Acumatica 2021 R2 is now available. This newest release is expected to deliver new or improved functionality in the areas of personalization of system features, financial management capabilities, CRM, eCommerce, and more. Let’s take a look at some of the top new features in Acumatica 2021 Release 2 based on release notes and input from Acumatica partners.
In this article:
- New Personalization Options
- Financial Management Enhancements
- eCommerce Updates
- CRM Improvements
- New Payroll Dashboards
- Other Notable New Features
Now Available: Acumatica 2022 R2 (See What’s New)
Personalizing Acumatica ERP
Each user in Acumatica has different roles, different tasks they perform, and different areas of the software you access most frequently. To make that experience customized and flexible to fit YOUR specific needs and preferences, Acumatica 2021 R2 introduces a collection of personalization features to “make Acumatica your own.”
A newly redesigned form toolbar gives you the ability to easily setup and quickly access your favorite menu commands. Plus, if there are multiple form-specific commands on the form toolbar, they are now consolidated on a single menu – the More menu – and listed under descriptive categories, which makes it easier to find the needed menu command. See our in-depth article on the new Acumatica Form Toolbar for more detail on the changes and enhancements.
When you launch a table widget in a dashboard, you can now sort the rows in the table by the values in a column of the data table widget by clicking the column header (ascending or descending). This makes it easier for you to see that data the way YOU want it and to take action more quickly.
Financial Management Enhancements
Financial management is the core of any ERP system. After all, today’s ERP was born from yesterday’s accounting software. Not to be forgotten in all the “whiz bang” features in other areas Acumatica, these important financial management features have been improved as well …
Customer Refunds with Open Balances
In previous versions of Acumatica ERP, a customer refund could not have an open balance and then be fully applied to a payment, prepayment, or credit memo. But in Acumatica 2021 R2, a customer refund that is released and open can now be applied to a sales order or payment. Now when a you create a customer refund on the Payments and Applications form and release it, the status of the refund is changed to Open, the corresponding GL transaction is posted, and the refund can be applied partially or in full to a credit memo, payment, or prepayment.
Bank Transaction Matching
You can now match one bank transaction to multiple documents. Previous versions of the software allowed you to match one bank transaction to only one document. This streamlines bank reconciliation for companies that may receive one bulk transaction that includes multiple documents from different customers or vendors which necessitates the need to match all documents to one bank transaction.
Better Support for Multiple Currencies
In Acumatica 2021 R2, you can implement multiple companies with different base currencies in the same tenant. Previously, all companies within the same tenant had to use the same base currency.
Tax Support in Cash Transactions
Starting in Acumatica 2021 R2, the Process Bank Transactions form allows you to create a cash transaction with one or multiple taxes applied automatically or manually to the transaction. Previous releases did not support creation of taxable cash entries.
Acumatica 2021 R2 eCommerce Updates
The Acumatica eCommerce Edition steps up industry-focused functionality designed to work with popular platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify with some of the following enhancements:
- Support for gift wrapping orders in BigCommerce
- Support of the net and gross tax calculation modes in imported orders
- Map metafields (custom fields) in Shopify to Acumatica ERP
- New predefined synchronization schedules automate and simply data exchange between Acumatica ERP and an external e-commerce platform
CRM Enhancements
The CRM component gets a nice boost in new features or enhanced capabilities in Acumatica ERP 2021 R2. For starters, Acumatica 2021 R2 introduces a new layout of the Opportunities and Sales Quotes. All the tab names are optimized to fit the screens of most laptops, provide a more compact view, display more information, and improve usability overall. You can more easily synchronize or override the data on the forms, create and view relations between entities, and navigate between related CRM entities (i.e. opportunity, sales quote, invoice, etc.).
New CRM business events are now available that allow you receive email or push notifications related to leads, business accounts, opportunities, and cases that you’re managing.
The workflow for sales quotes has been redesigned to make the workflow process clearer and easier. In addition to leveraging the redesigned form toolbar (mentioned earlier in this article), the transitions between states of a sales quote (pending approval, rejected, sent, etc.) have been implemented through menu commands on the More menu on the Sales Quotes form. When one of these commands is executed, the system automatically changes the current state of the sales quote so it’s easier to see where it stands at any time.
See also: New Lead Qualification Workflow in Acumatica CRM
New Payroll Dashboards
New payroll dashboards are introduced with Acumatica 2021 R2 that combine data with visual key performance indicators, metrics, and charts as follows:
Payroll Operational View: review the current situation for the current pay period for a selected pay group or for all pay groups at once. You can also evaluate the readiness and completeness of the payroll processing.
Payroll Personal View: A dashboard for employees to view their personal information about past payments, income and deductions, and the availability of paid time off (PTO) hours.
Payroll Executive View: A dashboard for executives and auditors to review payroll information for the ongoing business year.
Related: New Financial Management Dashboards in Acumatica 2021 R1
Other Notable Enhancements
Here’s a collection of other new features across field services, order management, manufacturing and more.
- With new drop shipments for projects, you can now create purchase orders for goods and materials that should be delivered directly to the project site.
- A new Related Items feature in order management facilitates cross-sales, up-sales, and item substitutions for stock and non-stock items.
- In Acumatica warehouse management, pick-by-scan ability provides paperless picking by using a mobile handheld computer with an integrated 1D or 2D barcode scanner.
- In Field Services, you can now quickly create service documents (i.e. service orders and appointments) from the Opportunities and Projects forms.
- A new Production Order Labor Efficiency report helps production managers analyze the labor efficiency of the employees involved in manufacturing production.
Acumatica 2021 R2 Release Date: September 22, 2021
Questions? Please contact your Acumatica Partner with questions or refer to the detailed release notes that will become available once Acumatica ERP 2021 R2 is officially released.
