The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Dear Clients,

Humans are visual creatures, so dashboards are a quick way to mentally digest information. Even a quick glance at this pie chart of AR Aging enlightens you to the good, the bad and the ugly on this important business metric. And, yes, it was hard work with my meager graphics skills to add “squinty eyes” to those pie slices!

A dashboard is a collection of graphical data representations of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), usually on one screen and formatted to provide maximum information in their presentation.

Dashboards can be implemented for entire companies, or departments, warehouses, teams, or processes, and are probably the single most impactful feature we ever implement for clients—providing succinct ACTIONABLE information at your fingertips.

What makes a good dashboard?

• Effective data visualization: Options range from simple colored buttons akin to a “check engine light,” to pie charts as above, to line and bar charts, to more elaborate graphics such as bubble charts, heat maps, and scatter plots. Different data lend themselves more naturally to different graphics and color selections, you want the best combination for the data set.
• Focus: Dashboards can provide a business-wide focus for senior management, or be more tightly constrained to specific functional areas like sales, receivables, inventory, or payables.
• Timeliness: Data should be real-time, or at least automatically updated on a frequent basis without manual processes, so you have current information displayed.
• Drill-down ability: It’s frustrating when you get a “Check Engine” light and you don’t know why, so you need an easy ability to drill down on the high-level indicators to see the source data.
• Filters: You often want to filter a specific indicator to display only a subset of the data, so it should be easy to do that directly from the dashboard.

In the AccountMate world, the data is easily accessible, and we typically implement dashboards using Microsoft PowerBI. Acumatica has built-in dashboard capabilities, or we can easily tie in PowerBI as well. Of course, both with secure/encrypted data between the server and presentation client.

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There’s a reason pilots don’t fly an airplane by reports—there’s too many variables to watch at once! A well-designed dashboard, with alerts for the super-important parameters like stall speed and ground proximity, is the optimal solution for flying both planes and businesses—allowing drilldown to detailed reports as necessary.

Check out the AP-focused dashboard below (click to expand it) for an example, and we look forward to building YOUR dashboards.

Regards,

Kevin E. Stroud
kestrou@nexlan.com
NexLAN, LLC
https://nexlan.com

AccountMate’s Customer Inventory Manager Module

Kick your level of customer service up a notch!

AccountMate has the ability to cross-reference inventory details, using both your details and your customer’s details for the same item. Customer-specific inventory makes things easier for your customers and for you.

Here’s an overview of what’s possible:

1. Customer-specific item details

Suppose your customer calls an item a “brace” in their business, while that item in your inventory is called a “bracket” by you and your other customers.

You can create a sales order for the brackets that the customer is buying from you—and when you send them a sales order or invoice or packing slip, those customer-facing documents will automatically call them braces instead of brackets. Your customer can easily match the items to their purchase orders.

By using your customer’s item names, part numbers, descriptions, and units of measure, you speak their language. The Customer Inventory Manager takes care of that cross-referencing—so that you see things in your “language” while your customer sees things in theirs.

2. Customer-specific inventory management

You can filter to view only the items in your inventory that match your customer’s item number, description, item class, product line, or inventory type. This makes it easy for you to make updates to customer inventory records without accidentally updating other records or missing an item that needs to be updated.

3. Customer-specific contract pricing

You can assign each customer a contract price for each inventory item, so that your sales team automatically sells at the agreed-upon price.

And you can enter new prices in advance of a contract’s start date, scheduling the price updates to go into effect—again ensuring that you always sell at the correct price.

Bonus: When negotiating a new contract, it’s handy to be able to view a complete history of a customer’s contract prices for reference.

Learn more about this module:

➤ View the AccountMate Customer Inventory Management Module brochure

➤ Contact NexLAN with your questions

PS. Vendor-specific item details, too

Similar cross-referencing applies to your purchases—and this one is built into core AccountMate; no module needed.

Suppose you sell a commodity item that you source from multiple vendors. When you place an order to restock your company’s Jet Pens, your vendor will see that you’ve ordered their Aero Pens on your purchase order, because that’s what your vendor calls them. When you receive the PO, the quantity for your Jet Pens will be incremented. Cool! Email NexLAN support for info about where to set that up.

AccountMate: Online Class for the Manufacturing Module

April 16–17, 2025 (Wed. and Thurs.) – 3 hours each day; 6 hours total. $1,050 per student.

There’s still time to register for this once-a-year class from AccountMate.

Brush up on features and expand your skills, so that your company can leverage more of the capabilities and automations offered in the Manufacturing Module. Or, if working with the module is new to your role at your company, get a solid understanding of how to use and optimize it.

This is an online, live class with hands-on exercises, taught by an expert instructor from AccountMate’s staff. It covers a lot of ground—so you’ll learn what’s possible, and how to monitor and manage all aspects of your production work.

Course Overview   |   Course Outline   |   Course Schedule

Registration closes seven calendar days prior to the session date. 

Contact NexLAN to register for the Manufacturing Module Product Training for AccountMate SQL/Express.

Acumatica: Unlimited User Licensing Supports Your Business Growth

You never have to hesitate about adding more users, because it won’t cost more

As you reach new customers and expand into new markets, you may also be faced with the challenge to hire and train new employees while you open new locations and warehouses. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry that you will reach the user limits of your ERP system as your business grows, because Acumatica doesn’t license by user count.

Instead, Acumatica uses consumption-based licensing, which means you are licensed for resources you use, not for the number of people you have in the system.

Having unlimited users opens up more possibilities in your business:

• User Count Flexibility
  Not only is it a breeze to add users to your Acumatica system during periods of growth so you don’t have to worry about adding more users when adding new storefronts or warehouses—if your business experiences periods of seasonality, you also don’t have to carry the cost of the additional users you need for the busy holiday season or planting season for just a few months of the year.
• A Single Source Of Truth
  With unlimited users, you can have everyone work in the same system, with the same data, at the same time. You no longer have to ask someone to log out so you can log in. You don’t have to work in disconnected systems or on multiple spreadsheets to match up data. You don’t have to make the hard decision of which departments or staff members are left out because of added fees for each additional user license.
  
• More Users = More Security
  Each Acumatica user is assigned a specific role giving them access to the data and parts of the system they need, and not the parts they don’t. When an employee is out on medical leave and a temp is hired to fill in, they can be assigned their own login with their own role and permissions rather than using the employee’s login. If you are limited on your ERP system users, for example if a single login is used by multiple employees at the shipping station, this leaves little traceability to who packed what order or who performed an inspection of a return, because of the shared login. With Acumatica’s unlimited users, everyone has their own login and you can easily see exactly who completed what task.
• Greater collaboration
  You can bring in other users you may not have thought possible before. Customers can use Acumatica self-service portals to view order and shipment status, make payments, or initiate support cases on their own (learn more about cases in the article below). Independent contractors or consultants can have access to business information they need without taking up limited user logins. Occasional users (board members, auditors, ownership partners, etc.) can also have their own user logins so they can make strong, data-driven business decisions with always-current data.

We like to call unlimited user licensing “scalability,” as one of the top ways that Acumatica is unique (see The 7ility Benefits of True Cloud). If you’d like to find out more about how Acumatica can support your business growth, reach out to NexLAN.

Acumatica: Use Support Cases (Tickets) to Manage Issues, Questions, and Tasks

Acumatica’s CRM module can do more than just traditional Customer Relationship Management. One of its key features is case management, to create and consistently track cases based on your customers’ requests. Track problems and requests submitted by email, phone, website, or live chat. And ensure that follow-up happens, with nothing falling through the cracks.

You can create cases for employee use, or for customers, or both. And if you have the Acumatica Self-Service Portal in place for your customers, they can create cases too.

What can you use cases for?

Use them to manage questions, requests, projects, and problems that you want to track consistently, where you all parties to have always-current information at their fingertips. Examples:

1. Sales (the most common use for cases). Manage prospects in your sales pipeline, moving them through each stage from initial sales lead, to qualified opportunity, to quote, order, and invoice.
2. Manage RMAs, from the time that a customer tells you that they received an unusable item, to receiving the bad item back, getting a replacement shipped, updating your customer on the status, and getting the original item repaired or replaced for your inventory.
3. Track field service work. For example, if a customer asks your customer service person a question about an upcoming appointment, your rep can quickly pull up their open cases and confirm the schedule and details.
4. Submit cases to an IT or legal team within your company.
5. Keep track of the status of required training classes and annual certification renewals for employees.
6. Set up cases to trigger preventative maintenance on your plant floor or in your facilities, such as a monthly case to replace the filter on a piece of equipment.

Learn more about Acumatica cases

Watch one of these 3-minute videos.

➤ CRM Case Management for Manufacturers

➤ CRM Case Management for Distribution

➤ CRM Case Management for Businesses

Powerful capabilities for cases

You can submit support cases to internal teams to respond to. You can see alerts on a dashboard for high-severity cases, or VIP customer cases. For billable cases, you can track contracts, buillable time, total time, and overtime work hours performed.

And of course, you can track case metrics like response time, response status, commitments due, activities performed, resolution time, and solutions and feedback provided.

Did these spark ideas for you and your business?

Contact NexLAN to see a demo of the type of cases you have in mind.

AccountMate Tech Note: How to Handle Sample Item Shipments to Customers

Merchandising or retailing businesses often distribute product samples as part of a marketing strategy to promote their products. Sample inventory items affect asset valuation and expense recognition; thus, it is important to properly record and monitor the shipment of sample items to customers.

Article #1199: How to Handle Sample Item Shipments to Customers discusses the methods of recording the shipment of sample items and their effects on the GL account balances and inventory on-hand quantities. This document also identifies the reports to generate for audit trail purposes.

AccountMate Tech Note: Understanding How AccountMate Handles Special Characters in Key Fields

Understanding the features and capabilities of the accounting software your company is using enables you to fully maximize its usage. It is also important that you are aware of its limitations. Knowing these limitations helps you plan how to efficiently manage the accounting software. One common limitation of accounting software is handling special characters. In AccountMate, we refer to these characters as “illegal characters.”

Article #1194: Understanding How AccountMate Handles Special Characters in Key Fields provides you with a list of characters that are illegal in AccountMate. It also provides examples of possible issues that you may encounter when illegal characters are used.

Acumatica Technical Tips

How to Record A Prepayment to a Vendor

Q: We need to send a prepayment for items we are ordering at the time we place our order. How can I do that and put the payment into a ‘holding GL account’ until I receive the final bill and receive my purchase order, debiting the inventory asset account?

A: You can enter a Bill with a Type of Prepayment which will Debit the Prepaid Asset account you have listed on the Vendor Detail > GL Accounts tab for Prepayment Account. Then print the check or process payment as usual for your vendor.

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How Do I Apply a Prepayment to a Final Bill?

Q: I sent a prepayment to a vendor and have now received the final bill. How do I apply the prepayment I sent to the bill I just received?

A: After entering the bill you received from your vendor that needs the prepayment applied to it, go to Payables > Transactions > Checks and Payments and select the Prepayment you already sent to the vendor. On the Documents to Apply tab click the Plus Sign to add a new row. Enter or use the lookup function to find the Reference Number for the final AP bill, then click Release to apply the Prepayment to the Bill. If there is any remaining balance to be paid you will finish processing payment as usual via Process Payments/Print Checks.

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How Do I Add a New Cash Account in Acumatica?

Q: I need to create a cash account for my company, what are the steps to do that?

A: To add a new cash account complete the following steps:

1. Go to Banking > Profiles > Cash Accounts
2. On the form toolbar, click the plus sign to Add a New Record.
3. In the Cash Account field, type the identifier for the new cash account. 
4. In the Account box, select the GL account from the list of accounts available in the chart of accounts.
5. In the Subaccount box, select the subaccount to be used with this cash account.
6. In the Branch box, select the branch that will use this cash account.
7. If this cash account is denominated to a foreign currency, in the Curr. Rate Type box, select the type of exchange rate to be used for currency conversions.
8. In the Description box, type a description for the cash account.
9. Optional: Select the Clearing Account check box to indicate that the cash account is used to record undeposited payments.
10. Optional: Select the Requires Reconciliation check box to indicate that reconciliations are required for this account and select a numbering sequence for these reconciliations in the Reconciliation Numbering Sequence box.
11. Optional: Select the Restrict Visibility with Branch check box to make this cash account visible to only a user signed in to the branch that is associated with this cash account.
12. Optional: Select the Match Bank Transactions to Batch Payments check box to indicate that during the processing of the imported bank transactions, the system should search for a match among Accounts Payable batch payments (which group documents for further processing by a money transfer operator). 
13. Optional: If you are creating a bank account and have configured a vendor to represent a bank your company works with, in the Bank ID box, specify the vendor identifier for informational purposes.
14. Optional: If you have configured the payment methods to be used to record transactions to this cash account, on the Payment Methods tab, add the payment methods and specify the appropriate settings in the row for each payment you add. 
15. Optional: If you are creating a bank account and have configured the clearing accounts to hold non-deposited payments, on the Clearing Accounts tab, add these accounts to the table.
16. Optional: If you have configured the entry types to be used to record transactions to this cash account, on the Entry Types tab, add them to the table.
17. Optional: On the Remittance Settings tab, which appears if at least one of the payment methods specified for the cash account requires remittance information, in the Value column for each row, provide the required information. 
18. On the form toolbar, click Save.
19. Go to Finance > Profiles > Chart of Accounts.
20. Make sure that the read-only Cash Account check box is selected for the GL account to which you linked the cash account you created. This check box indicates that the new cash account has been successfully linked to the GL account and that all transactions of the GL account will be traced in the cash management subledger.

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How to Enter Personal Use of Company Car

Q: I need to enter personal use of a company vehicle for our owners. How do I enter taxable fringe benefits?

A: To enter the personal use of a company car, first set up the benefit code under Payroll > Preferences > Deduction and Benefit Codes, then assign the benefit code the employee under Payroll > Profiles > Employee Payroll Settings on the employee’s Deductions and Benefits tab. Now enter the adjustment under Payroll > Transactions > Paychecks and Adjustments ensuring you change the Type to Adjustment. Enter your employee and add the benefit amount on the Deductions tab. On the Taxes tab, add taxable gross wages where applicable. Calculate, but do not Release the adjustment. 

Run the report under Payroll > Reports > Taxes by Paycheck for the Calendar year for only the employee you are working on, do not check the box to include unreleased transactions, and note the totals on the page. Then, re-run the report with the checkbox marked to include unreleased transactions and note the totals on the page.  Verify that the amounts are as you expect. You can now Release the adjustment.

AccountMate Technical Tips

How Do I Remove a Vendor’s Address from My Printed Check?

Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: AP

Q: The vendor’s address is printed in the TO THE ORDER OF area on the check. Is there a way to print only the vendor’s company name in that area?

A: Yes, perform the following if you want to print only the vendor’s company name in the TO THE ORDER OF area of the check:

1. Click the Factor (Pay To) underlined field label in the Vendor Maintenance > Settings tab to display the Vendor Address Maintenance window.
2. Create a vendor address maintenance record for which the only information is the Vendor # (automatic), Address #, and Company name.
3. Enter the Address # of the newly created vendor address record in the Factor (Pay To) field.
4. Save your changes.

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How Can I Delete the MAIN Warehouse?

Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: IC

Q: We do not use the MAIN warehouse. How can I delete the MAIN warehouse record?

A: You cannot delete the MAIN warehouse record. If you do not use the MAIN warehouse, then here’s what you can do to prevent it from being used:

• If the MAIN warehouse is assigned to an inventory item, then unassign the warehouse by deleting it from the inventory item Warehouse setup record. Note that you can only unassign the MAIN warehouse if it does not have any quantities (e.g., On-hand, Booked Qty, On-order, In-process, etc.).
• Unassign the MAIN warehouse from any inventory type records to prevent assigning the MAIN warehouse to an inventory item record.
• Set the status of all bins in the MAIN warehouse to inactive and do not assign any bin as a Receiving bin.

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How Do I Amend a Released Blanket Sales Order?

Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: SO

Q: Why does AccountMate not allow amending a released blanket sales order through the Create Sales Order function?

A: A blanket sales order is a sales agreement between a customer and a seller with set terms. The order specifies the agreed price, quantity, delivery dates, and other details of the order. It is like a contract. This is why you cannot amend a released blanket sales order.

If you want to make changes, cancel the sales order from the released blanket sales order, amend the blanket sales order to enter your changes, and then release the amended blanket sales order.

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How Do I Set Up an Employee for Electronic Payment?

Versions: AM13.1 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)

Module: PR

Q: I am about to set up an employee’s electronic payment details; however, I am not sure how to set up the electronic payment amount. How can I set up the electronic payment amount for the employee’s net pay?

A: The employee’s net pay can be distributed as follows:

• • If the employee wants to receive part of their net pay through check and the rest is through direct deposit (ACH); then:
    • Enter the amount he will receive through check in the Electronic Payment Setup ► Net Check Amt field.
    • Enter 9,999,999,999.99 in the Electronic Payment Setup ► Bank Information 1 ► Deposit Amt field.
  •  If the employee wants to receive part of their net pay through direct deposit (ACH) and the rest is through check; then:
    • Enter 9,999,999,999.99 in the Electronic Payment Setup ► Net Check Amt field.
    • Enter the amount they will receive through direct deposit in the Electronic Payment Setup ► Bank Information 1 ► Deposit Amt field.
  • If the employee wants to receive 100% of their net pay through direct deposit (ACH); then:
    • Enter 0.00 in the Electronic Payment Setup ► Net Check Amt field.
    • Enter 9,999,999,999.99 in Electronic Payment Setup ► Bank Information 1 ► Deposit Amt field.

Note: If the direct deposit is to be distributed to multiple banks, then enter the appropriate amounts in the Deposit Amt fields in the Bank Information area for each bank. The last bank account should have 9,999,999,999.99 in the Deposit Amt field to indicate that any remaining amount will be deposited to this account.

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