Item: Acumatica
Rating: 8
Author: Justin Denton

Overall Satisfaction with Acumatica

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Acumatica for accounting including payroll and project accounting. It helps us to track costs associated with construction projects as well as allowing us to report our certified payroll for government contracts.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Processes are intuitive and easy to use.
I appreciate the low code/no code functionality.

Cons

The native reporting leaves a lot to be desired. From basic construction reports to even standard financial reports. The P&L out of the box was way too summarized. Seems like you should have the ability to choose between detailed and summarized without having to build your own ARM report.
The fact that the cost projection by date screen no longer shows the description of the cost codes has been particularly challenging for our project managers and has made their job much more difficult.

Return on Investment

Our implementation was rough and we are just now after one year finally getting the functionality we had in our old ERP and are just starting to implement some efficiencies.

AI Capabilities

We are currently running 25R1 so we haven't yet leveraged these capabilities.

Acumatica Serving Customers

With the lack of reporting, it has been difficult to serve our internal customers.

Industry-Specific Use

The ability to bill our clients using the AIA pay applications as well as the ability to hold retainage in both AP and AR applications is helpful, but we had that functionality in our previous ERP.

Key Insights

Do you think Acumatica delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Acumatica's feature set?

Did Acumatica live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Acumatica go as expected?

Would you buy Acumatica again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Procore

Likelihood to Recommend

The data entry is easy to use and intuitive even in situations where you don't perform a regular task on a regular basis. It is also nice to be able to navigate from an AP screen to a vendor profile without having to navigate to the menu.

Acumatica Feature Ratings

Using Acumatica

Users and Roles

17 - Accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, GL accounting, construction (project coordinators, project managers), and senior leadership. There are an additional 35 employees that access their pay stubs using Acumatica.

Support Headcount Required

2 - There are really only two people in-house that support Acumatica daily: the Controller (me) and the Director of Internal Operations. The Director of Internal Operations primarily assists employees using the construction module (running reports, building cost projections, and building project budgets). I also help with these areas but also assist the accounting department with issues as they arise. Our biggest struggle has been with reports and getting the information out of the system. In my previous job, I built BI reports. That experience has helped me to change and build reports in Acumatica. It has not been easy as we have learned through a lot of trial and error.

Business Processes Supported

Project accounting
Accounts payable
Accounts receivable
Payroll
Financial transparency

Innovative Uses

Building business events to automate notifications.
Ability to build (with some assistance from our VAR) some robust construction reports.

Future Planned Uses

Mobile app
Uploading a budget for comparison purposes on the P&L
Workflows

Likelihood to Renew

I believe Acumatica is the right system for our organization. Our implementation was rough, but now that we are a year in, we are finally reaping the benefits of the system and its low-code/no-code functionality. Not to mention, we have invested so much time and effort into setting up the system, it would be disappointing to have to start over with a new system.

Evaluating Acumatica and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We came to Acumatica from ProContractor. Although ProContactor offered many reports right out of the box, there was information we still needed. It was difficult if not impossible to change the reports the way we needed them without support. Customizing reports through their support was expensive. They were getting ready to sunset the version we were using, and their support was not very responsive.

Key Differentiators

Cloud Solutions
Ease of Use

We liked that the processes in Acumatica were intuitive and easy to follow. We also needed a system that would facilitate certified payroll reporting. We found that other systems we were looking at did not provide this ability out of the box and required an expensive additional module to get this functionality. We also really liked having the app as an option for employees to enter time and expenses from their devices out in the field.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would have looked more closely at the reports that were available out of the box. We did not find out until after go-live that we were missing a lot of the reports we depend on to run our business. This would have prepared us for what we needed to do to get what we needed at go live.

Acumatica Implementation

Implementation Rating

There seemed to be a disconnect between the design phase and the build phase. When we got into the training phase, we were having to do a lot of design and build work. Trainings were frequently cut short because things weren't working as intended or they had been set up incorrectly.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Third-party professional services

We worked with CLA for our implementation.

Implementation Phases

Yes - Discovery, design, build, training, and implementation.

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - After having endured many software conversions over the course of my career, I prepped my team and was honest that the implementation would be a "painful" process. We had regular meetings discussing what the changes would be and how some of the processes were going to different. With the added abilities of Acumatica, we decided to first start with base functionality that we had previously and then roll out new functionality in phases. What we were not prepared for was the difficulty we had getting the information out of the system after go-live. Slow response times from our VAR in getting what we needed led to another member of our team and myself having to spend long hours trying to figure out how to use Report Designer on our own. Being rookies, we were not always successful building reports which led to a lot of frustration among our ownership team.

Implementation Issues

Disconnect between the Design and Build phases
The lack of adequate reporting out of the box
Being misguided during the training which led to delays and the construction module being set up incorrectly.

Acumatica Support

Support Rating

The majority of the support we have received has been from our VAR. There are a few people that have been extremely helpful, but they seem to be spread very thin, so we have gone for lengths of time without getting the help we need. Things seem to be getting better, but this has been a struggle.

Acumatica Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
None	None

Premium Support

No, we were not aware that this was an option.

Exceptional Examples of Acumatica Support

At Summit, we inquired about an issue that came about when we upgraded to 25R1. We had discussed the issue with our VAR previously, but when we addressed it with Acumatica support, they agreed that it was an issue and took charge right away. We are still waiting for resolution, but we were impressed that they got to work on the issue so quickly.

Using Acumatica

Usability

The processes are very intuitive and easy to use. Whether you are entering AP bills, timecards for payroll, or AR invoices, the processes are similar and easy to use. The drill-down capability is also a huge plus as you can easily toggle between different modules without having to leave the screen you are in and navigating through a menu to get the information you need. We found that the standard reports out of the box are lacking. Our implementation did not go so well and when we were finally ready to run financial reports, it was both disappointing and frustrating to discover that the P&L was highly summarized and to get a detailed report required having to do a lot of formatting myself. I was able to figure it out on my own, but when our financials were already delayed getting published, I did not really have the time to spend trying to figure out how to build my own P&L.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	Requires technical support Lots to learn