Dear Clients,
We regularly implement EDI integrations — which is “straightforward” but not necessarily “easy,” and I make the distinction because a client recently contacted us with the need to QUICKLY implement EDI.
Specifically the 850 Inbound Purchase Order (to create a Sales Order in their system) and 856 Advanced Shipping Notice, with the assumption this would be “quick and easy.” Sounds simple enough: The customer sends the 850 and the Sales Order magically appears in your system—and there’s a plug-in for that, right?
Yes, there are plug-in options, but the devil is in the details, so here’s an overview of the issues to be discussed…
⇨ For importing an 850 Inbound Purchase Order to create a Sales Order in your system:
- Is there an indicator for which customer record in your system to map to?
- Does the customer’s ship-to location already exist or do we need to create it?
- Which of your branches or locations will the order be assigned to ship out of?
- Does the 850 come in as a quote (to be manually reviewed and approved) or is it an order and you’re ready to print the Pick List seconds later?
- Pricing logic is a big consideration! Does your customer say what they’ll pay and you accept it?!
- Does your customer specify the shipping method or is that left up to you?
- Are there custom fields or values to be mapped?
- Are there potential item number cross-reference issues, where the customer specifies their item number and you must translate to your item number?
- Are there Unit of Measure translations where the customer specifies a “CASE” and your Sales Order needs to specify, say, a quantity of 24 “EACH”?
⇨ Do you need to provide an immediate 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgement back to your customer upon receiving their 850? This client didn’t, but you might.
⇨ Shipping out the Sales Order triggers sending your customer an 856 Advanced Shipping Notice, which has its own considerations:
- Of course, the shipment carrier and tracking number—but are there multiple tracking numbers because of multiple shipping units?
- Does your customer want the date the shipment left your door, or the date it’s expected at their door? Do you have the date that it’s expected at their door?
- A “shipping unit” can be very different from your item unit. Similiar to a Bill of Lading, your customer might want you to specify how the items are palletized, the weight of each pallet, and exactly what items and quantities are on each pallet. Is this information in your system?
As you can see, implementing EDI isn’t necessarily a simple plug-and-play setup task, as there’s numerous questions to be answered and your business rules to consider—but NexLAN is experienced at the task, knows how to get it done, and is always standing by in the cornfields to assist!
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Attention AccountMate users: Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and 2017 End of Life
If you’re running AccountMate/SQL V10.1 or lower, then we’re scant days from the end of Microsoft support for the latest possible back-end database, SQL Server 2016.
If you’re running AccountMate/SQL V11.1 or lower, then we have 15 months—until October 2027—until support for SQL Server 2017 expires, so let’s start planning!
Running your system without those important security updates and patches is a DANGEROUS place to be and we continue to see clients on unsupported versions impacted by intrusions, especially now with AI hacking tools being widely brought to bear so the situation is more dire than ever — see here.
Regards,
Kevin E. Stroud
kestrou@nexlan.com
NexLAN, LLC
https://nexlan.com
AccountMate: F9 Is a Huge Time-Saver for Your Excel GL-Related Reports
Do you work on data and reports in Excel using AccountMate GL data?
– Budgets
– Balance Sheets
– Income Statements
Imagine this. You’re in Excel working on an income statement. You need the newest data out of AccountMate. Instead of going to AccountMate to get that data to export or paste into your Excel file, you do something else. In Excel, you hit the F9 key on your keyboard.
Instantly, your Excel data updates to the current AccountMate GL data. With no need to re-run your cash flow statement. Plus, the AccountMate data comes in with all the right formatting to match what’s in Excel.
What??!! <mind blown>
The Infor F9 add-on is the most “no-brainer” add-on for AccountMate. It turns your keyboard F9 key into a dynamic hotlink to pull in your most current GL data into Excel.
- F9 saves our clients hours of time each month.
- It increases the accuracy and usefulness of Excel GL-related reports, and makes it easier to “noodle with the numbers” as you look for new insights in your data in Excel.
- It’s so easy to set up and use, that if you’re a NexLAN client we’ll set it up for you in your system and train you, free. Even if you just want to test drive F9 for 30 days before you decide whether or not to buy it.
Watch Kevin’s 8-minute F9 demo and read more on our Infor F9 GL-to-Excel Conduit page. Then give us a shout.
AccountMate: Core Modules Training Classes Oct. 7 – Nov. 19
Have you seen info about these Core Modules classes but you’re not sure what would be covered? These live, online, hands-on classes led by AccountMate go through all the capabilities of each core module in one or two sessions per module, at 2-4 hours per session.
To see a list of all the capabilities of a module and get a good idea of what the training will cover, just open the brochure for that module from our AccountMate for SQL and Express Modules page. This will help you decide whether to attend that class.
Modules taught in the Core training classes are:
- System Manager
- General Ledger
- Inventory Control
- Sales Order
- Purchase Order
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Bank Reconciliation
You can attend the entire set of Core classes, or a few, or just one – whatever you want. Different users at your company can attend different module classes.
Course Overview | Course Outline | Course Schedule (October-November dates there will be added in August)
$3200/all | $420/individual session | $0 with Active Lifecycle; ask us about your number of free seats, as that’s based on your number of users
Registration opens in August (you can let us know sooner to get on our list). Registration closes seven calendar days prior to the session date. To register, contact NexLAN.
Acumatica—New in 2026 R1: Payment Update Roundup
Check out these cool new capabilities to accept payments from your customers and send payments to your vendors, available in the latest Acumatica Release.
1. Accept customer payments on the go
You can now accept credit card payments on the spot using a compact Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) card reader such as the Square or FEITIAN within the Acumatica mobile app. These can be used at trade shows, by traveling sales staff, and by field service technicians performing onsite work—to improve payment speed and offer flexible payment options for your customers.
2. Recover your processing fees with automatic credit card surcharges
Automatically apply a surcharge to credit card transactions on invoices paid with credit cards. You can configure Acumatica to calculate the fees imposed by your processing center and add them to the payment transaction, itemized out clearly for both you and your customer. Surcharges will be held in their own GL liability account for remittance to your merchant servicer each month, and to not skew your revenue accounts.
3. Use payment links or QR codes on prepayment invoices
The payment links or QR codes you may already be using on your invoices can now be used on prepayment invoices. (Check out all the reasons to use payment links here!) First, create payment links as clickable URLs and as scannable QR codes on prepayment invoices to share with customers either manually, or all at once with an automated business event. After your customer has paid, your Acumatica can automatically update or close the prepayment invoice.
4. Pay your international vendors with BILL
BILL’s integration with Acumatica has been expanded and you can now send payments to your international vendors. You can pay vendor bills in USD, and your vendors can choose to receive funds either in USD or their local currency. BILL manages the currency conversion, regulatory compliance, and cross-border payment delivery for you. To read more about how BILL can simplify your AP payments, check out our article on the BILL Integration from a few months ago.
5. Use Bank Feeds to reconcile American Express Card statements
American Express statements have been added to the list of files compatible with Bank Feeds in Acumatica. This lets you process large volumes of employee expense transactions automatically and reduces your manual effort. See our article for a full overview of the Bank Feeds automation process.
To see a highlight of other features added in the 2026 R1 Acumatica release, visit Introducing Acumatica Cloud ERP: 2026 R1. Most clients’ systems will update within a few months of the March 23rd release date, though if you’re itching to start using the new 2026 R1 features, we can get your update started early! Got questions? Shoot us an email.
Acumatica: How to Be Alerted When Things Didn’t Happen
Use Business Events to monitor important steps that silently fell through the cracks
We usually talk about actions and reactions in your business workflows. An order ships, so a tracking email triggers. A new customer is added, so an onboarding alert goes out.
But what about the actions that failed to happen, and will cost you money and customer satisfaction if they aren’t addressed promptly? The quotes that sit unprinted. The high-priority support tickets that sit unassigned. The orders stuck on “hold” for four days because a supervisor didn’t see the notification.
When important tasks fall through the cracks, it’s not usually because a process failed; it’s because nothing happened at all.
Good news: You can use Acumatica’s native Business Events to flag inactions before they turn into a big problem.
A real-world example: “Ghost” sales quotes
Suppose your sales team creates a high-value quote, hits save, and then gets pulled into an urgent client emergency. The quote sits in the system, untouched and un-emailed, for 5 days. Your prospect concludes that you’ve ghosted them, and they turn to your competitor for help.
Instead, you can use Acumatica to automatically police this kind of silence:
- Cast the net. First, you create a simple data list (a Generic Inquiry) of all your open sales quotes, including basic fields like the Quote Number, Customer Name, Creation Date, and Status.
- Then set an alarm. Instead of triggering the event the moment a user clicks “Save,” you change the Business Event Type to Trigger by Schedule. Set a rule telling Acumatica to scan your quote list automatically every day at 4:00 PM.
- Then monitor for silence. In your trigger settings, you define what “inaction” looks like. In this example, you tell Acumatica the conditions: Raise an event and send an alert only if the Quote Status is “Open” AND the Days Outstanding is greater than 4.
If the system finds a record matching those rules at 4:00 PM, it instantly sends an internal notification or an email template to the account manager saying, “Hey, this quote has been sitting idle for 4 days. Let’s reach out!”
More examples
Once you shift your mindset from tracking actions to tracking inaction, you can apply this automation anywhere:
- In inventory: Trigger a notification if a purchase order has been approved but not marked as received after 10 business days.
- In accounts receivable: Alert an account manager if a high-value invoice is past due and the “Last Activity Date” field is blank.
- In customer service: Escalate an issue automatically if a case is marked urgent but has had zero status updates for more than 4 hours.
Let Acumatica vigilantly monitor the quiet corners of your workflow for you, to notice things that might have been missed. We’d be happy to show you how set up this type of Business Alert and answer questions; please reach out.
AccountMate Tech Note: Understanding the Standard Cost Methods in AccountMate
There are instances when companies cannot immediately determine the actual cost for a particular item; thus, a standard cost is used as a close estimate. Since standard costs are usually different from actual costs, there is a need to calculate and recognize the variance between the actual cost and the standard cost.
Article #1335: Understanding the Standard Cost Methods in AccountMate discusses how to set up inventory items to use the standard cost method. This document also discusses when AccountMate recognizes the standard cost variance and the transaction that causes the variance. This article also lists the features in several relevant functions and reports.
AccountMate Tech Note: How Building and Disassembling Kit Items Affect Inventory On-Hand Quantities
Creating and managing groups of inventory items packaged together as kits (e.g., computer unit components) and sold for assembly is handled in the AccountMate Inventory Control module along with the Kitting module. The creation of kit items requires you to set up an inventory item with pre-build requirement features in the Inventory Maintenance function; then, set up the component inventory items for the kit item using the Kit Formula Maintenance function. To assemble the kit items requiring pre-build, you need to build the kit item using the Build Kit Item function.
If the kit items are overstocked or component inventory items are saleable, you need to restock these component inventory items using the Disassemble Kit Item function. Read more at Article #1130: How Building and Disassembling Kit Items Affect Inventory On-Hand Quantities.
Acumatica Technical Tips
Can I Copy A Past Purchase Order When Making A New One?
Q: Is there a faster way to create a purchase order without starting from scratch each time?
A: Yes! If you frequently order from the same vendor with similar items, you can copy an existing purchase order rather than building a new one manually. Open any past PO, click the Clipboard, and select Copy Order. Acumatica will create a new draft PO pre-filled with the same vendor, items, and quantities which you can adjust as needed before saving.
For items you order on a regular schedule, also look into Blanket Purchase Orders (Purchases > Transactions > Purchase Orders, Type = Blanket). A blanket PO lets you set an agreed price and total quantity with a vendor upfront, then release smaller child POs against it throughout the year without rekeying vendor terms or pricing each time.
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How Can I Find A Specific Journal Entry If I Only Know The Description?
Q: I need to find a specific journal entry but I only remember a partial description or amount. Is there a quick way to track it down without scrolling through hundreds of transactions?
A: Acumatica’s Journal Transactions inquiry screen makes this much easier than it might seem. Go to Finance > Transactions > Journal Transactions and you’ll find a powerful set of filter fields at the top of the screen.
You can search by any combination of date range, branch, ledger, account, subaccount, reference number, or description. For partial text searches, type a keyword into the search bar in the screen header and Acumatica will return all entries containing that word or phrase.
A few extra tricks worth knowing:
- Click the column header of any column to sort or filter results based on that column.
- Save your most-used filter combinations by clicking the save icon next to the search bar, so you can recall them with one click next time.
For even more flexibility, the Account Details inquiry (Finance > Inquiries > Account Details) lets you drill into a single account and see every transaction posted to it across any date range.
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Why Isn’t A Payment Reflected In My Customer’s Balance?
Q: Why is my customer’s balance not updating even after I’ve applied a payment?
A: This one usually comes down to a payment that was entered but not released. In Acumatica, entering a payment and releasing a payment are two separate steps. Until a payment is released, it stays in a pending state and does not reduce the customer’s open balance.
To check for unreleased payments, go to Receivables > Transactions > Payments and Applications and filter by Status = Pending. Any payments sitting there can be opened and released individually or you can use the Release AR Documents screen (Receivables > Process > Release AR Documents) to release multiple payments at once.
A good habit is to check this screen at the end of each day or before running AR aging reports, so your balances always reflect the true picture. And/or, set up a Business Alert to automatically notify you daily about any unreleased payments that have been pending—see the article above, How To Be Alerted When Things Didn’t Happen.
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How Can I Speed Up The Bank Reconciliation Process?
Q: We import our bank statement every month and manually match each transaction, is there a way to speed this process up?
A: Absolutely, Acumatica’s Bank Transaction Rules can do most of that matching work. Once you set up a rule, the system recognizes recurring transactions, like a monthly software subscription or a regular vendor payment, and matches or creates the corresponding document without you lifting a finger.
To set up a rule, go to Banking > Preferences > Bank Transaction Rules. Create a rule that defines what to look for (such as a specific description keyword or transaction amount) and tell Acumatica what to do when it finds a match, whether that’s matching to an existing document, creating a cash transaction, or coding it to a specific GL account.
After your rules are in place, the next time you import a bank statement under Banking > Processes > Import Bank Transactions, matching transactions will be handled automatically, leaving you to focus only on the exceptions.
AccountMate Technical Tips
Why Are My Searches Only Showing Me 50 Records?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: SM
TIP: To help you easily locate maintenance or transaction records, AccountMate provides the Search feature. When you click the Lookup button in a maintenance or transaction window, a Search window appears:
- When you right-click on the Lookup button, it opens the Full Search window, which displays all records.
- When you left-click on the Lookup button, it opens the Leading Search window, which shows the list of records that start with the same characters entered in the maintenance or transaction field. By default, it shows the top 50 records, but you can configure this setting in the Advanced Options for Search Window.
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How Do I Remove The AUTHORIZE SIGNATURE Line On My Checks?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: AP
Q: When you print signature lines on checks, it will include the label AUTHORIZE SIGNATURE below the line. Is there a way to suppress the label and just print a line?
A: Perform the following if you want only the signature line on the check and no AUTHORIZED SIGNATURE label under the line:
- Create a signature image with just a line (take note of the image requirement and the steps to set up a signature image as noted in Article #1295).
- Add/select the signature image in the Bank Account Maintenance ► Signature ► Signature 1/Signature 2 field(s).
- Be sure to select No in the Bank Account Maintenance ► Signature ► Print Line 1/Print Line 2 fields.
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Why Are ACH Payments Not Showing In The Record Bank Deposit Screen?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: AR
Q: Why are my customers’ ACH payments/direct deposits not displayed in the Record Bank Deposit function?
A: You must select the Process Direct Deposit option in the Record Bank Deposit ► Select Receipts/Refunds window to record a bank deposit for ACH payments/direct deposits.
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What Shows On The PO Line Items For AP Matching Report?
Versions: AM 11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: PO
Q: What items are included in the PO Line Items for AP Matching Report?
A: The PO Line Items for AP Matching Report includes only received items from vendors configured for AP/PO Matching or Accrue Receive Goods. The vendor is configured for AP/PO Matching or Accrue Receive Goods when the following checkboxes are marked in the Vendor Maintenance ► Settings tab at the time the PO was created:
- AP/PO Matching and Accrue Received Goods
- AP/PO Matching only
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