a better workflow even through WFH distractions
• Business Events automate workflows for notifications and real-time tracking
• Generic inquiries are now easy for the average user to create with self-joining tables (wow!), and include instant previews that help you see your query as you build it

Commerce Edition Enhancements

January’s Acumatica Summit 2020 announced native eCommerce integration with BigCommerce, and now Shopify is on the list of Commerce Edition integrations, along with a large number of third-party connectors.

Updated to the Commerce Edition include:

• Acumatica acting as the master for all eCommerce data, including pricing, discounts, photos, videos, and more – all updating in real time between the Cloud ERP and the eCommerce store
• Dashboard integration that syncs sales information and actions directly from eCommerce platform to Acumatica
• Improved shipment tracking, refund processing, and buyer notifications

Retail business leaders will also be excited to learn about the new Acumatica Point of Sale (Acumatica POS) solution, which delivers the complete end-to-end omni-channel experience to customers online, in store, and on the phone.

Acumatica is the first ERP company to bring its retail users a fully native solution that includes:

• Real-time inventory availability
• Support for multiple locations
• Back-end warehouse management, such as barcoding
• Customer-specific pricing capabilities
• Advanced inventory management
• Customer management integration that can boost sales

Construction and Field Service Edition Enhancements

At Summit 2020, the Acumatica team announced the ability to track travel time directly from a mobile device. The latest updates to 2020 R2 make that earlier announcement seem like child’s play.

With all-new mobile functionality in the Construction and Field Service Editions, field service techs and construction workers can now:

• Track travel time for an entire crew
• Create and enter expense receipts from the field and link those expenses directly to appointments (this leverages the machine learning expense capture debuted at Summit 2020)
• Find and create purchase orders from the field for necessary parts or items
• Pause or resume work from the field while waiting for PO approvals or on breaks

Since everything in Acumatica Cloud ERP is in real time, actions completed from the field are instantly visible back at HQ and are ready for approvals. The latest Acumatica release also helps ensure accuracy of contract caps with retainage allocation enhancements.

Cross-Company Sales Enhancements

Cross-company transactions are now easier than ever before, with the new functionality announced in the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch event. With R2, users can:

• Provide a service to a related company, such as from one branch to another
• Sell goods to a related company
• Reinvoice bills to a related company
• Centralize account management

All of these transactions in Acumatica 2020 R2 ensure that AP invoicing is fast and easy, including automated invoice calculations. Companies can even charge markup and taxes in a cross-company transaction – all with audit-ready documents.

Workflow Configurations Enhancements

In 2020 R2, the Cloud ERP team has increased the functionality and user-friendliness of the workflow configuration tool they initially debuted at Summit 2020. The updated feature helps with:

• Better visibility for workflow steps, using colors and clear paths
• Simple click and edit functionality for workflows

AP Billing Enhancements with Machine Learning

Extending the robust power of their January 2020 machine learning expense capture tool that makes it possible to enter expenses just by taking a picture of a receipt, the ERP experts at Acumatica have now announced a new way to enter in AP invoices.

Significantly reducing manual data entry, this new feature from the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch event helps AP teams to:

• Send AP bill PDFs directly from email to Acumatica, using the Outlook plugin
• Use AI to automatically read and capture AP bills instantly, including all relevant data (with customizable data entry)
• Scan in paper AP bills for auto-capture and entry of relevant data

As you can imagine, this one feature may save hundreds of hours for companies that handle a large number of AP bills and are currently relying on manual data entry.

 

Electronic Banking

• • Automate your banking activity and streamline the process flow to stay current with all of your most important transactions
  • Securely connect to over 11,000 banking institutions with multi-factor authentication
  • Download realtime activity with automated smart matching
  • Intelligent creation of expense and disbursement transactions from downloaded activities
  • Anomaly detection

 

Advanced Expense Management

 

• • Automate expense receipt creation from credit card provider feeds to streamline credit card reconciliations and employee reimbursements
  • Mobile notifications for unreported corporate card transactions
  • Automatic expense receipt creation based on transactions
  • Intelligent Machine Learning (ML) enabled image recognition for expense receipt capture
  • Automated approval routing
  • Corporate credit card reconciliation processing

 

Want to Learn More About the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch? Ask SWK Technologies.

Acumatica presented breakout sessions at the Acumatica 2020 R2 Launch event for several of the new features. Feel free to ask the ERP experts at SWK Technologies about any of the over 70 enhancements to the cloud ERP, such as:

• Quality Management for the Manufacturing & Distribution Editions that tracks production outputs and moves products to market faster
• Finance Enhancements
• CRM Enhancements
• Distribution Enhancements
• Field Service Enhancements
• Manufacturing Enhancements
• And more…

Count on SWK Technologies to answer all your questions about Acumatica 2020 R2 (or anything else Acumatica related). We will have the right answers at the right time, so you can keep your business on the track to success.

Get in touch with SWK Technologies anytime to learn more about Acumatica.