This spring release is the scheduled update to Acumatica 2017 R2 released in Fall 2017. The release consists of four parts:
- General Availability of 2018 R1
- General Availability of the Acumatica Construction Edition
- Announcement of the Acumatica Distribution Edition
- Business Intelligence with Reporting, Dashboards and Analytics
Highlights of Application and Platform Enhancements in the Acumatica 2018 R1 Release
The documentation Portal, at help.acumatica.com, has been updated with the current 2018 R1 documentation, including Release Notes.
Usability
Stay proactive with enhanced notification triggers. Manage account activity by sending email notifications whenever data is updated, or any set of pre-defined conditions are met.
Easy access to essential data with improved generic inquiries. Generic inquiries in Acumatica offer an easy way to extract the specific data you need, filter it, and present it to reporting functions for analysis. Acumatica has made it easier to create, filter, and display generic inquiries.
Improve usability of mobile application dashboards. Acumatica now makes it easy to configure and display any dashboard element within your mobile applications.
Financials
Distinguish companies from branches. Acumatica lets you define separate legal entities with independent balance sheets and separate tax reporting requirements. Track financials for organizations and subsidiaries requiring inter-company accounting, with the ability to distinguish companies from branches and departments.
Divide transactions to various accounts or branches during reclassification. Acumatica now allows you to split transaction amounts to transfer portions to other accounts, subaccounts, or branches.
CRM
Flexible opportunity quote tracking. Acumatica lets users create multiple quotes for a single opportunity. Once the customer accepts an offer, a sales order and invoice can be created based on the quote.
Enhanced Salesforce integration. Users can choose to export the following entities to Salesforce by predefined scenarios: Leads, contacts, business accounts, opportunities, stock and non-stock items, and sales prices.
Project Accounting
New change order functionality
Improve project management by controlling changes to the project scope, including customer and internal requests. Create a change order with all the documentation, including the revenue budget, cost budget, commitments, and class. Define your workflows and approval processes, and release change orders with full business intelligence visibility and audit trail control.
Progress billing and pro forma invoices improved
Both progress billing and pro forma invoices were introduced in 2017R2, and in this release both have been enhanced to support time and material, tasks, cost codes, and retainage for the construction industry.
Field Service
Standardized Service Contract Billing
Define the services that will be covered in the billing period with the number of appointments or hours, the standard fees, and the overage prices. At the end of each defined billing period, the customer will receive an invoice that includes the covered amount plus the overage amount.
Real-time GPS tracking of vehicles,
Aids in keeping track of the work being performed by staff using the location capabilities of mobile devices to accurately track the GPS location on Bing Maps in real time. From that, a dispatcher can schedule the closest available vehicle for high priority service calls.
Platform
Monitor resource utilization and warnings. Acumatica is licensed by resource levels, not by user counts. Resource levels range from small to large (XS to 5XL+) and control parameters influencing system performance, such as database space allocated for Acumatica ERP data, number of transactions, and number of requests per hour for the web services API. Exceeding any of these limits indicates the owner should consider a higher resource level. Administrators are now able to:
- View resource limits associated with their license
- Display resource violation warnings and drill down for detail
- Monitor current resource utilization
View a short video by Ali Jani from Summit 2018 summarizing the 2018 R1 highlights: https://acumatica.wistia.com/medias/ecb3kiepsd