Feeling a Loss of Agency?

Perhaps an uncomfortable topic, but I’ve chatted with several business owners/leaders—and experienced myself the last month—a genuine withdrawal from decision-making and corporate leadership.

Drilling down on the issue, this growing crisis of executive exhaustion is really a psychological retreat due to a loss of agency.

Different than burnout, years of navigating relentless disruptions—including economic volatility, rapid AI integration, geopolitical conflict and millennial work styles —have left many business leaders feeling they no longer have a “grip” on the wheel. Rather than quitting, a very human response is that many leaders are staying in their roles but withdrawing emotionally and strategically.

Key signs of this withdrawal include:

• Decision Paralysis: Deferring hard choices or waiting for more “perfect” data that never arrives.
• The “Hunker Down” Mentality: Focusing on small, tactical wins while avoiding the larger, more complex strategic shifts.
• Emotional Distance: Becoming less present for their teams, which creates a ripple effect of disengagement throughout the organization.

This “fragility loop” creates a dangerous cycle. As leaders feel less in control, they become more risk-averse. This risk-aversion leads to stagnation, which further reduces their influence and results, confirming their belief that they have no agency.

The roadmap to reclaim agency and “get your grip back” isn’t easy, but includes:

• Acknowledge the “Agency Gap:” Be honest about where you feel powerless. Simply naming the feeling can help break the cycle of withdrawal.
• Micro-Agencies: Start by asserting control over small, high-impact areas where results are visible and immediate. This builds the “neurological muscle” of agency.
• Radical Presence: Instead of retreating into offices or data, intentionally increase your visibility and engagement with your team. Connection is an antidote to the isolation of powerlessness.
• Reframe the Narrative: Shift from seeing disruption as a force that happens to the company to seeing it as a landscape you’re navigating through.

The most resilient leaders are not those who are “unshakable,” but those who recognize when they are starting to drift and take active steps to reconnect with their sense of purpose and power. The goal is to move from a defensive “survival mode” back into a proactive “shaping mode.”

Regards,

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

AccountMate: Have You Checked Your Open Items Lately?

This month we’re shining a spotlight on cleaning up reports of your open items.

Backorder reports become useless for tracking open items when systems have super-old open sales orders or purchase orders.

Sometimes clients also have super-old data in their AR Aged Receivables or AP Past Due Ageing, which are no longer valid. This makes it difficult to validate the Balance Sheet, plus there’s a financial impact when they’re finally corrected.

See more info on reviewing your data in our Validating the Validation Reports article—which is a page on our site from five years ago that still gets visited quite regularly, so rest assured that you’re not alone when it comes to the never-ending challenge of keeping a company’s accounting data in good shape. Review the checklist there to note which items apply to your company and schedule them for ongoing monthly or quarterly review.

Now’s a good time to take a look for old open orders and old, invalid data—and get those cleaned up to minimize writeoffs, reduce liabilities, and prevent other not-fun actions and costs that are preventable when you regularly check your reports. If not now, when?

AccountMate: Which Module Are You Ready to Master?

June 3 – July 16, 2026 will be the next live, online, hands-on Core Product Training from AccountMate

Might June or July be an ideal month for you to focus on a module or two that you want to learn better—or a module that’s new to you and your current role?

While you can certainly take the whole series covering all the core modules, you’re also welcome to sign up for just the module you’re interested in. Book this into your summer calendar now so that upcoming projects or meetings can be slotted in around it, protecting your time to invest in your AccountMate skills.

Modules covered are:

1. System Manager I – System Administrator  June 4, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
2. System Manager II – User Interface   June 10, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM and 2:00 – 4:00 PM CST (4hrs)
3. General Ledger   June 11, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM and 2:00 – 4:00 PM CST (4hrs)
4. Inventory Control I   June 17, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
5. Inventory Control II   June 18, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM CST (2hrs)
6. AP/PO Master Record (Required for AP and PO Sessions)   June 24, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM CST (2hrs)
7. Purchase Order   June 25, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
8. Accounts Payable I   July 1, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
9. Accounts Payable II   July 2, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM CST (2hrs)
10. AR/SO Master Records (Required for AR and SO Sessions)   July 8, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
11. Sales Order   July 9, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)
12. Accounts Receivable   July 15, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM CST (4hrs)
13. Bank Reconciliation   July 16, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM CST (3hrs)

Course Overview   |   Course Outline   |    Course Schedule

$3200/all   |   $420/individual session   |   $0 with Active Lifecycle; inquire about details for your number of users

Registration opens this month (April) and closes seven calendar days prior to the session date. To register, contact NexLAN.

The full Core Product Training will be repeated October 7 – November 19, in case that works better for your schedule.

Acumatica: New in 2025 R2: Use Anomaly Detection to Monitor Production Variances

Building on the Anomaly Detection feature introduced earlier year (read more in our introductory article Acumatica 2024 R2: New Anomaly Detection Feature), Anomaly Detection has been expanded to detect variances in your manufacturing processes. 

Use Anomaly Detection in Manufacturing to help monitor out-of-the-ordinary material costs, labor time, production totals, and employee efficiency by using the four new generic inquiries specifically designed to use anomaly detection, now in Acumatica 2025 R2. 

1. Production Total Variance: Get a complete picture of cost variances for each production order, which could be in labor and/or material costs. 
2. Production Labor Variance: Identify discrepancies in labor time and cost, like if an employee accidentally double-adds their time to a production order. 
3. Production Material Variance: Analyze material cost deviations between planned and actual values for WIP and completed production orders such as if a component was received broken, but wasn’t caught until after the return window so you had to order a replacement. 
4. Production Employee Efficiency: Compare actual performance across employees doing the same operations so you can evaluate performance and set up retraining sessions if necessary. 

Use the Anomaly Detection feature in your manufacturing and production process to more quickly catch out-of-the-ordinary labor and material costs in your system and to get more up to date information on employee efficiency, so you can make smarter decisions in your labor planning and material sourcing, and improve your BOM accuracy.

For more information on Anomaly Detection and how it could be utilized at your business, send NexLAN an email to schedule a demo.

Acumatica: Reduce Your Dead Stock and Slow-Moving Inventory

Dead stock is inventory that you paid to purchase, but the money you spent on that purchase isn’t being converted to revenue—because the inventory items are gathering dust in your warehouse instead of selling! The reason could be that it’s expired, obsolete, low quality, out of season, more quantity than you normally sell, priced to incentivize your sales team to sell another item instead, etc.

Acumatica offers ways for you to keep tabs on your inventory health to reduce the hard costs of slow-moving inventory.

1. Information about deadstock is managed through the Dead Stock (IN405500) inquiry form. See more info below.
2. The Preparation (IN507000) screen to Manage Turnover History plus the Inventory Turnover (IN406500) inquiry identify slow-moving items by looking at the turnover ratio and Days Sales of Inventory.
3. Using the ABC Code Assignment, Acumatica can automatically categorize items as A, B, or C based on turnover time or value. Go to Inventory > Processes > Standard > Update ABC Assignments.

How to identify dead stock

The Dead Stock inquiry tool shows you items that have been in stock without movement (sales, transfers, or issues) for a defined period. Find it at Inventory > Inquiries > Dead Stock or via form ID IN405500.

The inquiry deducts the quantity of items in sales orders (including field service orders and production orders), shipments, and other documents that affect the quantity on hand, from the quantity of items that have remained in stock for the specified time period.

Steps:

• For accurate results, always begin by doing a Recalculate Inventory History (IN505000).
• Check the Rebuild Item History Since box for the relevant financial periods to ensure the “dead” status is calculated against the most recent transactions.
• Choose your filtering criteria. Filter by Warehouse (required), Item Class, or specific Inventory ID. Specify a mode of “by days stored” with In Stock Since, or “by days since the last sale” with No Sales For.
• Review the results. The inquiry will display the Dead Stock Qty, Last Sale Date, and Total Dead—as well as the Stock Cost to help you quantify the financial impact of unmoving inventory.

With these results in hand, you can decide how best to free up some cash from those inventory items—perhaps by selling off the excess inventory at a discount. And you can look for patterns of overbuying that are resulting in slow-moving inventory, to refine your purchasing process.

Note: A business alert can be added to notify users when thresholds are reached. Reach out to NexLAN to get help setting one up.

For full documentation please reference the help documentation, Dead Stock Inquiry – Acumatica Help.

AccountMate Tech Note: How to Record Details of Customer and Vendor Beginning Balances

In instances where you need to record the existing individual invoices that comprise the payable and receivable balances, a different method for posting beginning balances is recommended.

Article #1052: How to Record Details of Customer and Vendor Beginning Balances discusses how to enter and record detailed customer and vendor beginning balances.

AccountMate Tech Note: How AccountMate Handles Interfund Balancing

AccountMate has fund accounting features to support non-profit organizations. One of these fund accounting features is the option to do automatic interfund balancing. In daily operations, some transactions may occur between funds. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) require that the total debits and credits for each fund must be in balance.

Article #1145: How AccountMate Handles Interfund Balancing illustrates interfund transactions and discusses how AccountMate handles manual and automatic interfund balancing in compliance with GAAP requirements.

Acumatica Technical Tips

How Can I Stop Creating Duplicate Vendors and Customers in the System?

Q: I am having an issue with users creating duplicate Customers and Vendors in the system. Is there a way Acumatica can help us prevent this from happening? 

A: Starting in Acumatica ERP 2026 R1, you can prevent the creation of duplicate customer or vendor records. You configure Acumatica to check for duplicate Customers and Vendors using a weighted validation configuration in the Duplicate Validation screen with the Account to Account comparison option.

1. Go to Opportunities > Preferences > Duplicate Validation 
2. On the Comparison list on the left hand side, select the Account to Account comparison.
3. Then configure the following.
   a. On the Rules of Comparison grouping enter a Validation Score Threshold amount of greater than zero, but less than the sum of the score weight of all matching fields in the grid below.
       b. Check  the Validate on Entry checkbox.
   c. In the grid below, adjust the Matching Field, Score Weight, Transformation Rule, and Create on Entry columns to configure the validation to meet your needed requirements.
4. Click Save.

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Can I Make a Call Directly Out of Acumatica ERP System?

Q: While processing shipping orders we sometimes need to call the customer and verify a few things. Within Acumatica, is there a way to select the phone number on the Ship-To Contact screen and directly call out to the customer?

A: Starting with Acumatica 2026 R1, Acumatica has created a new control that lets you start a call directly from a phone number entered in a text box. This new control has a Phone Icon within the text box and when you tap the Phone Icon, the system opens up the default phone app on your device and calls the specified number. 

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Why Are My Emails Not Going Out in Acumatica with My Outlook Email Address?

Q: I have an outlook email account and my ability to email out of Acumatica has stopped, how can I fix this?

A: The Outlook email connection relies on your Azure connector certification and secret ID being valid. Azure does put an expiration date on these for security reasons. You will need to get your IT in the loop and have them recertify your Email Application connector. Once your IT has this update it will need to save your client secret just as they have done before. Feel free to reach out to NexLAN for detailed instructions on this part for your IT department to follow if necessary.

1. Have the Client ID and Client secret values in hand and log into your Acumatica system.
2. Go to Integrations > Preferences > External Applications
3. Verify that your Client ID is the same – update if needed
4. Enter and update your Client Secret
5. Click Save
6. Click Sign In and log in to your Outlook Email account.
7. With credentials and secret ID updated correctly you will be able to log in successfully to your email account via Acumatica and emails will be able to be sent out of Acumatica.

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How Can We Tag Our Files in Acumatica to Pull Them Easier When Needed?

Q: We have really utilized the Acumatica system to upload files/documents into the system as an entire company. With all these different types of files in the system, is there a way to organize or search for these files from within Acumatica?

A: With Acumatica 2026 R1 File Tags are now available system wide. With this systemwide change you can organize files by using tags, and quickly find what you need. Here are a couple of use cases for tag-based document management.

• Use Case 1: Filter Files by Tag

Inventory managers can assign tags to files—such as certificates, manuals, specifications and pictures—attached to an inventory item. Later, they can filter files by type and group them by owner, making it easier to selectively share the correct files on the Acumatica Self-Service Portal.

• Use Case 2: Retrieve the correct files for audits

Compliance or account managers can tag files by type—for example, “certificate” and “agreement,” and by additional attributes—such as “2024” and “signed,” so that they can easily locate the correct and current file for audits.

• Use Case 3: Locate Receipt Files

Receiving clerks or warehouse managers can tag files and photos attached to purchase receipts—for example, “consignment,” “customs,” “condition – damaged,” and “condition – intact.” This will allow them to easily distinguish between different types of receipt-related files and quickly retrieve the specific scanned documents or photos they need at any moment.

Before assigning tags to files, you will need to create these tags and assign them access rights on the File Tags form.

1. Go to System Management > System Preference > File Tags
2. In the Tags pane, create a tag by specifying its name and description.
3. In the Access Rights table, assign each role’s access level to the selected tag.
4. Repeat the two previous steps as needed for each type of tag.

Now that you have tags created and configured, assign the tags to files. 

1. Go to a transaction or page that already has an attached document (e.g., Sales Order), click the Files (paperclip icon) button in the top right, then click the Edit link next to the file name to open File Maintenance.
2. In the File Maintenance form, you now see a Tags section. Click the magnifier icon in the Tags box display where you can select from the tags you have access to and assign them to the file – you can select as many as you would like here.
3. Hit Save.

Searching by Tags

1. Go to Time and Expenses > Inquiries > Search in Files 
2. There is now a Tags section for you to search files by specific tags. Click the magnifier icon to select your tag names.
3. You can also search for files with no tags assigned by selecting the Show Only Untagged Files checkbox in the selection area.

AccountMate Technical Tips

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

Module: AP

Q: We have two vendors that are subsidiaries of another vendor (the parent entity). The payments for these subsidiary vendors must be made to the parent. Is there a way to combine the payments of these two subsidiary vendors and issue them to the parent?

A: You cannot combine payments of two vendors; however, you can set up the same payee for the two subsidiary vendors through the Vendor Maintenance ► Settings ► Factor (Pay To) field. When you print a check for the two vendors, it will print two separate checks; however, the payee is the company set up in the Factor (Pay To) field.

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

Modules: AR, SM

Q: Is there a way to remove the contact name from customer address labels?

A: Yes. The contact name in customer address labels comes from Customer Maintenance ► Information ► First and Last fields. Remove the first and last name from customer records if you do not want the contact name to be printed on customer address labels.

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

Module: AR 

Q: How can I void a posted customer beginning balance?

A: You cannot void a customer beginning balance posted through the Post Customer Beginning Balance function. You may reduce the amount by applying an adjustment or write-off using the Apply Payment function. The invoice # assigned to the posted customer beginning balance is 0.

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Please Clarify Favorable Versus Unfavorable Balances in the Budgeted Income Statement Report

Versions: AM 13 for SQL and Express (and higher versions) 

Module: GL 

Q: How do you determine the Difference/% Diff signs (e.g., positive or negative) in the Budgeted Income Statement report?

A: The Difference/% Diff sign depends on whether the variance is favorable or unfavorable. If the variance is favorable, then it is displayed as positive (no parentheses). If it is unfavorable, it is negative (in parentheses).

Higher revenues and lower costs/expenses are favorable variances. Lower revenues and higher costs/expenses are unfavorable variances. For example:

Sales Revenue: If the actual revenue is higher than the budget, this is favorable.

Cost: If the actual cost is higher than the budget, this is unfavorable.

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