Acumatica’s latest release, Acumatica 2019 R1 is all set to give a huge boost to the construction industry. The usability and functionality will surely benefit their project teams in various ways. Acumatica builds new construction functions and features into its software, using the feedback and advice of customers and partners.
In the Acumatica 2019 R1 release, Acumatica Construction Edition includes numerous enhancements and new features across Financials, Project Accounting, and Project Management, to meet the demands of the project teams.
Additional enhancements like Commitment Inquiry filter, Project Budget Control Warnings, and a new Pay when Paid report are some added benefits that reflects how dedicated Acumatica is to the needs of construction contractors.
Acumatica Construction Edition Feature Details
Given below are the new features and enhancements that make Acumatica Construction Edition more intuitive and easier to use.
New features that Acumatica 2019 R1 brings to Acumatica Construction Edition are:
- Drawing Logs:
Drawing Logs can be used by the project teams to store drawings and sketches required for the project. Team members can also create a revision and attach the updated drawing(s).
- Project Budget Forecast:
This feature allows project teams to enter and modify project budget forecasts as well as compare these forecasts with the actual project costs and revenue for each financial period. There is provision for multiple budget forecast revisions. Users can distribute amounts and quantities of the project budget among the selected range of financial periods in forecast revisions. Generic inquiries and pivot tables can also be created using this feature.
- Pay When Paid:
This feature reports the paid amount including retainage, total balance, original retainage, and unreleased retainage up to the specified financial period for invoices and retainage invoices. However, these reports do not consider paid amounts after the specified financial period. Users can compare what was paid by the customer (AR Docs by project with paid amount) to what they owe their subcontractors/suppliers (AP Docs by project with paid amount) when selecting AP Bills to pay.
General Features for the Acumatica Cloud ERP Community
The General R1 release provides the following additional features that can be immensely beneficial to contractors and to the entire Acumatica community.
Platform Usability
- Highlights of results in Inquiries provides visual clues on rows or columns of a generic inquiry based on customized conditions that have been introduced. Based on the alerts required, the system can highlight various elements of a generic inquiry based on alerts required whenever necessary.
- Side Panel displays the details of a row on an inquiry screen. In 2019 R1, significant improvements have been made to the Side Panel UI for improved usability.
- Improved search using Machine Learning (ML) where inquiries made in the HELP menu inform the system what was useful and how to improve its recommendations over time.
- Custom color gives the company the ability to personalize the primary color of the company’s user interface and create its unique identity.
- Multifactor authentication provides enhanced security where a user is granted access only after providing additional evidence of authentication in addition to the user credentials.
- Outlook add-in provides the ability to create RFIs and Project Issues without leaving Microsoft Outlook thus eliminating the need to copy/paste and reduces data entry errors.Financial Management
- Tax improvements enhance the integration with tax engines, including overrides for shipping address on AR and SO invoices and pro forma invoice screens to third-party tax providers, such as Avalara.
- Credit Card Processing improvements leverages the updated Authorize.Net plug-in for better PCI compliance; tokenizing credit cards allows greater security for credit card payments.
- Location tracking uses the mobile device of service personnel to locate and record the GPS location of the device.
- One-click invoicing enables the easy closing of an order, accounting for inventory, and generating of an invoice from a service order or an appointment.