The first of two semiannual major updates for Acumatica 2024, R1 (Release One), rolled out towards the end of the first financial Quarter of the year. This release contains major features upgrades for Acumatica Cloud ERP, including for its core accounting package, CRM system, developer tools, third-party integration connectors and vertical suite solutions. These enhancements improve or add functionality for dozens of workflows and tasks within the core platform, giving users significantly more flexibility and options when managing items in bookkeeping, payroll, projects, support cases, production or distribution scheduling, Amazon product listings and fulfillment, state sales tax nexus identification, software customizations, accounts payable or receivable, customer returns, and a long list of many, many more additions in a long list of workflow upgrades.
Here is a comprehensive breakdown of all of the updates Acumatica 2024 R1 adds for each individual application and industry Edition bundle, as well as the xRP platform for developers:
Acumatica Financial Management and Payroll Modules
Acumatica Financial Management is the core application of the ERP, powering the accounting features of every module, including Acumatica Payroll. Both programs received multiples updates with the first major release of the year which mostly centered around improving transactional automation and visibility, along with a handful of more esoteric – but vital – individual workflow upgrades.
- Time Off Management: Automate vacation or sick time tracking with new features such as banding rules, anniversary date resets, and simplified adjustments. Enable administrators to manage paid time off (PTO) during employee probation and adjust for future plan changes.
- Acumatica POS Payments: With Acumatica Payments, you can now process POS transactions using credit card readers directly within Acumatica instead of requiring a third-party application.
- Financial Transaction Controls: Enforce optional or required approval and rejection reasons for financial transactions, such as invoices, bills, adjustments, memos, and payments.
- Cash Purchase Returns: Simplify returns on cash purchases by generating cash return transactions included in bank deposits.
- Unified Credit Card Accounts: Consolidate multiple employee corporate credit/debit card transactions into one account.
- Canadian Transaction Formats: Acumatica 2024 R1 expands transaction capabilities for Canada by allowing you to easily configure or customize export payment file formats for the Royal Bank of Canada and other Canadian financial institutions.
- Avalara Sales Tax Integration: Comply with sales tax nexus laws with Exemption Certificate Management from Avalara to collect and manage customer exemption certificates for healthcare providers, government organizations, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and qualifying manufacturing product sales.
Acumatica CRM Module
Acumatica Customer Management is a built-in CRM (customer relationship management) application that connects seamlessly with your financial and operational data in your ERP. Updates to this module in the Q1 2024 release added features for a variety of use cases, focused mainly on expanding visibility into customer support and service items along with a couple of new automations.
- Case Management: The Acumatica CRM now features advanced case commitment tracking and a flexible workflow for case closure.
- Project Detail Visibility: Provide a 360-degree view of project details by automatically updating projects with associated activities that are automatically updated with related tasks.
- Email Template Customization: Tailor email templates by branch for use with your customer, project, service management or subcontract communications.
- RMA Notifications: Notify support specialists when return merchandise authorizations (RMAs) related to open support cases are closed.
Acumatica xRP Platform
The Acumatica xRP Platform is the architectural framework behind the ERP, providing a flexible yet robust foundation behind the core application and all of its components – including native tools, connectors and customizations built from scratch within the system. It was designed using standardized coding and programming languages to ensure easy modification, integration and scalability. The recent updates expand on this approach with new tools for developers and system administrators to refine workflows directly in the software.
- Generic Inquiry Enhancements: Calculate ratios and improve reporting flexibility by using Generic Inquiry results at input to other inquires.
- No-code Workflows: Acumatica 2024 R1 adds new sequential actions that can be set to trigger independent of specific conditions for no-code workflow creation.
- Business Events Conditions: Create actions and notifications based on triggers and formula-based conditions for business events entered.
- Mobile UI: New image thumbnail support has been added for lists on the Acumatica mobile app user interface (UI).
- Multi-language Support: Users can access reports in multiple languages via REST APIs.
- Security Customization: Define security access permissions for new system objects as part of the object publication process.
Acumatica Manufacturing Module
The Acumatica Manufacturing Edition is built on the Manufacturing Management module, which comes equipped with features for materials and resource tracking, cost estimation, production scheduling, product configuration, engineering controls and approvals, and more. Acumatica 2024 R1 updates this functionality in several areas, particularly adding operational improvements and better visibility into planning activities along with increased automation and integration for connected workflows.
- Material Demand Planning: Forecast optional stock and non-stock kit components as part of material demand planning.
- Production Reporting: Provide manufacturing workers the flexibility to report production operations when they are run in parallel.
- MRP Optimization: Use ‘planning horizons’ to define time-constrained data for inclusion in material requirements planning (MRP) calculations.
- DRP Configuration: Configure MRP and DRP (Distribution Requirements Planning) to include or exclude sales order types to improve planning by excluding returns and other types of orders from inventory planning calculations.
Acumatica Construction Edition and Projecting Accounting Module
The Acumatica Construction Edition features some overlapping functionality with the Acumatica Field Service Edition, but is more tailored for the construction project management needs of general contractors and subcontractors involved in commercial real estate, residential real estate, land development and more. The suite includes the Acumatica Project Accounting module, which tracks transactions, costs, budgeting and more related to individual projects across the ERP, including when integrated with Procore. All of these solutions received enhancements with the Acumatica 2024 R1 update that relate to project transaction and budgeting workflows, and add new automation rules for invoicing, receipts and other documentation.
- AP Invoicing: Access accounts payable (AP) cost transactions related to progress billing lines from a new pro forma invoice side panel.
- Negative Expense Receipts: Users can enter and process negative expense receipts to make a full or partial refund to the corporate credit card for GL (general ledger) account reconciliation.
- AR Corrections: Leverage a streamlined workflow for previously closed and released accounts receivable (AR) documents to handle pro forma invoice corrections, and use one-click initiation to correct invoices created from service documents.
- Automated Budget Updates: Project budget rules no longer depend on the transaction source and GL account type, and update automatically with each transaction.
Acumatica Distribution Edition
The Acumatica Distribution Edition bundles inventory and warehouse management systems (WMS) with additional features for shipping, order management, requisitions and more. One of the biggest changes with the new semiannual update is the introduction of the Distribution Requirements Planning module, which is based on the Material Requirements Planning in the Acumatica Manufacturing Management application and serves a similar function for stock level tracking and forecasting. Other upgrades include streamlined documentation and approval workflows as well as improvements to the Acumatica WMS and shipping integrations.
- DRP Module: The new DRP application allows for time-phased purchase orders, kit assembly, and warehouse transfer recommendations, and also includes exception messages for distributed items, kits, and kit components.
- Return Material Authorization: Expedite RMA processes with improved document searches using invoice and line details such as sales order type and number, inventory ID, lot or serial number, and order dates.
- Warehouse Management: Acumatica WMS (warehouse management system) now includes bidirectional picking and aggregated quantities for pick lines.
- Document Approval Automation: Configure unique document approval workflows for invoices, credit memos, debit memos, cash sales, and cash returns.
- Pacejet Shipping Integration: Streamline small parcel and LTL (Less than Truckload) shipment processing workflows and configure packing and shipping scenarios with the enhanced integration for Acumatica and Pacejet, providing transparency for shipment data, including hazardous materials, PRO bill number, delivery instructions, accessorial definitions, non-standard containers, serialized shipping container codes (SSCC), and other packaging and shipment information directly in your ERP with no need for separate customization.
Acumatica Retail-Commerce Edition and eCommerce Connectors
The Acumatica Retail-Commerce Edition combines several bundled ERP functions – from financial management to inventory and order tracking – with a Commerce Connector that integrates with market-leading eCommerce solutions such as Amazon, BigCommerce and Shopify to pass data seamlessly between each system. The semiannual update for 2024 improves upon these synchronizations for areas such as product listings, point-of-sale and transactional workflows.
- Amazon Integration: The Acumatica integration with Amazon synchronizes data for order fulfillment, product availability, Amazon.com fees, payments, and taxes.
- Shopify POS Integration: 2024 R1 adds improvements for directly importing exchanges to Acumatica from a Shopify POS order for the same product at the same or different price, or for another product at the same or different price.
- Commerce Connector: Use the bidirectional sync to import products from Shopify and BigCommerce stores to Acumatica through the Commerce connector.
Learn More About 2024 R1 with the Acumatica Partner of the Year
The Acumatica 2024 R1 update brings a long list of major changes for the cloud ERP, but SWK Technologies is here to help you navigate through the technical complexities and ensure you get the most out of your enterprise software. As a 4-time Acumatica Partner of the Year – awarded most recently for 2024 – the SWK team of Acumatica consultants will provide you with the expertise, knowledge and guidance you need to maximize your ROI on your implementation.
Contact SWK here to learn more about Acumatica 2024 R1 and get started on tailoring your upgrade to the next version, or prepare to migrate from your legacy system to a state of the art cloud ERP.