> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://abcsoferp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 8 Things We Actually Like in Acumatica 2026 R1 - URL: https://abcsoferp.com/episodes/s04e10-8-things-we-actually-like-in-acumatica-2026-r1/ - Published: 2026-05-04T23:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-19T21:50:18.000Z - Description: Acumatica 2026 R1 is live — 460 pages of release notes, and we've read them so you don't have to. Pete, Nirav, and Emily walk through what actually stood out, what's genuinely useful, and why this particular release deserves your attention sooner rather than later. In this… - Author: ABCs of ERP & Beyond - Tags: Acumatica, Data, reporting and AI, ERP practitioners, #episode S04E10 · 53 min ## Episode notes [Send us a message about this episode!](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2109197/fan%5Fmail/new?ref=abcsoferp.com) Acumatica 2026 R1 is live — 460 pages of release notes, and we've read them so you don't have to. Pete, Nirav, and Emily walk through what actually stood out, what's genuinely useful, and why this particular release deserves your attention sooner rather than later. In this episode, we cover: - Acumatica Payments on Shopify — how closing the refund and B2B payment gap between your storefront and ERP simplifies reconciliation - The redesigned customer portal — what it looks like now, why it actually resembles an e-commerce experience, and whether B2B customers will use it - InsightXL — Acumatica's new Excel add-in with a live connection to ARM, and what it means for Velixo - The AI assistant and AI Studio — why Acumatica's approach is ahead of Dynamics Copilot, and the data governance question nobody's answering yet - GI enhancements, GL anomaly detection, and the classic UI sunset — the things that aren't flashy but will affect your day-to-day Acumatica 2026 R1 Official Release Notes here: [https://community.acumatica.com/supported-releases-67/acumatica-2026-r1-downloads-and-release-notes-34865](https://community.acumatica.com/supported-releases-67/acumatica-2026-r1-downloads-and-release-notes-34865?ref=abcsoferp.com) Oh, and Emily Browning is now officially our third permanent co-host. Commiserations to her. If you're on Acumatica or evaluating it, this is the release review episode to listen to. [Support the show](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2109197/support?ref=abcsoferp.com) ## Watch the episode ## Transcript The speaker labels and timings come from the edited Riverside transcript. Read the full transcript Peter Nicholson (00:00) And welcome back to the ABCs of ERP and beyond the podcast all about enterprise resource planning and how it helps modern businesses run smarter, scale faster and actually make sense of their data. and as ever I am joined with Nirav Shah. And I should also say, cause I forgot to really mention this. You've obviously been listening for a while and you know that, if you've been listening to the last few episodes, Emily has been a familiar face. or at least to film in their voice if you listen to the audio. And she has been a guest on a few episodes recently. But as of today, well, as of a few weeks ago, unofficially, things change. Emily's now officially the third permanent co-host of the ABCs of ERP and beyond. So Emily, welcome or commiserations for joining the team. Nirav Shah (00:50) Yeah. Emily Browning (00:51) Delighted to be here. Peter Nicholson (00:53) And one an episode. Yeah. Nirav Shah (00:54) We found another crazy person that loves talking about ERP and project management. Wow, I didn't realize one other person existed except me and you, Peter, but here is one more. Emily Browning (01:02) There are dozens of us. Peter Nicholson (01:05) There are dozens of us. What better way to spend your weekend? And what better way to start a episode with the latest Acumatica release 2026 R1 released a few weeks ago. It's taken us a while to have a look through the release notes, 460 odd pages of release notes. If you're listening to this, thankfully, we're not expecting you to really, really read through those. We are Emily Browning (01:06) You Nirav Shah (01:09) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (01:32) discuss the things that we found as we have read through those pages, the things that have stuck out to us, that has got us excited with the way that Acumatica is progressing the development of their ERP system. So today we'll be walking through those together and discussing really what stood out for us. So without further ado, let's get going. I know that we've all had a look through and we've decided the things that we have caught our eye and we're going to kind of chop and change between the three of us, I guess, some of these. So what better way to start off than, Nirav, I guess you can start us with some finance, some boring finance. Might as well get it out of the way with first of all. So we got to do something. We'll get to the exciting stuff later on. But what caught your eye in terms of the latest release from Acumatica here? Nirav Shah (02:16) Everyone is awake, right? Let's just get it out of the way. Emily Browning (02:19) I'm Nirav Shah (02:21) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it was a combination of things for me, Acumatica and you got to give kudos to their roadmap developers, their programmers, the amount of requests that Acumatica gets just in terms of new functionality, customer requests from all over the world. And they have to pick and choose which ones they want to put into the release. That must be a laborious task to do, but I think they usually hit the nail on the head in terms of new functionality to bring out release by release. This one is a really nice release adding to the big release that happened last fall, the 25R2\. A release that I think every customer should not disregard. think every customer should highly consider doing this release if you have options to. plan out your releases and see which one you're on. This one is kind of like one of those don't miss releases. Put this on your roadmap and do. But a few things that I feel from my perspective that I was really happy to see as part of the edition. This first one falls in two categories. Peter. Finance is one of my first interests, but you also know that I have a deep interest in e-commerce, right? So on the e-commerce side and finance side, there's now the capability to use Acumatica payments on Shopify. And Shopify being one of the world's leading e-commerce platforms. I think that's a nice addition there, because historically those merchants have a few options. primary player here is the native Shopify payment processing tool there, which is there's Shopify payments. Most of our customers use that on a day to day basis, along with, you know, being able to leverage other things outside of just the payments piece of it, which is Shopify loans and stuff like that, because they see the volume of the transactions you're doing there. But there's some gaps between if you are using Shopify, Shopify payments, and seeing those payments reflected in Acumatica, there are some real-time gaps here and Acumatica is doing as much as they can to close this gap for that merchant that's using the Acumatica, right? A few examples that I feel that this is pretty powerful, in my opinion, is if you take refunds in the ERP. Well, if you take refunds in the ERP, now that refund will go and update that Shopify order, right? Instead of having for you to do it in the... the Shopify platform and this is really good adding on to that for B2B orders, right? B2B is kind of like a new area for Shopify and that Acumatica integration, but a lot of times when those B2B orders come in into Acumatica, you're not taking payment on the Shopify side. That order is coming in on a terms perspective. So once that order gets paid, now that could be paid directly in Acumatica. that will then send the payment to Shopify if they're using Shopify payments, right? Same thing with the refund. If they're doing the refund in Acumatica now, that refund will be sent to Shopify. So I think that's a big gap that they're solving. When you're a merchant, online merchant, refunds really will set you apart from being a successful merchant or a merchant that's just kind of getting by, I feel like. Because that experience has to be seamless. Peter Nicholson (05:33) Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (05:40) for the customer at end of the day, and if it's not, that customer's gonna go somewhere else, right? You think about Amazon's return policy, there's no questions asked. You think about brands that you shop with day in and day out, there's no question that that return policy is very seamless. So I think that's really cool that they added this acumatica payments capability on the Shopify side. I think that's gonna continue to expand in scope, but just having it live on both sides just makes that integration tighter from my perspective. Peter Nicholson (05:58) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. I'm not a finance guy. I'm a data guy. But the one thing I do hear from finance people is that it's always reconciliation. That's the the drain, right? The the time sync can be reconciliation. And refunds is one of those areas. I guess having that kind of almost acumatica helping us getting towards a single payment processor that spans both the storefront and the ERP having that improved will certainly help that reconciliation problem, right? You it gets messy, gets messy, especially with, you know, Amazon or Shopify, you've got other fees, marketplace fees, refunds, even partial refunds, and the timing of these as well, between the AR transaction side in Acumatica versus the actual transaction. Nirav Shah (06:35) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (06:53) timing in the e-commerce platform. can be a nightmare from reconciliation point of view. So seeing Acumatica improve this whole payment processing part of the ERP is great. I can see a lot of benefit here. Nirav Shah (07:06) Yeah, for sure. Shopify charges processing fees, So does Acumatica, but you reconcile it much easier when you have the same platform on both sides. I think this is a good addition all the way around. They also, Acumatica, just to kind of look at the extension of this, of Acumatica payments, is that they took it further into the BigCommerce side too. So BigCommerce now also has Shopify payments integrated within that platform, which is really nice too. Peter Nicholson (07:13) Hmm. All right, I think that leads us nicely on to one that we've got listed down. Emily wants to talk about in terms of Shopify is the customer portal. So I'm going to throw this straight over to you. Why did this catch your eye? Emily Browning (07:49) So I'm first of all really happy with what I see in Acumatica's release this time. My introduction to Acumatica was pretty much January 2025, their summit last year, and a lot of what they said they were going to do, all the cool stuff that they told us about they've done, that's what we're seeing in this release. And the thing that's really stood out to me with Acumatica is that what they're doing really seems to benefit the real day to day of the business and the customer. It definitely feels like they're listening, which isn't always the case with software. So yeah, still staying on the e-commerce theme. The new customer portal is something I'm really excited about. Now I know they already have a customer portal, but this is in the modern UI. And to me, it feels like an out of the box e-commerce. experience. And the problem that I in the business that I really want to be able to address or people should be able to address with that type of thing is using your people or your people having to spend their time on just admin tasks, just stuff that they shouldn't, you know, really need to be keying in. If you have functionality, like, you know, what is essentially, you know, a self-service portal for your customers, you can then have your people focusing more on value add tasks, going after more sales and things like that. So the customer portal, jump in if I miss things, but you've, it's essentially a view of your entire account. So you can go in and see your orders, you can reorder. And none of this is necessarily new, but it looks different. And I think the usability of it, feels a lot more like an e-commerce experience rather than. what looks like an ERP before. So you can see your orders, you can see your payments, you can see what's overdue. It has this really nice, what is essentially a shopfront, where you can have pictures of the products. It's for all intents and purposes without me testing it out myself. It looks like an e-commerce store. And I think that's fantastic. Nirav Shah (09:23) you Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (09:31) Mm-hmm. I agree. think the customer portal beforehand, it just looked like a stripped down ERP screen, which for me is just not good for B2C and especially not for B2B. I think now the portal has been meaningfully extended. There's more features, but also it looks better. You're right. It actually looks like a customer portal now. I think the other thing that I really liked is case management. the fact that the customer portal now has a bit of a dashboard that we love. When you're using Acumatica as a business, the dashboards are so powerful. Now we're seeing that on the customer portal side where I can see my open cases. I'm not having to email customer service of a business to find out what the latest status of my support ticket is. I can actually also see that in my customer portal as well. there's more functionality and you're right, it starts to look like its own actual customer portal. I think it's moving towards a better B2B interface. Now I would question the adoption. I think these portals only work if customers actually use them. I think B2C, it's great. B2B, I think the challenge is gonna be the adoption of businesses. Nirav Shah (10:48) Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (10:55) businesses already using their own ERP to put purchase orders into their system. Now you're asking them to use your portal to maybe duplicate their own effort. I don't know, I'm gonna throw that out to both of you. What do you think is that? Is that the challenge? Because Acumatica can make the best customer portal with loads of features and easy to use. But if customers don't want to use it, then is it? actually any good. So I think this was challenged. think we were all in that session when they were talking about the new customer portal. And I think someone in the audience also put their hand up and said, this is great. This just looks like an e-commerce for B2C. But what are you expecting our B2B businesses also leveraging the same thing? And I think there's a little bit of concern around that. So what do you think? What do you think the reception is going to be like? to customers using this. Emily Browning (11:46) I think there's a couple of things I would consider. So the wider functionality, not just the order processing, I think draws people in because there are things that are answered on that portal where they would have had to phone or email a customer service before and kind of go through that. And I personally would much rather be able to just log into something and see, you know, what is the status of my order? Has it shipped? Is it processing? Peter Nicholson (12:01) Mm-hmm. Emily Browning (12:10) that type of thing. So I think on one hand they can be drawn in that way. Another point I think is that even you know B2C versus B2B it's still a human interacting with it. So If it looks familiar, if it looks like the type of online shopping that they're used to, I think there's some benefit there. And then from a business point of view, I also just think you can incentivize it. If you want to, you know, draw your customers away from dealing with your customer service team and onto online, you can implement things such as a different, you know, minimum order quantity. Peter Nicholson (12:37) Mm-hmm. Emily Browning (12:43) if they place it online versus with your customer service team. So that's how I think it could be approached. Peter Nicholson (12:50) Yeah, Nirav? Nirav Shah (12:50) Yeah, I think the customer portal is a very specific use case. I think with e-commerce and how flexible it is, think a lot of customers could replace customer portal with e-commerce. But the real value with the customer portal is think of a company like Grainger or a company that does high volume purchases repeatedly. I think that is really where a customer portal shines. We're not doing it through an e-commerce platform because in that portal, you're seeing way more than just products, prices, but you're seeing history, you're seeing quotes, you're seeing transfers, you're seeing all these additional elements because the relationship between the B2B buyer or the B2C buyer is very intimate in this case. That it's almost like a very closely extended salesperson, but it's a portal, essentially. Versus an e-commerce site, think of the concept there is really to upsell you, to give you maybe the highest margin products in your face so you will be more tempted to buy that at the end of the day, because they're trying to increase profitability. versus the portal has a very specific value proposition when you look at that for customers strategically to make sure those order volumes continue coming in for specific products. Think of blanket sales orders, right? That type of thing. You want insight into your supply chain, into your organization. are you? What's the status of this product? It's in manufacturing, or it's in QC, or it's ready to be shipped. That type of thing. Peter Nicholson (14:14) Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (14:35) I really like the fact that the portal now has some AI elements to it, which I think will continue to extend, where you could see sentiment value. You could see repeat orders. You could duplicate orders on there. So I feel that the customer portal will never go away. think it's a necessary, it's a need. We need that. The only closest thing that could replace a portal, I feel like, could be maybe EDI, potentially. But the portal has a very specific use case. I love that there's Acumatica recognizing it. Because if you look at the dynamics side, in the dynamics world, there is such a thing as a customer portal, but it's not as thoughtful as how Acumatica is doing it and focusing in on this. So Emily brings up an awesome point that Peter Nicholson (15:01) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Nirav Shah (15:19) you know, the customer portal coming out and the addition to the new functionality is, I think it's going to be very welcome for people that really, really need that functionality. Peter Nicholson (15:29) All right, moving on. The one I want to throw into the ring here is this was interesting when it got announced at the summit. The feeling in the room was interesting, should we say. InsightXL is what Acumatica is calling it. This is, I would say, taking the arm or analytical report manager that Acumatica has. to another level, right? So Arm, it's Acumatica's native financial reporting engine. It's the tool that you use to build things like P&Ls, balance sheets, budget versus actual, those kind of reports. That pulls directly from GL accounts and sub accounts and can handle kind of row iteration and column sets. It's really powerful, but the limitation is that it lives entirely inside Acumatica. And we know that financial... guys and girls in the world, they want to manipulate cells, they want to be able to use or leverage the power of Excel on top of that data that's coming from the ERP. So what you used to have to do is you download a set of data from your system and then do things. Problem is, as soon as you export to Excel, what happens? You break that connection, you lose the connection to the ERP. What InsightXL does is that it's it sits as an Excel add-in that gives you the live connection to ARM, right? So you open Excel and your reports are now ARM reports and you just pull data in. And crucially, you can change parameters and cell values and formulas in Excel and have that refresh live without ever having to leave Excel. You're not having to go back to Acumatica to download. newer data or data filtered on a different parameter, the data just updates in place. And I think we saw some of the screenshots where we could start to see some of the formulas that InsightXL uses, things like =ENDINGBALANCE and things like that. So I think this is really long overdue. I think that Acumatica has been behind other ERP in this space, Business Central, Sage, SAP, they're already doing this. Acumatica is finally there as well. And the reason why I say it was an interesting reception in the room when they announced this in summit, obviously when we think about live Acumatica data as a connection into Excel, everyone immediately thinks of Velixo right? That's been around for years. It's very, very powerful. Nirav Shah (18:05) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (18:08) I would say it's certainly a lot more powerful than InsightXL will be on the first iteration. But of course, people were thinking about this as, crap, what does that mean for Velixo then? Now, is there a partnership between Velixo and Acumatica? Have they been bought out? It doesn't look like it. It looks like Acumatica's just made this in-house as a direct competitor to Velixo. So there's two things I wanna throw at you guys. One. What do you think about InsightXL in general? And two, what's your feelings on Velixo now? And where does that leave that company? Nirav Shah (18:41) Yeah, I could start. The back end technical piece of it, Peter, you're probably better than I am on here. But just talking from a functional standpoint, think this is just to maintain, like you mentioned. A lot of publishers already have this. They're doing this. Excel is the world's greatest ERP system. Let's face it. At the end of the day, everyone believes that still. you have an initiative to get away from Excel or not, that's never gonna happen. You're always gonna have some sort of spreadsheet type of analysis that every company does. this is going back to how you said, does this do, actually answering your second question, what does this do to Velixo I don't think it does much. In my eyes, Velixo's way far ahead in what they could do with their functionality. This is just Acumatica's entry point, and they may stop here. Peter Nicholson (19:21) Yeah. Nirav Shah (19:27) They might not even do anything more. Again, I don't know what their roadmap is and what they're going to do, but this is just the light version, right? Just to get somebody interested and being able to move their ERP data to Excel, I think this was necessary. Absolutely. So Acumatica doing this is showing their user base that they're listening to them for sure, because they need this. There's no reason that if you need something basic as this, you shouldn't have to go buy a ISV solution for something this basic. and what they're releasing. But I don't know if it's going to get any further. I think Velixo is way further ahead. They do some really amazing things, I feel like. So I don't think it's a competition, to be honest. I think it's just more of a feature that customers have been asking for. But it's going to stay where it is. And Velixo is still going to a place in this ecosystem for Acumatica. Peter Nicholson (20:10) Mm-hmm. Yeah. completely agree think the biggest thing with Velixo is that write back functionality. That's huge. Like you hear all the time in Power BI world that it's read only, it's one way traffic. If only I could submit my plan, like you could create the best report that shows you, you know, your annual forecast by customer group, by product, family, whatever. If only I could also enter Nirav Shah (20:19) Yep. Peter Nicholson (20:39) amendments to that without having to kind of look at how that's built in the ERP. you know, Power BI we're seeing this with translytical taskflows. Eventually we're now getting there with write back. Velixo has got this completely buttoned up. It's seamless, isn't it? Being able to do to pull actuals from the ERP into into Excel and also write back annual plan back into Acumatica. So I think that's huge. It's going to be interesting. You're right. Does Acumatica just stop here? Is it just solving the biggest pain point that controllers have, which is month end management packs? Is it just a case of we have this Excel, we use this for our month end process, but we have this pain of having to export data in the right format from our ERP. That all goes away, right? With InsightXL. Is that just what Acumatica wants to do? Or is this the start of a long term look at, can we do our own version of Velixo? Nirav Shah (21:31) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (21:33) Emily, what's your thoughts on this? Emily Browning (21:35) I mean, I think it completely makes sense that they had to develop this, you're right to say that they were behind other ERP softwares. No one anytime soon is trying to take Excel away from finance teams, they need it. So it's absolutely important that they have a way to get that data, that live connection into the data in their ERP. So I'm aligned with the two of you, they needed to create something like this. But Velixo have been doing it for years. They're specialists in this. done, they must probably have, you know, years, years more of market research in this very specific area, developing their product for that. I think it's a different set of needs. Do Acumatica stop there or not? don't know, but I think we have a great set of functionality available InsightXL and Velixo depending on what your business needs are. Peter Nicholson (22:25) Yeah. Yeah. I think what also helps Velixo here is the fact that Acumatica just sells through VARs and you speak to any VAR as soon as you mention Excel or anything beyond just export from Acumatica. The first thing the VAR mentions is Velixo. Like anytime that finance wants to do anything, like, have you looked at Velixo? You know, they've been around for so long. I don't see this as a threat. Nirav Shah (22:47) Yep. Yeah. Yeah, me neither. Peter Nicholson (22:53) Nirav, what's your second highlight of 2026R1. Nirav Shah (22:57) Yeah, um This may sound small to a lot of people but I think the detail here is important if you're an ecommerce customer and you do a lot of b2b and you're probably using draft orders and Draft orders, know kind of almost think I think they think of it this way They operate could be blanket sales orders potentially where you do different releases off of it Maybe you send deposit invoices to get some draft orders, but those draft orders now come into Acumatica as sales quotes, which is nice, because it ties it together, right? You could do, like in Shopify, you do draft orders that convert to orders. Now you could do a draft order that converts, that comes in as a sales quote in Acumatica, but then you could have the handoff be to your CSR team or your sales reps that take that draft, that sales quote in Acumatica. Peter Nicholson (23:31) Yeah. Nirav Shah (23:52) work with the customer and they could convert it to a sales order in Acumatica, which will then create the order in Shopify. So it kind of like fills that final gap on the two order types that Shopify has at the end of the day. So it's becoming like, you you're having better handoffs between, you know, Shopify orders in Acumatica. So it's nice, you know, it's Peter Nicholson (24:01) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Nirav Shah (24:19) Is every Shopify customer using it? Probably not. They're not using draft orders, but the ones that do and they're looking for an ERP product that integrates, you know, draft orders into the ERP, Acumatica is a great choice. I love this addition. I think it's going to be helpful to a lot of those B2B customers out there. Peter Nicholson (24:35) Yeah, I think this is going to be valuable for anyone using Shopify for B2B where typically in B2B there's more of a negotiation phase than B2C. B2C is the sale is already done, right? The customer is just placing their order. Whereas with B2B there's that kind of negotiation phase where, well, I would say that that negotiation phase just immediately creates the gap in Acumatica, right? Where Nirav Shah (24:48) Yeah, Peter Nicholson (25:01) the customers interested, they think about placing this order, that historically has just been invisible in the ERP. You can't do anything with it until it's like firmed up. So now being able to have this come in as a quote gives you visibility into your ERP where, know, now you're thinking about, and this is for me why, why we shouldn't see ERP as a single system, we should see it as a single connected system, right? Because when that comes in as a quote, now if you've got that CRM module, now your sales teams are actually seeing exactly what's coming in and they can just go to that one system. So I think this is huge. I think it really bridges that gap, right? Nirav Shah (25:39) Bingo. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's exactly what I was thinking about. The CRM element of this is huge now, because those quotes are coming in. Everyone has visibility, win-loss percentages, opportunities, taking it through a proper CRM cycle. I think it's great addition. Peter Nicholson (25:51) Hmm. Okay, so next up, we're going to throw it back to Emily on this one. And I think we're all kind of trying to get this in our our own shortlists, but somehow you've managed to nab it from both of us. The AI assistant, and I'm going to couple this with AI assistant and just the general kind of AI studio that Acumatica teased last year, and firmed up, I would say this year. So why does this? Well, We all know why it makes everyone short list, but why did it make your short list? Nirav Shah (26:23) Yeah. Emily Browning (26:24) Yeah, I'll only touch on part of it. So there's lots, lots left to discuss, I think. First of all, gives me this is an area that gives me some trust in Acumatica They said they would do this back in 2025\. And then they did. They've delivered on the roadmap that they said they were going to do. I'll give a little shout out for one we're not going to discuss as well, which is the shop floor kiosk. They told us about that, or that they were developing that kind of thing back in 2025. Peter Nicholson (26:47) Hmm. Emily Browning (26:50) It felt that it seemed in quite early development back then. So I'm surprised that it's already here. So little shout out there. But back to the AI assistant and back to my point about how does it help the day to day? How does it stop the people in the business spending time on admin and non-value added work? What I really like about the AI assistant is that Peter Nicholson (26:57) Yep. Emily Browning (27:13) Something that I find for the problem solvers in the business, and they're often in IT, but they're in other parts of the business too, when people don't know how to do something, they will often come to those problem solvers. and ask a question, is essentially how do I do my job? And it's not because they don't know the definition of it, it's because they don't know how to use the system and they also don't know how to troubleshoot within that system, how to Google their problem and how to go through that kind of problem solving process. So you end up with these poor people in the business who stuck as that problem solver role. And I think the AI assistant goes a little way. Peter Nicholson (27:47) Mm. Emily Browning (27:49) to taking the pressure off of those people because it means that in a conversational way, they don't have to know how to Google a technical thing to get the right answer anymore. can just, in their own words, in the same way they would ask their local problem solver, they can come to the AI assistant and ask what's going on with something, how to do something, and it's going to point them in the right direction. And I see that as so valuable because it lets... Peter Nicholson (28:00) Yeah. Nirav Shah (28:01) Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (28:16) Mm-hmm. Emily Browning (28:17) our humans use their brains to focus on value added tasks, which is what we want. We don't want AI doing everything, but I love the idea that it can take on these sort of more basic admin type parts of our jobs that do take up a bunch of time. It really can interrupt you if you have to switch to that kind of thing. And I think we can throw it back to our data king maybe on how it interacts with the GIs. Peter Nicholson (28:42) Yeah, I mean, the standout point for me is that term that you used there in a conversational way. I think that really bridges the gap between the end user and GIs. Being able to use an AI assistant where I can ask, you know, what were our top 10 customers by revenue last month, last quarter, and not have to worry about Well, shit, have we got a GI? Like which, where do I find that data? Do I just go to our sales orders and export to Excel and try and do something in there? Like it bridges that to just asking the question because that's the same question they're going to go up to someone that does know GIs and all of the technical backend to be able to answer that for them. It just cuts that out immediately. They've got a chatbot. They just ask that conversational question. and get the answer they want. So it probably links into the GI enhancements that I've got. It's just the fact that it's now, now we're seeing that AI assistant effectively abstracting that GI layer. So instead of having to build a query, you just ask a question. And for those kinds of casual users, that's, think, where the biggest ROI is. So You know, for power users who build GIs, it probably doesn't replace anything that they do. But the vast majority of people, customer service agents, it's going to be huge for them. It's going to, everything, every single time I think about AI and I see the AI assistant or in general, the AI studio, there's just a million things I'm thinking about where this could be leveraged. I'm thinking about onboarding new staff. I'm thinking those day to day questions. thinking about those error messages that throw up. I'm trying to create a shipment and I get an error message pop up in the top right and I don't know what it means. There's so many use cases here. I think this is gonna be huge and I'm so happy that Acumatica are late to the party here because we've seen the failures of BC. Every single copilot agent is shit. The one that we see Nirav Shah (30:49) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (30:53) time and time again, every single demo I see in Acumatica is actually genuinely useful. Now that doesn't mean that they've solved everything. There's still a data governance, there's still a privacy issue, there's things that they need to be more clear on, but I'm happy that they've sat back and watched others and have actually come out with something that so early on, because a lot of this is still in preview and it's still in preview for 2026 R1. is so much better than any other ERP right now. Mic drop. Nirav? Nirav Shah (31:27) Yeah, you know, I everything I agree with everything that just said Emily and Peter, I have to come, you know, I'm come, I have to think about this on another side of this a little bit from a partner perspective. And, you know, how can this actually support, right? What is the practical use of this? I think the technology, I think the software, I think what Acumatica is doing, bringing it out, adding to it, I think is awesome. It's great. In like a fantasy world. and I'll tell you why, is that the underlying data is what concerns me. Just plugging this in for any customer right out of the bag just because it's being released in 26R1 could lead to false decisions, could lead to bad decisions. You could fail really fast here if you don't already trust your ERP data, right? If you don't trust your due dates, if you don't trust your pricing, if you don't trust your... you know, whatever that you're asking it to be judgmental on at the end of the day. So my fear and I, you have to start somewhere. I think Acumatica releasing this is great, but we should probably do a different podcast around this. I just want to caution users that, you know, be careful what you ask it and be careful of its judgments. Like, you know, take a step back. Peter Nicholson (32:47) Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (33:12) before you make a decision on what it spits back out to you at the end of the day. But I think the product is going to continue to evolve. It's going to be great. this AI assistance is way far superior than what Dynamics has introduced so far, what other publishers are probably doing with their AI. think this is more practical. You could use it every day. You could have junior employees become senior employees very, very quickly. Peter Nicholson (33:26) Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (33:42) because of the way they can analyze data and you could have AI make the low level decisions and you could have your team that are interacting with human beings make more strategic and value added decisions to bring the business forward. So all around, I think it's a really good thing. I'm just scared that implementing this too soon, you could fail really fast or go down this dark hole where you made a decision, spent all this money without really realizing that this is not how your business is set up or defined. Peter Nicholson (33:43) Yeah. I think so many of these tools come back to how good your data is. we know that ERP like the number one thing with ERP and I know there's someone that hopefully is listening to this episode who's shouting and cheering at the screen. It's all about dates. It's dates, dates, dates, right? Every single part of the ERP, you know, customer demand feeds into purchasing feeds into production. everything is about dates and it's gonna be the same with AI. You're gonna get shit data back if you're not managing the rest of the data entry very well. Maybe, maybe if we see AI coupled with anomaly detection, some of this is gonna surface the issues and help teams get better anyway, which is gonna be cyclical in terms of improving the AI assistant. But I do agree. The one thing I do like is the AI, Nirav Shah (34:14) Yeah. Yeah. Peter Nicholson (34:32) I did a presentation for my business on this around the best tool for AI is the semantic model. It's the semantics. It's about your business context. And I think this is where Acumatica has got a little bit of a nice niche over other ERP. AI assistant in Acumatica, we know that you just don't have access to the underlying tables, do you? You talk to and grab data through DAC. You have the DACs, which is a kind of almost like a SQL view where you're bringing in the semantics of your business and layering AI on top of a DAC rather than layering it on top of just a tabular database table. I think that's where you're gonna start to see a better Nirav Shah (35:10) Right. Right. Peter Nicholson (35:14) a better AI environment that's going to give you better answers than just seeing tabular data. You know, we talk about this when we think about, you know, who are my top 10 customers? Well, define customer. Is that all customers? Is that active customers? Well, what do you mean by active? A customer bought in the last 12 months? Like there's all of these semantics of a business of what an active customer is an active part. Nirav Shah (35:31) Right, right, exactly. Peter Nicholson (35:39) that can sit within a GI rather than anything that can sit in the underlying database table, I think Acumatica needs to leverage that. And I think they need to leverage the fact that they are coupling this with GIs and they are going to be able to produce better answers in their AI assistant than anything I can see coming from Microsoft and Copilot. Nirav Shah (35:49) Yeah. couldn't agree more. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this part is going to be probably a focused investment for them over the coming years. Just every release I feel like is going to be improvement, improvement. So if you're on the fence to be on this release, I would say get on it so you start learning it. Because the further you fall back, more you're going to have to learn. I would say just this is one of those areas, strategic investment, focus areas. Peter Nicholson (36:26) Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (36:30) Get on it sooner than later so you're comfortable with it as this functionality improves release after release. Peter Nicholson (36:36) Yep. Yep. Emily Browning (36:37) I think you made a really good point about the, I guess, the people governance around using AI. I have to say, I don't think I've seen too much said about, you know, as a human, what should you do when you get a response from AI? How do you, you know, use your brain then against that and, you know, having any kind of company policy? Because when I've spoken about how we can use AI and, you know, maybe what what processes could be replaced with AI. The response you tend to get is around, well, it's not 100 % perfect. And then our people are just going to use that and sometimes it will be wrong and then they'll just blame the machine, which isn't really how it should be. I don't know if it would entirely be like that because usually we don't... you know, just Google something and then take the first link, you know, before Google AI was there in the answers, you didn't just click on the first link unless you, there was the I'm feeling lucky button from the past, is it still there? You know, you don't just say, I'll take the first answer and that's what I take as truth, you would click on a few, hopefully do a little bit of research and get your answer. Peter Nicholson (37:34) Yeah. Nirav Shah (37:35) You deserve Peter Nicholson (37:41) Hmm Emily Browning (37:43) And think that is the same of the Google AI response now that you get first as well. I think it's getting better, but it almost exclusively used to be wrong when I actually knew the answer. So the concept of kind of as a business, putting together some governance for your people, this is how we expect you to use, to interact with AI, whatever you're doing with it, whatever we're saying you can or can't use and when you shouldn't or shouldn't use it. All of that aside, when you do use it, this is how you need to work with that information, this is how you need to apply your human brain on top of that, which is what gets us to the really great stuff. So it could be an interesting topic for another time because I don't think I've heard too much on that and it's probably something that businesses need to define quite clearly. Peter Nicholson (38:17) Mm. Mm hmm. Yeah, I'm hoping that expand on the AI studio for that least. And I put it back on the business. But if you have got someone that you know, you can train up internally to understand prompt engineering, I think the AI studio is going to be huge to at least put some guardrails in those kind of questions. I think you can create kind of, you know, a chatbot for this and a chatbot for that, at least give it a system prompt. You know, down to the Nirav Shah (38:34) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (38:59) you need to structure your output as this. We saw it, right? We saw it on CRM resolution notes or something. I'm hoping they expand on that AI Studio to be fully fledged system that we can help to govern some of that stuff. They also are doing an LLM token tracking feature. So that allows admins to see what the AI tooling is using. Nirav Shah (39:06) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Peter Nicholson (39:24) they've shown that you can use your own LLM, your own, if you've got an enterprise agreement with Anthropic or OpenAI, you can leverage that. But I think token usage of end users, how do we control that? Transaction count as well. How's this going to impact our transaction count of our ERP? We know that Acumatica is transaction based. We don't want to just like, yeah, exactly, money, money, It's the corporate world, right? It's capitalism at its finest. How can we leverage this? And I will say, shameless plug, because both of you knew this was coming. If you want to keep your transaction count down lower, you can leverage such things. Nirav Shah (39:50) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (40:04) as an Acumatica MCP server. So you can stay in your world of your Claude co-work or your chat GPT client. And if only there was a custom MCP server designed to be used with Acumatica. there is. By the time this goes out, I'd probably put a bazillion posts on LinkedIn about this. I'm playing with this right now an MCP server that can do a lot of the stuff that we see AI assistant doing. I can't speak about the future, the stuff that I've seen it do so far is really cool. And it's outside of this whole AI assistant, AI studio thing. I don't know how much it's going to cost. Is it a paid for module? And we bolt on to Acumatica. I don't know. Okay, fine. So you've got to pay for that. Fine. So you've got to pay for that. And you've got to pay for the tokens from Anthropic or OpenAI. Well, cut out Acumatica. Nirav Shah (40:45) It is, yeah. Yeah, it is. It is, yeah. Yeah, they're charging separately. Peter Nicholson (40:58) probably going to regret saying this cut them out, fight against the big man and use my acumatica MCP. Emily Browning (41:03) You Nirav Shah (41:05) Ha Yeah, which is awesome, awesome, All right, I'm out of here. Thanks, Peter. It's been great. Great podcast here, everybody. Peter Nicholson (41:06) There goes that any sponsorship deal with Acumatica gone. Hahaha All right, my last point, I think we've got a couple of bonuses floating around, but my last main point that I quite like here, the data guy is gonna obviously say about this, and it's the GI enhancements. So GI enhancements that we're seeing, one of them was that it doesn't show, it sounds so stupid now, but it doesn't show record count, right? So. Nirav Shah (41:15) Yeah, good. Peter Nicholson (41:36) When a GI gets refreshed, it actually runs two queries, one for the data and one for the total record count that powers the whole pagination at the bottom. You you see it like one to 50 of three and a half thousand records. Now on a large data set, that query, the count query slows and with a lot of records can fail. So there's a new toggle that suppresses that entirely. So you lose that. X of Y records display. But what you do gain is a faster load because then the power is just fully on that data query instead. So if you are running GIs as OData feeds, which I know I am straight into Power BI, or you're copying it into a lake house against high volume tables, disabling that is massive. So I love that they've done that. Sounds so stupid. Nirav Shah (42:28) Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (42:31) but it's really going to optimize data loads and data transfer. My second one, which I quite like, I don't think I'm leveraging this in a lot of places, but the ability now to be able to pass parameters from a parent GI into a nested GI. So you can use a GI to feed a GI, right? We call it nested GI's. It's just using one GI table inside another. That's existed for a long time. But the parameter value of that didn't flow through. So if your parent GI was filtered by a date range or a branch or whatever, the nested GI just ran independently. But now the parameter value can be wired all the way through at runtime. So that enables a proper cascading of a filter in hierarchical reports. So I think that's going to be great. It's not flashy, but it's really going to help if you are running into issues with nested GIs and passing filter context against a GI from a parent to a nested. That was super nerdy, but I like it. Emily Browning (43:34) Sounds very functional. Nirav Shah (43:36) Yeah. Emily Browning (43:37) Sounds great. It's functional, but it's great. Peter Nicholson (43:41) It's a pain point. Like you go to the Acumatica community and search for these kinds of threads, you'll find thousands about this. And it's just the limitation of the system has now been answered. Guys, what's your deep thoughts about this one? Nirav Shah (43:51) That's it. Yeah, I've heard about this one. Customers have asked for it. I know our dev team has been trying to figure out ways to do this. So this is good. This is good. We can move on now. Yeah, this is great. is great. Peter Nicholson (44:00) Good. Mm, whatever. All right, good. Nirav, I think you've got a bonus one, but I want to put my bonus one out, and it's not really a bonus feature. It's more of a warning that the classic UI is being sunsetted. We have a confirmed timeline. 2026R1, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand it as 2026R1, the one we're talking about, is... Nirav Shah (44:11) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (44:30) where the classic UI toggle is still there and works. As soon as 2026R2 ships later this year, that option of reverting to classic UI is gone. It's the first time in this version that we've seen Acumatica be clear and no longer a vague kind of someday. That's it. And the reason why this is important is because We've seen a lot of hiccups on the modern UI. I know they've ironed out a lot of issues, but the fact still remains if you are using customizations or any custom screens or any custom workflows, you need to start testing these because at some point you will be forced onto the modern UI when you upgrade. So, Nirav you mentioned it a couple of times that this is the one. you upgrade, if you're looking at upgrading Acumatica, this is the one to do it. Get on 2026R1. One, for the feature functionality we're seeing, and two, you need to get ahead before it's no longer an option. Soon it won't be optional, you will be on the modern UI. And you don't want to be stuck with customizations that breaking, screens that are failing. So use this time now whilst it's still optional. That's the reason why 2026R1 is crucial, because it gives you a solid six months whilst it's still optional, because soon it won't be. Nirav Shah (45:34) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Exactly. It's worth noting that the previous versions prior to 26R2 classic will be supported still until you upgrade. So if you're on the always current plan, this is the time to start thinking of converting all your screens to modern UI. But if you're not on the always current and you have the flexibility, it's still wise. Peter Nicholson (46:01) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Nirav Shah (46:13) to start getting onto the modern UI, even though the classic will be supported. Peter Nicholson (46:15) Yeah. Yeah, and this is one of these cases where it's like, you know, it's easy to go, well, you know, if it ain't broke, well, acumatical will break it. You can't just sit on it now. Start moving. Nirav Shah (46:23) Yep. Yep. Right. Emily Browning (46:26) I also think this is the beauty of a cloud-based ERP. It appeals to me because it's getting updated regularly. You're forced to update it relatively regularly. And it means you have an alive, up-to-date system. And a lot of what I've had to deal with in my career is very, very old systems that were able to just sit as they were, how we like it, for 15 years, and now it's a pile of junk. So this is really good for me. pro-change and I like to see this kind of thing happening in an ERP and if you have a business who hates change, then maybe don't go for a cloud-based one but I think this is how it should be, this is the way the world is going. I think this is good. Peter Nicholson (47:09) You Yeah, Like when you're on a static ERP and things, you your business changes and your ERP doesn't, that gap widens. That's where you start to see Excel reports trying to fill the gap and a bunch of reports have to get run. Bonus points, we're running out of time, but Nirav, think you said you had a bonus one, do you wanna fit it in? Ugh. Nirav Shah (47:34) Yeah I did. Finance, going back to my finance comfort zone here. And yeah, no kidding, right? The one I like is the general ledger anomalies. There's a lot of journal entry transactions that happen in the ERP system, right? It's focused around accounting as we know, but this is nice. It kind of is checking to see are there any unusual transactions happening. in the system. So anomalies, if you haven't used it, this has been out for some time now before it was experimental. Now it's really coming out in the forefront and a lot of customers are embracing it. And it's a great way to keep track of any leaks in your system, right? Somebody's doing something that they shouldn't be doing. There's a branch that's maybe trying to do a transaction that they shouldn't be doing, right? And or there's a Peter Nicholson (48:06) Yeah. Nirav Shah (48:23) Unusual purchase order amount that created this this transaction so it's good to keep an eye on that so it doesn't get too far ahead and you could start Recognizing a gap and fixing it so you know you still have a standardized system at the end of the day So that's that was my only one that I had as a as a bonus That's a good one that's coming out in 26R1 Emily Browning (48:43) I think that's a great one and important. Maybe doesn't deserve its status as a bonus. It should have been in your main a great one. It's going to catch things that would have been missed or people having to do quite manual analysis or check some daily report or whatever to find those things. It's again, another one. It's not flashy, but it is functional and it shows they're listening. Nirav Shah (48:50) Yeah, that is good. Peter Nicholson (48:49) Sure. Nirav Shah (48:59) Yeah. Peter Nicholson (49:00) Yep. Nirav Shah (49:05) Yeah, functional, exactly. Yep, Peter Nicholson (49:06) Yeah, yeah, yet you decided to choose syncing of draft orders to sales quotes over that. Nirav Shah (49:08) exactly. Hahaha! Emily Browning (49:16) Yeah. Nirav Shah (49:17) I'm always more interested in money coming in. Yeah, we can always figure out the rest, but let's get more money coming in over here, right? Let's get the business growing. Peter Nicholson (49:20) Hahaha You Alright, fine, I'll give you that. Emily Browning (49:29) Fair. Nirav Shah (49:32) So that was mine, that was my bonus. That's all right. Somebody has to fund these things. Peter Nicholson (49:32) From a data guy that is not right. That's not right. Data integrity is more important than that. Any other bonuses? we between the three of us? Is there any other bonus points you want to say? There was a load, right? There was like tagging of documents. The document management thing is better in Acumatica Nirav Shah (49:45) I mean, there's ton. There's Outlook. There's a ton of new Outlook things, the deeper Outlook integration, which is pretty cool. Approval workflows for inventory adjustments, which is nice. I have some safeguards around that. know, build.com. Yep. Peter Nicholson (49:59) Hmm. Emily Browning (50:00) Mm-hmm. Peter Nicholson (50:02) Manufacturing departments are like being able to group work centers. That's quite a good one. Nirav Shah (50:08) Yep, yep, yep, yep. So I think we'll put a link to the release notes for 26R1\. It's GA already. So if you haven't seen it, then scan that. There's going to be something for everybody out there that's on Acumatica that's looking to upgrade here. they usually make these improvements across the platform so every edition gets something at the end of the day. So if you're on retail, if you're in construction, if you're in manufacturing, professional services, you're going to find something that Acumatica has enhanced. Peter Nicholson (50:45) Yep. And whilst you're scrolling down below the video or below the podcast episode into those show notes whilst you there hit that like button, hit that subscribe button and the share button. You might as well hit all three while you're there. Yeah. So I think that's a wrap on 26R1\. So as always, if anything we've covered today is relevant to where you are with your ERP. Nirav Shah (50:57) All three. Peter Nicholson (51:12) whether that's you're on Acumatica as a live system or you're implementing it, you've got an implementation or a migration in progress, or you're just keeping an eye on where the platform is heading. Feel free to reach out. We live and breathe the stuff, stuff we're passionate about. If you've got any other questions or if you've got your own opinions on some of the stuff Acumatica is coming out with, then just let us know. The contact details are also in the show notes. or you can find us on LinkedIn our LinkedIn page. So if you just search for the ABCs of ERP and beyond, you'll find that we have a LinkedIn page as well. We post a new episode every two weeks. So make sure you like and subscribe. We cover everything from project management to ERP, the technical, the demos, what we're seeing, what our opinions are of what's coming out and what is our forecasts or predictions for what's coming out in the future. with that being said, thank you both once again. And again, Emily, welcome to the team as a permanent member. Nirav Shah (52:15) Mm-hmm. Yep. Emily Browning (52:16) Thank you. Happy to be here looking forward to more. Peter Nicholson (52:19) Good and I will see you both in a couple of weeks time. Nirav Shah (52:22) Awesome. Emily Browning (52:22) See you then!