Acumatica offers a variety of editions specific to the needs of their customers. These editions include Construction, Distribution, Retail, Manufacturing, and General Business. Acumatica also announced they would release a new Professional Services edition as part of the 2024 R2 later this month.
This is the second in a mini-series regarding product enhancements to the various Acumatica editions originating from the 2024 R2 release. Whether you are a residential contractor, a commercial contractor, or a subcontractor serving one or both of the major construction enterprises, Acumatica’s Contractor Edition can keep all your projects on track, manage your workflows, plan your materials, staffing, and supplies, and drive profitability that will grow your business.
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The Contractor Edition is designed to meet the needs of all four major roles of any construction business: Job Site Operations, Job Site Support Operations, Back-office Operations, and Construction Management (Executives).
Release 2024 R2 included numerous enhancements driven by customer requests. Some key items included in this release are substantiated billing enhancements, additional project quote statuses, and improved subcontract import workflow.
Substantiated Billing Enhancements
Typically, when a contractor bills their customer, the customer wants proof of costs being billed. That means contractors must provide supporting documentation along with the customer’s Invoice. Acumatica provides various ‘substantiated billing’ reports showing supporting documents and cost breakdowns.
As part of Acumatica’s 2024 R2 release, these substantiated billing reports have been enhanced to provide filtering and selection capabilities to match the proof of costs with invoiced items on a line-item invoice basis.
Using the Transaction Side Panel of a ProForma Invoice, a user can link cost transactions from various sources to any selected line on the Invoice or the Invoice as a whole.
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The Acumatica Substantiated Billing report now allows users to select related cost transactions for inclusion within the report by ProForma Invoice and Date Range (or a combination thereof). It’s now possible to even include ‘non-billable’ transactions. As a result, the report layout has been enhanced to reflect the list of cost transactions linked to specific pro forma invoices for a given date (as shown below).
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Additional Project Quote Statuses
As part of the project workflow, using project statuses with associated comments makes it easier to manage the lifecycle of a project from quote to award.
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Acumatica added several new statuses to improve metrics and project workflow management, including “Accepted by Customer,” “Declined by Customer,” and “Approved” (in place of “Prepared”).
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Pro Forma Invoices
As part of the Acumatica 2024 R2 update, users can now enter and adjust pro forma invoices independently of the established billing schedule and easily enter ad hoc expenses that initially were not planned in the project budget.
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When creating a Pro Forma Invoice from the forms toolbar, a user selects the project to which the Invoice is related and then adds the appropriate progress billing lines (as shown below).
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If an existing Pro Forma Invoice exists, users can enter a progress billing line that doesn’t even yet exist in the project revenue budget.
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Even when entering this data manually, if the project has a budget specified, Acumatica will search the existing budget for any corresponding lines to the entered data and display the default values from the project budget when found.
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Acumatica has given users ‘drag and drop’ functionality to rearrange lines in their Pro Forma Invoices before printing.
Acumatica links Functions together
We talked earlier about Substantiated Billing, and we just finished a look at some of the Pro Forma Invoice enhancements. Let’s look at an example of how Acumatica links functions together. As part of 2024 R2, Acumatica has made it easier to verify expenses before they are invoiced to the customer. Employee information from expense claims can show up right on the Pro Forma invoice line when the Invoice is being prepared to ensure it’s part of the substantiated billing information the customer ultimately receives.
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These are all just a few of the hundreds of upgrades within Acumatica's 2024 R2 release; for more information, head to the Acumatica website.
Disclosures:
Acumatica, as used herein, refers to one or more registered trademarks of Acumatica, Inc., a privately held, multi-national corporation headquartered in Kirkland, WA (USA). Since 2019, Acumatica has been held by the private equity firm EQT of Stockholm, Stockholms Lan, Sweden.
Acumatica Cloud ERP is a comprehensive business management solution that was born in the cloud and built for more connected, collaborative ways of working. Designed explicitly to enable small and mid-market companies to thrive in today’s digital economy, Acumatica’s flexible solution, customer-friendly business practices, and industry-specific functionality help growing businesses adapt to fast-moving markets and take control of their future.
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