Acumatica 2026 R1: Equipping Professional Services Businesses with Vital AI-Powered Features and Insights

According to The Business Research Company, the professional services market is expected to reach $8.5 billion in 2030. That’s a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.2%, thanks to what the research company calls “stable economic growth.”

This is good news for small and midsized professional services businesses using the right tool to operate in a digital-centric world. In this case, that tool is Acumatica’s comprehensive, AI-powered enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution with our fully integrated Professional Services Management application.

From project proposal to final delivery, our customizable and intuitive professional services software is designed to give growing firms complete control over, insight into, and optimization of every project they take on. With advanced project accounting, management, and resource planning features, these firms also have embedded CRM and AI that provides meaningful and actionable insights right at their fingertips.

Even better, our ERP software for professional services received innovative enhancements via our newest release, Acumatica 2026 R1. Let’s take a look at these exciting new or updated capabilities designed with the professional services industry’s unique needs in mind.

Acumatica 2026 R1: Professional Services Updates

In a 2026 R1 press release, Jon Pollock, Acumatica’s chief product officer, says to be successful, service-driven businesses need clear insight into people, projects, and profitability. Professional services 2026 R1 addresses this need with AI-enabled workflows, enhanced reporting and financial oversight, and deeper collaboration capabilities.

“When finance, project, and field service teams within an organization work from the same data,” Jon says, “they make better decisions, improve resource allocations, protect the company’s margins, and build a unified foundation for sustainable growth.”

The focus of a professional services business is squarely on billable hours. In 26R1, we introduced reporting capabilities to support this, especially for hourly-based project tracking.

For example, our Employee Utilization report now allows teams to track employee utilization out of the box by combining calendar availability, time entries, holidays, and absences to give a full picture of both project-specific and non-project work. It provides deeper insight into how time is being allocated across billable and non-billable activities, deepening their people management and resource allocation capabilities.

We also introduced a Project Revenue Analysis report and an Unbilled Project Revenue Aging report to help streamline the billing cycle. The aging report helps expose unbilled amounts so teams can stay ahead of billing delays and accelerate cash flow. The project revenue analysis report emulates the billing process without actually running it, allowing managers to analyze expected, billed, and unbilled revenue before generating invoices and comparing projected revenue against actual performance and remaining contract value.

When it comes to reporting, Acumatica eliminates extra steps like generating, reviewing, deleting, and regenerating documents. Now managers can see everything upfront and have better clarity before billing.

Additionally, 2026 R1 offers Flexible Time Card Periods that allow users to align with weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, or monthly payroll cycles and per-employee frequency settings and delivers enhanced mobile time tracking that empowers field teams to reduce administrative overhead and improve data accuracy by:

• Clocking in directly against project tasks.
• Managing time logs.
• Converting entries into billable activities.

Acumatica 2026 R1 and AI for Professional Services

As an AI-enabled product release, 2026 R1 is introducing professional services SMBs to intelligent innovations, such as AI Assistants, that can help them grow their businesses and maintain their competitiveness. We’re working closely with our Acumatica AI team to utilize Acumatica’s AI Studio to enable anomaly detection. For professional services, this could include anomalies in billable hours or project costs. It can also work with custom data queries.

AI Studio saves time and allows users to focus on more strategic work. There’s also an opportunity for AI to proactively identify issues—like incorrect expense entries—and suggest fixes before they become problems.

AI won’t replace experts, but it will allow you to focus more on meaningful tasks and improve your decision-making efficiency. Having more control over your projects through Acumatica 2026 R1’s enhanced workforce management and AI in professional services features—which includes the ability to detect unusual variances and to automatically tag documents by type—leads to better, more profitable outcomes, as it did for Hardline Engineering and Industrial Specialty Services USA LLC (ISS).

Acumatica Customer Supplies Superior Client Experiences with Help from Acumatica

Hardline Engineering is a client-focused, outcome-driven engineering and consulting firm based in Calgary, Alberta. It provides its customers with expert assistance in designing, drafting, and project management for power projects, including transmission, distribution, and substation design.

Founded in 2017 by former utility engineers to provide specialized expertise, Hardline Engineering utilizes Acumatica Professional Services to deliver on its promise of powerful solutions that go above and beyond.

By leveraging Acumatica’s project-based accounting, time and expense tracking capabilities, Hardline Engineering streamlined its operations and improved the processes’ visibility, and made the job accountability more transparent.

Like Hardline Engineering, ISS tapped Acumatica to support rapid growth.

ISS provides technical maintenance, repair services, and solutions to the refining, petrochemical, gas, power, pulp and paper, and other markets. With Acumatica’s easy-to-use, scalable, and affordable solution, ISS is able to focus on servicing clients efficiently. ISS now also enjoys full visibility into its high volume, short term operations, allowing the team to track profitability at a granular level.

“Seeing billable time and how much we pay our field services team is one of the largest management tools we have, and we knew we would be able to get that level of detail from Acumatica,” says James Craig, CEO.

Customer Input Drives Acumatica Innovation

Customer success stories like these are the result of our passion for constantly innovating, and these non-stop innovation efforts are fueled by customer input. Everything we build is based on their feedback, with features found in 2026 R1 coming directly from customer requests and votes.

We intentionally allocate a meaningful portion of development to listening to customers and responding to their needs.

Those needs are changing right along with our evolving marketplace. AI-driven automation is a major trend, but it’s really about improving workflows and reducing manual work. The next phase is rethinking these workflows entirely by not just improving them but replacing outdated processes with better ones—and Acumatica 2026 R1 does just that with our new streamlined workflow from entering time to billing it, which is supported by detailed reporting.

We’re also thrilled to see Acumatica customers using our latest enhancements to:

• Leverage billing rates per project.
• Track costs alongside revenue.
• Track time extensively.
• Capture expenses (e.g., employees can take a photo, and the information from the photo flows directly into budgets and invoices).

Technology is evolving quickly, and Acumatica is going all in to deliver a thoughtful, AI-enabled, and cloud-based ERP solution that will help professional services businesses improve financial insight, experience less timekeeping friction, enjoy more accurate project costing, and improve operational control for better—and more profitable—client outcomes.

To learn more about Acumatica 2026 R1 and about Acumatica’s professional services solution, contact our experts with any questions and to schedule a demonstration. You can also watch our online webinar to discover Acumatica’s deliberate and secure AI-first strategy and check out our other Acumatica 2026 R1 blog posts for more details:

• Acumatica 2026 R1: Latest Acumatica AI-Enabled Product Release Delivers Intelligence That Works For You
• Acumatica 2026 R1 Empowers SMBs with AI Intelligence That Drives Results
• How Acumatica 2026 R1 Fuels SMB Success with Real-Time Visibility and Insights
• Acumatica 2026 R1 Delivers Industry-Specific Value Today for Growing Businesses