Acumatica kicked off its 2020 R2 Virtual Launch event with Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill introducing us to the release from Seattle’s Museum of Flight!

Roskill went on to remind us of the Acumatica Customer Bill of Rights, which has served as a guidepost for Acumatica during the COVID-19 pandemic. This Bill of Rights has served as a reminder that all new features must have a clear purpose. Roskill emphasized that they should not develop technology for technology’s sake and that everything new in Acumatica is built for real-world scenarios.

Acumatica has boosted all editions with feature updates. So, without further ado, here are the brand-new features in the Acumatica R2 launch:

New Usability Features In The CRM Module

Acumatica Demo experts Doug Johnson and Jessica Gadbois showcased some excellent usability improvements to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Module.

• If an address is missing in a lead entry, you can use the new Address Lookup feature to find it. Just hit View on Map, and use Address Lookup to find and add the address for you from a dropdown map and menu:
• The new “Recent Records” feature is useful for when you are interrupted—clicking this button launches all recently viewed pages, allowing you to resume precisely where you left off, in just two clicks. 
• Acumatica’s notifications engine now contains new “Business Events” options. By creating a new Business Event, you can consolidate emails, texts, and push notifications to account holders. Once the event triggers, your defined notifications will alert the account holder. 
• It’s small but essential: dashboards automatically refresh now, so you don’t have to click it manually. This is great for business environments such as kiosks, sales floors, or warehouses, an enhancement remarked upon by the folks at Titan: 
• Dashboards are now much more comfortable to generate, using the “Generic Inquiry” tool. Using generic inquiry, you can select the data tables you want to add to your dashboard. Once you choose a table, the “Add Related Table” button opens a list of fields that may be important to you. 
  For example, let’s say you’re starting with a table containing recurring transactions (AR-Recurring Transactions). You may want to view the shipping schedule of certain products and the users handling the shipping, so you select related data fields breaking down both of these items: 

The Generic Inquiry tool will automatically establish these relationships in the system, and the data will show up on your dashboard. 
One more new feature: you can preview the inquiries as you’re working on them, using the spyglass icon.

New Features In Acumatica Commerce Edition

• Metadata is now readily available within the Commerce Edition interface. You will be able to see and download any attached files to product listings. Changes you make to meta keywords, descriptions, pictures, and even media URLs automatically sync with the rest of your Acumatica instance. 
• There is now a new status for orders called “Awaiting Payment.” The status is triggered when the buyer does not hit your designated payment terms. For example, you can create a rule that orders will not ship until at least 50% of the total cost has been paid. 
  • This feature is for larger orders that merchants take partly on credit, which usually occurs in B2B environments.

Accounts Payable Automation (AP Automation)

• Using the Acumatica + Microsoft Outlook email plugin, you can select bills, leads, contacts, or any other important emails, then create them in Acumatica directly from your Outlook instance. For example, let’s take a PDF bill from your email. You can create AP bills out of these by submitting the documents directly to Acumatica’s artificial intelligence engine:
• • The AI engine will then recognize the PDF and fill in the fields in your associated AP bill. Now that it’s submitted, the document is viewable in Acumatica. This feature cuts out a ton of manual entry time with the new automation.
  • Users can now scan paper bills into PDF format, which can then be submitted to the Acumatica AI to create AP bills.
  Wrap-UpAcumatica had to make some significant adjustments as a company due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and execs questioned whether they’d be able even to launch 2020 R2. Luckily, Acumatica’s engineers and developers stepped up, collaborated remotely, and succeeded in getting it done. There is some incredible technology here that truly demonstrates Acumatica’s ethos of “No technology just for technology’s sake.” If you would like more information on setting up your own Acumatica instance, contact Kensium for a free consultation to see if this ERP is right for you.