Dear Clients,
The largest business disruption in several years is the imposition of wide-ranging and constantly changing tariffs on goods imported to the US—with clients scrambling to handle this in a nimble manner. We’ve had numerous discussions on the topic—so here’s options for both the purchasing and selling side of the equation for you to discuss with your CPA.
Purchasing
How to recognize the increased costs of your imported goods? That depends…
If the goods are FOB “destination,” then your vendor pays the tariffs and you’re just seeing an increased item cost for the line item cost on your Purchase Orders.
If the goods are FOB “origin,” then you’ll be paying the tariff separately, either to a third-party importer or direct to US Customs, and then you have options:
A) Simplest is to enter the AP invoice from US Customs and “expense” the tariff—which can easily be to a COGS account.
B) More properly, from a GAAP perspective, would be to use the Landed Cost approach to roll the cost of the tariffs “into” the onhand value of your inventory. This is built-in functionality, but is a little tedious, so please give us a call to chat through the process.
Sales
Now that you have the increased cost, how do you pass this on to your customers? Here’s three ways:
A) Simplest option is to increase item pricing, but many sellers want to show the reason for the increase, so this is the least common option.
B) To show tariffs as a single line item on the Sales Order or Invoice, you can create an inventory item (that doesn’t update on-hand) and then either manually calculate a price for it or we can make a modification to auto-calculate the tariff price. Please note, with this method all tariff charges to customers will then show in a single revenue account.
C) If you’d like to show the tariff upcharge on a per-line-item basis, with only minor modification to allow a “negative line-item discount percent,” the upcharge shows for each individual line item and is reflected in the item-specific revenue account.
Summary
- Pairing Purchase-option-A with Sales-options-A-or-B will give visibility only in the financial statements as to whether you’re covering the tariff costs and, even then, you’ll have “timing issues.”
- Thus, Purchasing-option-B with Sales-option-C is the best choice as you maintain visibility on per-item profitability via the <Profit Margin Report> and there’s no timing issues.
No company is enjoying the effort and uncertainty of the current tariff situation, but rest assured we have options to accommodate—and are always standing by in the cornfields to assist!
Regards,
Kevin E. Stroud
kestrou@nexlan.com
NexLAN, LLC
https://nexlan.com
AccountMate: New Possibilities to Get Value from Your Data, with Power BI
BI stands for Business Intelligence. Microsoft Power BI is aptly named, as it gives you more Power to understand, and effectively communicate, your business data.
Power BI doesn’t replace Excel
You can use them side-by-side—and with AccountMate reports as well.
- Excel is the gold standard for creating routine reports; for building ad hoc reports and charts and graphs; for calculations that use formulas; and for data manipulation. It’s all about generating, tracking, and analyzing data—and it’s staggeringly flexible.
- Power BI is best for business intelligence, data visualization, and interactive dashboards that you can click down into for details. It smoothly handles complex database analysis that Excel would struggle with. It can combine multiple datasets from multiple sources, linking to them to refresh with always-current data.
Power BI can handle large—even massive—datasets. It offers high levels of automation. And it offers security that protects against tampering and accidental data or formula changes. It’s a trusted building block for high-quality, repeatable analysis. See Kick your reports up a notch with Power BI.
When to consider using Power BI?
When you want to explore your data with lots of slicing and dicing, or share it for discussion.
- For example, maybe you’ve done an analysis of past orders from your suppliers in Asia, and now you want to do the same thing for your suppliers in other regions.
There’s no need to deal with the tedious task of inserting more rows and columns and formatting, and fine-tuning formulas to accommodate the additional data. Power BI will expand to fold in the new datasets using the same setup, to facilitate your comparative analysis.
- Or maybe you want to sort multiple years of your product catalog sales data by every attribute you’ve got, one at a time, so you can look at your sales for new insights and trends by industry, or by product spec choices, by seasonality and promotional prices or discounts, by Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value, and more.
- When you’ve got something like that, don’t head down the path of a 250Mb spreadsheet with a collection of hidden pivot table filter bars and hand-built graphs, and formulas that crisscross a million tabs—reach for Power BI instead.
- If the point of your analysis is to help your team decide upon next action steps, or to persuade your colleagues—then smart, effective charts/graphs and dashboards can help everyone understand and discuss what the data is telling you.
Power BI has a broad array of design and presentation options to make your educational presentations and collaborative discussions better.
Where to start with Power BI?
Our clients usually start by contacting NexLAN with an idea of what they want to analyze or visualize. Then we do the Power BI work for them.
Once they see the results, they’ll either turn to us for occasional Power BI projects going forward, or they’ll appoint someone inhouse to learn Power BI for regular use.
Data lovers and pivot table wizards who are in their happy place when they’re in Excel, will enjoy using Power BI to add value to your business. Maybe that person is you!
AccountMate: You Can Still Sign Up for Core Product Training
Half-day online sessions, two days per week, June 4 – July 17
Registration closes May 28.
Attend one session, multiple sessions, or all of them. Included as a benefit of your annual Lifecycle plan, or the cost is $420 per session or $3,200 for all of them, per person. See the Course Overview link for details on how many free seats you’re eligible for annually.
Attend all sessions yourself, or divide them up with a colleague. You’ll have time for hands-on practice and asking questions in this live, instructor-led training.
For some businesses, summer is a slower season so it’s a good time for training. Learn best practices and new-to-you details to make your job easier—and discover new ways that your AccountMate system can help your company achieve its goals.
Modules covered:
- System Manager
- General Ledger
- Inventory Control
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Purchase Order
- Sales Order
- Bank Reconciliation
Class details: Course Overview | Course Outline | Course Schedule
Contact NexLAN to register.
New in Acumatica 2025 R1: Set Up Your Own Attributes on Items With Lot and Serial Numbers
The 2025 R1 Distribution Edition includes the ability to assign attributes to stock items with lot and serial numbers, without customization.
Before, you could only set up attributes yourself on your stock items that didn’t have lot or serial numbers, and it took a NexLAN customization if you wanted to track additional product information using attributes on lotted or serialized items.
(Need a refresher on attributes? Read our article, With Acumatica Attributes, It’s Easy to Add Custom Fields, and learn how attributes are no-coding required, user-defined fields that let you capture and track additional information throughout your system, for items, vendors, customers, and more.)
Here are some examples of lotted or serialized items and their additional details that you could now track without a costly modification:
- Serialized injection molding machine
- Extrusion temperature
- Finish coating
- Amp rating
- Warranty expiration date
- Lotted packaged candy
- Expiration date
- Flavor
- Batch number
- Country of origin
- Serialized Canon video camera
- Battery life
- Color
- Storage capacity
- Production year
Because you can add new attributes yourself, anytime, you don’t have to hesitate when you have an idea for new attributes that you want to track.
- Add attributes to use in your reporting to find which features are your best sellers, identify sales trends, and ensure proper inventory levels for the best-selling features of your products.
- Add attributes to help your customer compare similar products and select the unit that best fits their need—whether you’re on the phone with them, or they’re looking at product specs (attributes) in your integrated ecommerce store.
- Add attributes to your items the next time you are setting up a product line from a new supplier.
What serialized items have additional details that you want more traceability of in your system?
To see a highlight of other features added in the 2025 R1 Acumatica release, visit the webpage Introducing Acumatica Cloud ERP: 2025 R1. If your company uses lot and serial numbers, make sure to try out this feature when your system upgrades to 2025 R1 (most clients’ systems will update within a few months of the March 20 release date). Got questions? Shoot us an email.
Acumatica: Strategy Ideas to Make Your Demand Planning Even Better
On-Demand webinar, “Mastering Demand Planning for Optimal Inventory Management”
This webinar is a fantastic source of ideas to identify new efficiencies that your Acumatica system stands ready to assist with—to help you control costs, boost profits, and keep your customers coming back.
The Acumatica presenter gives an overview of all the factors that influence your ability to keep enough inventory on hand to avoid stockouts, while not spending money on more inventory than you need.
- Then he introduces Acumatica’s capabilities in inventory replenishment—warehouse transfers, purchasing, and production orders— and DRP/MRP inventory planning (Distribution/Manufacturing Requirements Planning).
- Finally, he discusses a variety of strategies to consider for your company. For example, with Vendor Managed Inventory, you could give your suppliers access to see the on-hand quantities in your Acumatica system, of items they supply to you (or you could push out automated reports to them of your stock levels), allowing them to create purchase orders in the system for you to approve.
Register now and you’ll receive an email link so that you can watch anytime:
Mastering Demand Planning for Optimal Inventory Management (50 min). Scroll down about 10 rows on that page to find this webinar among the large collection of recordings.
If you have questions about how you can set up anything mentioned in the webinar, reach out to NexLAN.
AccountMate Tech Note: How to Record Customs Duties (Tariffs)
Whether a company chooses to capitalize or expense tariffs, AccountMate provides the tools to properly account for these costs, ensuring accurate financial reporting and cost tracking.
Article #1352: How to Record Customs Duties (Tariffs) in AccountMate discusses the two methods of recording tariffs in the software.
AccountMate Tech Note: Understanding the Recalculate Account Balances Feature
AccountMate allows you to perform a recalculation of GL Account ID balances to correct inaccuracies or inconsistencies affecting these records.
Article #1141: Understanding the Recalculate Account Balances Feature helps you identify the symptoms of incorrect GL Account ID balances and explains the requirements you must comply with before performing recalculation. This document also discusses the data files or tables used during recalculation and common data issues that cannot be resolved by recalculation alone.
Acumatica Technical Tips
Can I Change an Item’s UoM When I Have Outstanding Orders?
Q: I have a change to my unit of measure for a stock item, but I have outstanding orders in progress. Do I have to go and delete all current orders?
A: No. You can add additional conversion rates for the new unit of measure you are adding while leaving the current unit of measure active as well, so that it will not affect your previous pending transactions using this specific Stock Item. To add an additional conversion rate, complete the following:
- Go to Inventory > Profiles > Stock Items and select the profile for the stock item you need to add a new UofM to.
- On the General Settings Tab under Unit of Measure, click the + Add button and enter the new Unit of Measure. When creating your new transactions, you will select the new UofM option.
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How Do I Set Up Assignment Maps In CRM?
Q: How do I set up an assignment map so specific business account classes are assigned to specific employees in my CRM?
A: This can be done with some simple configuration after you have your account classes created.
- Create your Business Account Classes.
- Go to the Assignment and Approval Maps screen.
- Select Add Assignment Map.
- Name your new approval map (eg. Business Account Class By Employee)
- In the Rules Column click the + Add button.
- In the Conditions Tab click the + Add button and add the condition of the Customer Class equaling the specific Class value for the first assignment map.
- For each condition that you have created, then go to the Rule Actions tab. For Assign Ownership To: choose Employee. Then select the Employee that you would like this business account class to be assigned to.
- Repeat steps 5-7 for additional Rules and Conditions you would like to Map and then click Save.
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What Are My Inventory ID Character Restrictions?
Q: When creating a new Stock Item do I have any special character restrictions?
A: No, the Inventory ID is a unicode field meaning you can use all special characters. Stock Acumatica Inventory ID’s have a 30 character for length restriction, but this can be easily changed by going to More Items > under Configuration click Configuration > under Segmented Keys click Segmented Keys > and for Segmented Key ID enter Inventory. In the grid below that, you can change the length value to your desired character count.
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Can I Set a Default Vendor Based on Warehouse Location?
Q: Can I set a default vendor based on the demand plan warehouse when I am entering a purchase order? For example, we have warehouses in multiple states. When creating a purchase order to replenish the widget stock at the Virginia facility, the system should default to using the Virginia location for the widget vendor.
A: On the Item Warehouse Details screen, on the Inventory Planning tab, you can designate a Preferred Vendor for each item for each warehouse it is assigned to.
AccountMate Technical Tips
How Do I Remove a Scheduled Revenue Amortization?
Versions: AM10 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: AR
Q: How can I remove the scheduled revenue amortization for a credit invoice?
A: Perform the following:
- Access the Create Sales Return without an Invoice # function; then, select Amend Sales Return.
- Enter the credit invoice #; then, go to the Line Item Details ► Revenue Amortization area.
- Unmark the Amortize checkbox; then, hit Save.
Note: You can only do this if you have not started the amortization.
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Does the Accrued Landed Cost Appear on the Inventory Transaction Log?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Modules: IC, PO
Q: Does the accrued landed cost recorded through the Accrue Landed Cost function appear in the Inventory Transaction Log report?
A: If the items for which you recorded the accrued landed cost are set to update on-hand quantity (i.e., the Update On-hand checkbox is marked in the Inventory Maintenance Settings (1) > General area), then, yes, the accrued landed cost is displayed in the Inventory Transaction Log. The assigned transaction type for the accrued landed cost is IADJ and the transaction number is the PO number.
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How Do I Add a New AccountMate User?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: SM
Q: How do I add a new AccountMate user?
A: To add a new AccountMate user, perform the following:
- Launch the AccountMate Administrator program.
- Access the Setup ► Security ► Group/User Setup function.
- Select the group to which the user belongs (e.g., System) in the Group/User Setup window; then, click the Add User button.
- In the Add User window:
- Enter the user’s name, full name, password, etc.
- Select the company in the Company List grid to which you want the user to have access.
- Mark the checkboxes for the features you want the user to have in the Access/Feature grid.
- Click OK.
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How Do I Re-Use a Check Number?
Versions: AM11 for SQL and Express (and higher versions)
Module: AP
Q: I inadvertently voided a check that has already cleared the bank. Can I issue payment again in AccountMate using the same check # as the voided check?
A: Yes, you can if the Allow to Re-use Voided Handwritten Checks checkbox in the AP Module Setup ► Printing tab is marked.
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