Acumatica Cash Management

This blog is taken from the notes that our senior consultant made during his certification training for Acumatica and focuses on the Financial Management Features.

 

Throughout the training our senior consultant made comparisons to other Mid-Range ERP (MERP) Systems so that we could see where Acumatica really is a step above the rest.

 

“Acumatica has some great features and improvements over what other MERP Systems offer.”

Acumatica Cloud ERP - Cash Management.

Batch Transactions – I’ve seen this in other systems, often hidden away though. Depending on how your bank shows your transactions on your statement, you might want to roll up transactions into one single transaction to make reconciliation easier. Acumatica helps you prepare a deposit slip for example, grouping multiple AR receipts and posting to your bank account with one reference.

Payment Reclassification - When going through the bank statement, you could find random receipts/payments on there. With Acumatica you can enter them into the system against a holding account so they are at least logged. Then once you've investigated them you can reclassify them and assign them to a customer/vendor and Acumatica will create the AR/AP documents for you automatically and move the balance from the holding account to your bank account. Alternatively you can link it to an AR/AP entry if it's already there and you missed it first time round. Compare this to the paper method of highlighting bank statements and then hopefully remembering to investigate it, rather than use it as a psychedelic coaster! By having it in the system it's logged for someone to do something with. I really like this!

Bank Statement Import - File formats supported are OFX and Excel, the latter doesn’t use systemised templates so it needs to be configured each time you import. If you have any other formats, you can use the integration manager to bring these in. Hopefully as the partner base expands, more templates will be developed and it can catch up to other products in the market. That said, once you have your statement imported, it's a really cool tool which I think will lead the market very quickly. It's definitely friendlier than other tools I’ve used. The AutoMatch feature is incredibly configurable and you can create transactions (e.g. bank charges) directly from this screen too.

Bank Reconciliation – This is pretty standard. But that’s a good thing! A nice feature is the ability to void out previous reconciliations and do them again - and easily. I’ve not come across this before in other MERP’s I’ve used.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with v4.0. It’s clear that the developers are listening to their user base and giving them the features they really want rather than what they think they should have. The best part is that it doesn’t end here. I recently attended a reveal of the features due in v4.1 in August. They are amazing. I can’t believe they’ve achieved so much in 6 months. Stay tuned for more on this!

 

Acumatica Accounts Payable

This blog is taken from the notes that our senior consultant made during his certification training for Acumatica and focuses on the Financial Management Features.

 

Throughout the training our senior consultant made comparisons to other Mid-Range ERP (MERP) Systems so that we could see where Acumatica really is a step above the rest.

 

“Acumatica has some great features and improvements over what other MERP Systems offer.”

 

Acumatica Cloud ERP – Accounts Payable

Built-in EFT Export Capabilities – out of the box Acumatica has one basic bank format but thanks to the included integration manager we can configure many more bank file formats really easily, no need for any additional software to be purchased to handle this.

Corporate Credit Card Processing – if you’ve ever experienced the pain of reconciling credit cards issued to staff then this feature is for you! It’s more of a pre-designed walkthrough than a feature of the system but it’s very nicely handled here.

Vendor Refunds – Again, this is another complaint of other MERPs. Why do they have to make it so difficult to receive money back from a supplier? In Acumatica, all you have to do is raise the debit memo and create a payment using the Vendor Refund type. Then you can reconcile it in your bank. Easy!

Payment Lead Times – Royal Mail let you down again by not delivering on time leaving you to explain why you haven’t paid an invoice? Acumatica allows you to create cheques days in advance of the actual document due date allowing you plenty of time to get them posted out to suppliers.

Advanced Vendor Discount Processing – Not sure if paying an invoice in an earlier payment run will give you that discount you agreed? Acumatica allows you to select all invoices that will qualify for the discount if paid in the next few days. I wonder if it also prints out the apology letter to your supplier!

 

Acumatica Accounts Receivable

This blog is taken from the notes that our senior consultant made during his certification training for Acumatica and focuses on the Financial Management Features.

 

Throughout the training our senior consultant made comparisons to other Mid-Range ERP (MERP) Systems so that we could see where Acumatica really is a step above the rest.

 

“Acumatica has some great features and improvements over what other MERP Systems offer.”

 

Acumatica Cloud ERP – Accounts Receivable

Customer Credit Limits – Again, better than other MERPs. You have the traditional credit limit amount setting but Acumatica also has an additional level for a warning or buffer for any transaction that would take the account over this base amount. Acumatica also has a couple of ways of looking at due dates and calculating the limit on an in time balance instead. This works across modules too. Many other MERPs only look at posted AR transactions for this.

Credit Card Processing - This has the potential to be a brilliant module and looks very powerful. It's currently only linked to one provider in the US but if they expand this for other markets the service will be really useful.

Direct Write Off When Paying Customer Invoices - Similar to other MERPs but less clunky. You can just write off an amount when entering the receipt but you don't need to care which GL account it goes to. You can do write offs with that level of control too, but it's nice that for basic transactions you can set defaults and not worry about it! I’ve seen too many instances of write offs being done wrong as basic users get access to choose the GL account (eek!).

Overdue Charges - Acumatica allows you to raise new invoices with specific charges or use a percentage and a minimum charge. And you can build up multiple charges too if the bad debts persist.

Statement Cycles – This is like most other MERPs but the mail out function and general control over whether you send something out is better. Reprinting is nicely handled here as well.