Stop Being a Button-Pusher: Acumatica Automation Schedules

Peter Nicholson (00:24)
And welcome back to the ABCs of ERP and Beyond, the show that looks at ERP from three different seats. Most ERP advice comes from one chair, the partner who sold it or the user who's got stuck with it. We try to triangulate that. Narav Shah gives you the VAR's view. He's at AdCirrus ERP and implements this for a living. And I come from the nerdy data and systems side from inside the business that runs it day to day.

And Emily Browning, who can't join us today. Well, she's the one that keeps us honest on business process, project management, the people and the workflow the systems actually mean to serve. ⁓ she's off this week, so today you've only got two of the three seats, the partner and the data side. So we are getting hands-on. And hands-on is the point of this episode. Most teams are still checking the same buttons, say every morning, same screen, same filter.

Same process button and almost nobody realizes that Acumatica will just do it for them on a timer, on a schedule. No code, no integration, no consultant required. So Narav is going to share his screen today and we're going to build one live. We'll take an example of where you can leverage automation schedules within Acumatica. It's one of the most useful features in the system and one of the ones that's probably least used. So

without further ado, welcome back, Narav.

Nirav S. (01:51)
Hey, hey Peter. Yeah, happy to be back again and and do one of these episodes. We feel like it's we haven't done a live demo in a while, and showed some features of Acumatica. You know, we we did that a lot in season one and two, I feel like. maybe even part of three, we did we did live demos for Acumatica and Dynamics Business Central. So we do for those that do enjoy the live demos that we do and and get some value out of it, we

Do plan to put out some more live demos here in our upcoming episodes. and this is one I think doesn't get a lot of fair play. I feel like in the Acumatica space. I think everybody knows it or has heard of it, but has maybe haven't seen it or don't really know the true like extent of what they could actually do with automation schedules. And it's a feature that I

personally use in my day-to-day by using Acumatica. And for all of our customers, we recommend them using it wherever they can as often as they can. because it basically takes away this question, right? Where there's a person that's required at a specific time to do a specific task and is very repetitive. And that's what this particular function feature

automation schedule is designed to solve is to take away that specific time hitting a button and it could be by one person or multi multiple people, that button is automated and it happens every day as as you schedule it behind the scenes, right? So that person is actually more now looking at exceptions and looking at, you know, the day to day that they have to do to add value to the business instead of being this button pusher.

Right, to ensure this this this process runs on its own. So it's very it's not a customization, it's not, you know, something you need a consultant on, as you mentioned, Peter. Right. this is all UI based. It's all just understanding some of the configuration, where this is accessible for you in Acumatica, and how to quickly activate it, right? And there's the I do need to add a caveat to this. whatever advice we're giving here.

Peter Nicholson (03:47)
Yeah.

Nirav S. (03:56)
And let's say you're live in Acumatica, you're listening to this on the way to the office, or you are you know at lunch and you're listening to this and watching this podcast, do this in test first. Make sure this is gonna work for you in a test environment. The last thing you want is like, for example, you release 5,000 invoices, but they don't get released the way you generally release them, right? So I'll just say, do what we are kind of going through today.

Peter Nicholson (04:13)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav S. (04:21)
Do it in like a test tenant or if a s if you have a sandbox, do it in a sandbox and run through some scenarios and then once you're comfortable, then do it in live. Cause this could have some meaningful impact. cause it's usually these processes directly impact the general ledger, directly impact customer subledgers, right? vendor subledgers. So you kind of have to be a little bit careful here.

And word to the wise, do it in a test tenant. So you could iron out the details and everyone is happy and then do it in live.

Peter Nicholson (04:54)
One of the tips for test tenant, because you can buy a sandbox from Acumatica. ⁓ the other way is you have it on the same instance and just for this kind of light testing, just have it on the same instance, do a snapshot of production and have a separate one, you know, just flip to it on the top right hand where your username is to test it in there. but you're right, because when we talk about automation schedules, well.

Nirav S. (04:59)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Okay.

Peter Nicholson (05:20)
typically we see automation schedules. The first ones, if you're venturing into them, is you'll see them on any process screen. So in any module within Acumatica, you've got that subheading of processes where you can do things en masse, things like process sales orders, which you know you can create shipments from that process screen. it'll be there that will you'll probably be the first time you are trying out automation schedules, and those process screens are progressing something further through the process.

But every process screen impacts something, some kind of general ledger. It might just be moving value from one general ledger bucket to another, GL account from GL account. It might be, you know, if you're moving inventory, so

Yeah, definitely be careful and that's that's where the sandbox is. And you're right, if you haven't set it up without with the right guardrails, you could end up send sending out those five thousand invoices. But ⁓ yeah, you've got to be careful. and also I wanna touch upon what you said there, because

Nirav S. (06:06)
Yeah.

Ex exactly.

Peter Nicholson (06:20)
Modern ERP is very different from old ERP when we talk about automating things. When we talk about automating a process, it's something that's happening in the background. It's it's a code that's executing in the back end of the ERP that's replacing the front-end end user doing something. And of course, whenever we want to do something in the back end and automate it, that typically meant custom code. That typically meant some kind of

cron job that executes a stored procedure in the background and it would have to have that customization or separate code built in to be able to fire that off in the background. What I love about automation schedules in Acumatica and Business Central have something kind of similar in the the way they go they go about it is that you can at least build this from the front end and configure it. Now we've moved from customization to configuration.

because it's like a it's more of a it well it is it's a native feature. We don't need any developer to write specific code. We're just configuring it through the same UI that we transact everything else through in terms of the ERP.

Nirav S. (07:30)
Yeah, I f and there's also one other kind of feature that we should mention here. It should should not confuse the both these two. One is called business events. And the other one, what today we're gonna focus on is automation schedule. And then the quick difference between both of that. Right. I feel like Peter, I don't know if you feel a little differently, but you know, you've used business events, you've created for your company many times over again in different use cases. But I feel like business events are more kind of

reactive something happens and then you go ahead and you know it it sends out some subscriptions some subs subscribers emails so far and so on so forth versus automation schedules are more proactive like it's it's you don't have to invoice because let the let the automation schedule invoice for you right you don't have to mark close your sales quotes that are expired let the automation schedule do that for you that type of thing

Peter Nicholson (07:58)
Yes.

Nirav S. (08:21)
So, you know, really two different concepts here. we should probably do a separate section on or a a podcast on business events. I think there's a ton of value there. Th that that does a lot of stuff in Acumatica. and again, that just goes with Acumatica's theme is you know, put more power in the end user's hand. Don't do the customization, right? Stay away from customization. So

Peter Nicholson (08:29)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Nirav S. (08:42)
Ecumagan does a really nice job of that. and we're just kinda just focusing on the automation special piece of it today.

Peter Nicholson (08:45)
Yep. And I

think also the business events is is more it's more comprehensive because with a business event you can monitor something. Because this has happened, go and do something else. Right. So a business event is typically monitoring something, like it might be monitoring a GI. That normal position is the GI is completely empty. As soon as a GI populates with a an entry, a row,

Nirav S. (08:58)
Yep. Yep.

Peter Nicholson (09:11)
then you know it could be it could be anything, right? It could be an anomaly, it could be a variance that shouldn't be there. Go and that is a trigger, as you said, reactive. Go and do something else. It might be go and email someone, it could be sends a team's notification. It could even be run an entire import scenario. so I think there's a lot more powerful, but it's slightly different. It's reactionary, it's because this has happened in one area of the system, go and do this in another area.

Nirav S. (09:31)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (09:38)
Whereas automation schedule is something that's repeated admin that you do that you would like to just schedule so it happens in the background. So things like releasing shipments, creating pick lists on Mass, anything within that process. and I would say yes, we we have and I wanna touch upon this actually, because I wanna see what your side from the var side thinks about this. For me as an end user,

Nirav S. (09:38)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (10:04)
When we first implemented Acumatica almost a year ago to the day, we said to everyone, we sold it as this amazing ERP that does these automations. However, we were very clear with our end users and said we will not be turning on any automations in the first kind of phase or first period, first six months of being on Acumatica, simply because users need to understand how all of the screens work.

what good looks like, what happens if it breaks. And then once we fully understand what the system's doing, can we then automate those things? It's I always likened it to a pilot, right? A pilot learns how to manually fly the plane. And then ultimately as he's more experienced with flying, then you get into the commercial airliners where yes, 90% of the flight, it's on autopilot. Everything is automated. But he has

Nirav S. (10:57)
Yep.

Peter Nicholson (10:58)
complete control and knows how to do everything that the plane's doing manually because at time that the automation fails he can identify where the failure happened, be able to cover it, cover the automation, and then correct and be able to put the automation back in place. It's the same approach that we used for ERP. So it's only been recently that we started to switch some of these things on. Now you as a VAR, when you're selling ER ERP,

And this this new way of being able to configure stuff and you don't need a bunch of customization. You can automate boring admin. What's your approach when you know, you you might have in the first few pitches spoken about the ability to automate more, but what happens actually when the customer's gone live, when when you start to approach the idea of automation?

Nirav S. (11:47)
Yeah, it's great question. I think most of it has to do with, you know, of what processes based on their industry we know have just have to be automated, right? It's just too much time, too much admin to keep it manual. on how basic ERP does at the end of the day, versus waiting, you know, kind of a year, six months here to automate, you know, something that

should have been maybe automated phase one, but they need to get familiar with that process. They need to kind of still double check that data before they have an automation schedule running and and and doing that specific function for them. An example of how we just turn it on, you know, immediately really is like, let's say in your e-commerce customer, you take payments through Shopify. And when you when those orders come into Acumatica, the prepayment also follows that order. So when you ship that order,

And you've created the invoice. Why would you keep that invoice open when there's already a payment that came in? Right. And you ship the goods. So that payment should auto-apply to that invoice. So basically, upon shipping that order to auto-generate the invoice, to auto-apply the payment and close the invoice, right? Nobody in an e-commerce world, that invoice is really meaningless because the customer's already paid for it.

So, you know, we'd kind of know some of that stuff in advance that we'll kind of say, okay, we're this is something that we know we're gonna have to automate. And maybe that's something that they were doing manually before, right? Because maybe they're using QuickBooks and they're had to generate an invoice to recognize the revenue, then the payment would come in from Shopify. So they'll wait until they do a bank rec potentially and then apply that bank rec payment to the invoice manually. A lot of manual steps, right? So they're like those kind of our immediate wins with automation schedules.

Peter Nicholson (13:17)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav S. (13:25)
Where you could, you know, kind of recommend that right up front, saying, you know, this is a step. As soon as you ship, recognize revenue, apply payment. Really no one is doing that. The system is doing those steps. So we we we make those recommendations. But then there's other places where, when you create a pick, right? Maybe when you create picks, you don't want the system to start spitting out picks without, you know, without anyone looking at it or without anyone trying to make a decision on what parts I want to pick first or what type of orders I want to pick.

you know, today or by the end of the week, maybe a little bit more control there, right? But once you have a rhythm, I always feel like this on a rhythm, right? Like it should just feel like it's it's it's the right time to do something because it's part of the company's like just flow. Okay. It's part of the flow. So once you figure that out, like we do this every time and the we apply this filter and then we, you know, get these, you know,

the these orders to process a certain way. And we just do it every week at you know, every Tuesday at three o'clock. You know, when you get to that point post go live, that to me are light bulbs going off of my head saying, This is a great automation schedule can candidate here. Let's try to automate that. Right. And that takes a little time. You don't you don't get to that flow or that rhythm of of of just consistency immediately.

Peter Nicholson (14:42)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav S. (14:42)
You gotta settle in, you gotta know how Ecumatica works, you gotta know the type of output you're getting. Cause that's you know, maybe you're changing a ton of processes that you just don't know yet. So once you get to that point, there's a lot of that automation schedule conversation that comes out post-go live. And like you mentioned, Peter, and you know, you're coming up to a year for your for your deployment and kind of meant what I what I think you mentioned is in the last like maybe five, six months, you really took advantage of a lot of the automation schedules versus the first six months when you when you jumped on. So

Peter Nicholson (15:06)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav S. (15:08)
you know, we try to we try to provide best practice, you know, knowing what we know, their industry, their business, you know, kind of immediately like common sense that you know, we need to automate this because this that those two or three steps don't doesn't add any value to your process. versus us waiting and and understanding what that flow rhythm.

Peter Nicholson (15:25)
Yep. Yep. And I the other the the the power of automation for me is it's if you were to categorize the different steps in a process, if you had order to cash for example, that massive process, there's gonna be different things in that process that you would have identified during the migration from your old ERP to your new. One of them is gonna be a bunch of legacy process that you just need to kill

You don't no one knows why you still do it, why you print that piece of paper out. it doesn't add any value to you or the customer. if you stop doing it tomorrow, nothing would go wrong. So stop doing it from tomorrow. But then there's other ones. There's the value-added processes, which is things like raising the sales order in the first place, right? The customer that adds value to the customer because they're going to get their goods. It adds value to you as a business because you're going to get revenue.

Nirav S. (16:01)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (16:18)
So that you want to still do and encourage. You want more of that, obviously. But then there's also this this bucket of process steps that's actually the biggest one. And it's these non-value add things, but you have to do them. Because if you don't, the process stops. The customer doesn't care that you have to click this button. But if you don't do it, the rest of the the chain of events can't happen, right?

Nirav S. (16:24)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (16:47)
And it's those where the type of the steps we're talking about here, those ones that are often admin heavy. And those particular categories of steps are the ones that absolutely you should automate. You're like, it doesn't add any value, but we have to do it. It could be for compliance reasons, for example. Yeah. If we can just get this automated, we don't have to worry about it anymore. So I think that's crucial of why we want to look at some of these automation schedules.

Nirav S. (16:47)
Yep. Yep.

Yep. Set it and forget it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Set it and forget it.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (17:16)
The other two reasons, and you kind of said about it, like when a company gets towards that that situation where they're like, right, this is what we do, we do it at 3 p.m. every day. Well, there's gonna be a ton of customers out there that will never get there because John does it one way, David processes shipments in a different way, and you will never get to that consistency. And I think what automation schedules does is it gives you that consistency. Once set up, that job runs the same way.

Nirav S. (17:16)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (17:45)
same time right there's no more Dave does it slightly differently there's no like backlog on Monday because Friday was like a half day or or you got super busy like it just hits it you know that automation schedule fires the same time every time on that schedule and I think also that that whole idea of you know the Monday backlog will help CFOs out there right you know the consistency and the approach of an automation schedule.

Nirav S. (17:46)
Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Peter Nicholson (18:13)
when David goes on holiday and it's like, crap, who who's gonna be posting the invoices? That no one's got time, no one's covering Dave when he's on holiday. we'll just do it on a Friday. Well, think about what impact that has to your kind of cash flow or even your DSO, right? Day Sales Outstanding. when it's just piling up because no one's really covering Dave and someone are just like pump it all out on a Friday so it's done.

Nirav S. (18:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (18:40)
When Dave gets back on the Monday. Well, an automation schedule removes the admin anyway and provides you that consistency. So, you know, you have you have less chances where revenue's just kind of sat waiting and it's not really there and it's sat in shipped-not-invoiced and you're not recognising the cash. it's huge for that.

Nirav S. (18:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, just because the system is doing these schedules and they're it's running this function automatically, you still have an audit trail. It still tells you, right, when this function executed, if there's any errors, if they're, you know, which which processes were successful, that type of thing. So, you know, there is that audit trail piece of it as well that you can always, you know, lean back to and say, Okay, you know, what happened when this ran essentially at the end of the day. So

it's not just something magically happens in the background, you'd have zero idea whether it ran or not, right? It's there it there there is this this nice notification audit table that that you could see. So I think part of today is to also share and show where this stuff is located, right? Maybe you might be new to Acumatica, you just went live or you've been alive for a little bit and just don't know that this exists. we want to show you where these things and and automation schedules live.

Peter Nicholson (19:31)
Yep. Yep.

Nirav S. (19:52)
And reside in Acumatica, how to kind of maybe turn a few on, right? What does the screen mean and look like for you guys? So you could start kind of researching it. Everybody has access, right? If you're if you're an Acumatica customer, you should know you have access to Open University that will help you learn this topic even deeper. you know, what we're gonna share here today is probably gonna be best practice, but you know, if you want obviously some some some more in-depth analysis.

And understanding field by field. always look at the open university. They some really good information there. or reach out to Peter and I. More than happy to, you know, share some of our knowledges and experiences, you know, post podcast, any, any, any time here. But Peter, should we should we just go ahead and share sh my screen and and show the automation schedule? All right, let's do it.

So here we're inside Acumatica, and we're in our dashboard view. I think we did like a dashboard overview, Acumatica overview at some point, but these are some nice dashboards that Acumatica has. If I just search for automation schedule, okay, you're gonna see a quick menu that pops up here. You have under system health monitoring, automation schedule statuses, automation schedule history.

AI automation history, kind of that's like how it's running, what type of GIs it's created, you know, what type of import scenarios that's ran, so on and so forth, potentially your anomaly detection. ⁓ and then you have system preferences automation schedules. Well, you want to be really is in here automation schedules, and you could then see which automation schedules you do have running based on which are active. The history is nice because you get an audit of anything that's ran. So if I just take us into history first, you'll kind of look at

All our different automation schedules that are running. So you'll see here we have update inventory, we have prepare and complete shipments, we have process stock items, we have prepare stock items, we have a direct AP cost anomalies ⁓ GI that's running. So we have quite a few automation schedules that are running in the background is telling you how many records it's finding and how many records it's processing, if there's any warnings and those, and if there's any errors. So this is a really good place, like.

I feel like someone who's in charge of let's say your AR manager or your AR clerk and you just want to know, hey, did my process run? You could quickly come in here and look at it, just all your different ⁓ automation schedules in the system, or you could search and see by which one is active, right? I could hit true here and see which ones I have kind of activated at the moment, and and then basically look at okay, I want to see how often update inventory ran.

This will update to update inventory and I can see it's running every, every minute, basically for me, right? ⁓ and the reason why I have update inventory running, if I open my update inventory schedule, okay, open up a new tab.

We'll see kind of the setup behind the this automation schedule. And this may look a little like much, like, okay, wow, I need to first go into the the history and then I could go into automation schedules. You don't. ⁓ I'm gonna show you here real quickly how very naturally and organically, when you want to create a schedule because it's the right point in the business now, and it just makes sense. You need a set it and forget it type of model for a specific process because

Somebody is doing the same thing repetitively day every single day. we'll show you how to create that from a process screen perspective. But here inside this automation schedule, we we define what we're gonna be automating here. And it tells us the screen that we're automating is process shipments. We're processing the shipments, and when we process the shipments, we're updating inventory. Under details, we could limit or ⁓ keep some controls around.

How, you know, how much we want this automation schedule to run, ⁓ how many times we want it to execute, ⁓ and do we want it to expire on a certain date? ⁓ right? If there's if there's specific ⁓ aborts that happen in the automation schedule, do we want it to completely deactivate if that happens, right? That no longer run the automation schedule. So we could also kind of look at that. How many branches do we want to process this automation schedule in? different companies.

In in Acumatica. So kind of think of it that way if you want this to affect different companies. when was the last time it was executed, last executed, next execution, what time zone you're in, right? All the kind of simple stuff here. generally, best practice if you're doing this again on a day in and day out, you want this to run every day, right? You don't expect this process to change in the near future this year, next year, year after that.

Just go ahead and write no execution limit. Go and flag that. So don't have to worry about this expiring on a day and then it's not running all of a sudden. And then you have to come back here, figure out which automation schedule it is and and and activate it again. ⁓ and keep full history. We always recommend keeping full history of this so it shows up on your on your audit audit list. Okay. Just quickly kind of going through a few other other tabs here under schedule. How often do we want this to run? Daily, weekly, monthly, in a specific financial period.

Right. Again, think of this as how often do you do this in the same particular process? Okay. some could be daily, some could be just weekly, some could be monthly. Okay. I could see like you having specific ⁓ journal entries that you create automatic automation schedules around ⁓ that post once a month, kind of month end.

Right. So that would be a good candidate for your for an automation schedule that gets maybe posted only every month, every 30 days on a specific time, potentially. Okay. And that's that execution time here. You put the starting, the start time ⁓ and the stop time, and it'll go ahead ⁓ automatically, once that time trigger hits based on the next execution date, we'll go ahead and release that journal entry.

Conditions and Peter, you and I were talking about this right before the episode, is you know, you could really get down and ⁓ create different combinations of the same automation schedule. So, you know, an example Peter, you and I were talking about prior to the podcast is let's say for customers that are going UPS or no, let's say shipping shipping ⁓ ship via LTL, you don't wanna go ahead and invoice those type of orders.

In an automation schedule, maybe you want to keep them kind of in queue for you. So you could go in and manually add the freight charge for those and then release the invoices manually. But for other shipments that go UPS, FedEx, USPS, or what have you, you want the system to automatically create those invoices. Well, you could add filters in here or conditions and tell the system, for example, ship via if it's this ship via or does not equal this ship via.

invoice the rest of the orders or ship the rest of the orders, right? You could really get kind of granular here and create different combinations, like I said, of the same process to behave different ways, right? Or pick up values so it it ⁓ can it it respects those conditions and takes on the function and process to complete that task ⁓ with or without these conditions.

Peter Nicholson (27:20)
anytime you try and put some cool thing, cool feature in, you're always gonna get that one end user goes, Well that's great, but it wouldn't work for this customer. Or it wouldn't work for this item. Well it wouldn't work when we do LTLs. it wouldn't work for FedEx. Fine, we'll filter it out. Handle those manually and then the other ninety five percent we can automate.

Nirav S. (27:29)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah, you can automate. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. So this is where you are now looking at this a little deeper, right? Okay, you you have eighty percent that you could automate. Well, what is out eighty percent? Let's automate that. ⁓ and can we apply a filter or a conditioner on that? So the eighty percent gets processed, and the twenty percent you look at manually and you review and you make decisions on, you know, how you're gonna pa manage and maintain those orders.

All right. And then you go to apply the filters to apply. So what you'll see here in the next moment or two when we go and create an automation schedule to the process. This basically are these filters in those process screens. And you could kind of pre-define these filters. So when it runs, it will go ahead and apply this filter and find those records along with the conditions that you've added and process it. Right. So you, for example, in this.

Update inventory. If I wanted to also define a printer and print a report directly to a printer when this runs on a day-to-day basis, it will go and spit this out and spit this out to a specific local printer or device sub printer or whatnot, right? Without me having to click extra buttons or even do anything for that matter, for the system to to react and ⁓ proactively go ahead and and print these, print whatever I wanted to print based on this process.

Okay. So a lot of power in the automation schedule screen. I'm gonna I'm gonna get back out of here and now go into a few process screens for us. I'm gonna go ⁓ into our sales orders. And under you're gonna find this automation schedule process a lot under processes. Okay. ⁓ under processes.

Have month multiple different processes. This is the sales order workspace. Then you have the inventory workspace, you're gonna see ⁓ something's here under process. Then you have purchases, you're gonna see process under payables, you're gonna see process. So anywhere under processes are mainly where you're gonna be able to quickly create ⁓ your automation schedules in Acumatica. So, like for example, if I go back to sales orders and I go to process shipments, right? ⁓ probably on a screen there. as my previous automation schedule that.

That I I'm not gonna save that one at the moment. So I could look at one of these processes here, right? I got print my print my pick and pack, I got confirmed shipment, prepare invoices, prepare dropship invoices, right? Print pick list, email shipments, print labels, so on so forth. So these are all unique steps in the process that we have here, right? And these steps kind of are predicated ⁓ on different type of predecessors here. So like you need to confirm the shipment before you prepare the invoice.

You need to prepare the invoice before you go ahead and you know maybe update inventory. So these steps are in a specific order, and you could then apply automation schedules around these steps, basically. So, like if I know once I confirm my shipments in Acumatica, so if you're not, you know, if you're using Acumatica, you'll understand what I mean by that. If you don't use Acumatica right now, confirm shipments basically is the process for you to.

quote unquote let Acumatica know that you've shipped the goods out of your warehouse and has gone to the customer, and ⁓ you have recorded the reduction of inventory and the debit of cost of goods sold at that point. And now you're gonna go ahead and the next step is to recognize that revenue and AR on the prepare invoice side. But let's say this confirmed shipment happens in your day-to-day process, right? You actually need somebody to go into the shipment, they print the label.

They go ahead and ⁓ confirm the shipment and that's done, right? Because you need a little bit more hand holding for that process potentially. ⁓ But the second part, the shipment's already gone. And let's say at the moment you have somebody in your AR team just waits, is sitting there and they look at this queue of what we call prepare invoices, of invoices coming in ready to be created based on shipments being processed in the system. So if I just take a shipment,

I'm just gonna go and do one here real quick. Say I go to my shipments page and screen here. And let's say I just take this Amazon order.

Okay. And I could go ahead and let's see I put a pet a box in here. So I put any box. right. And here are my items. That's my sales order. Here are my items. I have enough. it's gonna say ship 300, totally fine. I'm gonna confirm that shipment. Okay. I'm gonna confirm the shipment, basic confirming that it's gone. Now, in this step right here, I also could prepare my invoice here and update my inventory. However, I'm gonna go back to sales orders.

Process shipments. And if I go now to my prepare invoice, you'll see I have a record over here. Okay. Now I could be that AR person that's just looking at this list pile up, like all these shipments are done by my shipping team. And I need to just go ahead and invoice this out. Now it could be a very basic, right, rudimentary process here that you're just hitting, you know, opening the shipment, and then or you're selecting each line and you're selecting process to create the invoice, right? Using this.

But let's say now you want to add an automation schedule around this. And you want the system to automatically basically listen and find shipments that are auto-populating in this view for you.

And anytime a shipment appears here, you want it to automatically create the invoice. So what I would do at this point is I would wait for these shipments to come in. Basically, don't even have to come into the screen, but kind of showing you what you do, you could this little ⁓ kind of clock icon, or we call the schedule. You could add a new schedule. And when I add a new schedule, you'll see the schedule is basically gonna be on.

When I go to filter to apply, is the action gonna be prepare invoice? Because this action is prepared invoice. So it's automatically defining that for me. And I could then tell the system I'm not gonna put any ending date here because I want it to run anytime there's a there's a invoice that comes in. So no starting date, no ending date. Right? I do I want to print something? I could print it automatically to a printer if I want. Otherwise, let me just create it electronically. So I'm gonna remove that. Okay.

And then if I go into my details tab, I'm gonna say I'm gonna run this wide open. I wanna keep a history of this. I wanna run this daily. And maybe I wanna run it every minute. Okay.

Every time I see it sees an order out there. And I'm gonna write a description here, prepare invoices. Okay. And then I'm gonna save this. It's already marked as active. Okay. Now if I just let this order sit here for a minute, okay, I'm just gonna go back to my automation schedule.

History here.

Peter Nicholson (34:38)
Well

while we wait for that, I got two things. There I recently I found out that ⁓ a particular business like when you're going through a migration onto Acumatica, there's so much to learn. It's a new ERP, right? As much as it's so strong in user interface, user experience, there's a lot to take in. It can feel like you're drinking from the fire hose. But all it took is for a business that I know

Nirav S. (34:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (35:08)
The person in AR forgot that the process shipment screen even exists. So what did they do? They didn't say anything. They defaulted back to the way they used to operate in the old ERP. And this company were doing a hundred shipments a day. And they were manually going to every shipment on the shipment screen, going into it and clicking that green button where it says prepare invoice. They were doing that a hundred times, one by one a day.

Nirav S. (35:16)
Hmm.

Yeah.

⁓ boy.

Peter Nicholson (35:37)
Because they knew no different. That that's how they were doing it for twenty years in the old ERP and all it took was for them to forget about this screen that we see right now. Let alone the automation. So one, let that be a warning to people. ⁓ and two, anytime you're on this screen where you've put in these parameters, so you see those filters on the right hand side where you you know you might filter down to a particular customer or particular carrier or a particular warehouse. When you

Nirav S. (35:40)
Yep.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (36:07)
get this set up to the point where you're about to hit that process button, just pause and look for that clock icon. Cause if it's there and this is something you're doing on a daily basis, have that question with the business. Or even you've may have the authority to do this. ⁓ think maybe we should just put an automation schedule. I do this every every morning. Why can't we just automate this? 'Cause it's free. It it costs nothing. It's still the normal

Nirav S. (36:27)
Yeah, exactly.

Peter Nicholson (36:36)
It's it's a baked in feature, it's doesn't cost any more money, it doesn't cost any more transaction count, just automate it.

Nirav S. (36:45)
Yeah, exactly. And I also say in Acumatica, anywhere there's a green button, okay, so like here, let's go back to shipments here. and we'll go to the second one. anywhere there's a green button, that could be automated. General rule of thumb. Anywhere there's a green button in Acumatica, that could be automated through an automation schedule.

Okay. So kind of think of it that way as well. Let me go back to my shipment. I didn't process anything, but you see that second Amazon order that I did? It's already invoiced because the automation schedule ran and picked it up, right? ⁓ and that's what we want. That's the whole purpose around this. Where if I see these these various different ⁓ if I go back to my process shipments screen here, and I see kind of shipments piling up here.

And someone is always going in here, opening up the shipment, just hitting the prepare invoice screen, going on to the next shipment, hitting the prepare invoice screen, going to the next next shipment, hitting the prepare invoice screen. Well, guys, that's a lot of waste of time, right? Use this power of Acumatica automation schedules and automate this. Create the automation schedule quickly through this process, as we did, and just hit add, you know, put put the different options ⁓ available that you need to put here to run this effectively.

no expiration date, how the schedule you want to run this in, your can any conditions that you have, any additional filters you need over here that you need to put in. So, you know, think about that, add that in here, and then once you have it, activate it. That's another really key point. We I see a lot of users get stuck ⁓ and they say, we created automation schedule, but nothing is working. We don't see it running at all. Well, it's because it's not active. So make sure you activate it so it runs. And then for the first few times, monitor it. Make sure it runs.

Look at the results of it. Did it create the right invoice? So if I go into back to our example here, and if I go to sales orders invoices, the first invoice I should see on my screen is my Amazon invoice. And you see here, my my Amazon invoice is over here. And just look kind of press spot check it. Did it create the invoice the way I wanted it to? Right? ⁓ addresses, all that type of stuff. Like, you know, anything that matters. ⁓ so you want to make sure that the output is what you expect when the automation schedule runs at the end of the day. So

You know, that's that's obviously very good type of information. If you go to audit history for the order, it'll tell you that the admin ran it over here. Okay, because I'm logged in as admin, but whoever created that automation schedule, that's that's that's who's gonna say it was created by essentially. So also kind of keep that in mind when the automation schedule runs is more the system is running it based on the user ID who created the that that automation schedule. So, you know, I hope this kind of demo of automation schedule was useful.

to to our ⁓ audience out there. I think this is kind of a feature that gets underutilized, like I said. ⁓ but again, depend it depends on where you are in your journey with Acumatica right now. How close are you to starting to automate? Are you doing things repetitively? And are you ready to take the step? Right. so consider this, look at this. A lot of great help documentation at Acumatica Open University around this as well, you know,

Peter, you and I obviously always available to take questions on helping anybody ⁓ with these f with these functions using automation schedules. But it could you could do a lot. The filtering, you know, there's some variability around filtering you could do as well. You could put an aunt at and and symbol ⁓ on there so it kinda looks out in perpetuity and definitely. ⁓ always finds the today's date in in in in

Certain filters will always apply today's date as is running the automation schedule. So it's things like that. There's a little bit more, you know, kind of in depth type stuff that you could do outside of today's demo and automation schedule, but this is a great starting point, I feel like.

Peter Nicholson (40:32)
Yeah. And those filters, remember the I think the filters in Acumatica are great because they also have those dynamic ones on the date filters where you can put like at today or at end of week, month, year, whatever. ⁓ so you don't have to worry about like if you if you don't leave it blank, you if you hit the calendar, ⁓ the little calendar icon to the right hand side, you'll have those dynamic ones.

Nirav S. (40:59)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (41:00)
⁓ even

Nirav S. (41:01)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (41:01)
quarter start, quarter end. So if you've got a process that has to happen at quarter end, and you think, how do I tell Acumatica all of the quarter ends? Well, you don't need to, right? You just set it as a dynamic one here with the at quarter end, which is really useful. Whilst on the subject of dates, this is a key one because this if you are looking at setting up an automation schedule on preparing of invoices.

Nirav S. (41:11)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Nicholson (41:28)
⁓ which is a really nice one to start with. There's one key checkbox that will catch you out if you don't remember it. We only stumbled upon this ⁓ recently when we were setting up one where if you're in a scenario where you expected to ship this you know on Tuesday the second and that pick list sat in the warehouse for two weeks.

Because of, you know, maybe the customer phoned up and said, Yeah, guys, hold that shipment, don't send it for a couple of weeks. Then you go and, you know, it gets picked, shipment gets confirmed, it gets picked up by this process shipment screen and invoices out. What it's going to invoice it out at will be the shipment date by default. And if that shipment date was two weeks ago, you've just stolen two weeks worth of payment terms from your customer. If that customer's on 30 days,

You've suddenly just given them 14 days instead. So, Narav, if you go to the sales module and in sales orders preferences, this is preferences item, ⁓ there will be a checkbox you need to uncheck. And the checkbox is ⁓ use shipment date for invoice date. It's the bottom left, it's currently ticked because that is the default value. With that unticked, it uses the business date.

Nirav S. (42:30)
Yep.

Peter Nicholson (42:55)
Which obviously in in this scenario is ⁓ June twenty eighth. So untick that, save the preferences, and then it will just use that business date. So the date of which the the automation schedule runs on will be the invoice date used. So you haven't got to worry the warehouse now, haven't got to go and backday or change dates to shipments to make sure that they're not gonna affect invoicing. You would never wanna be in that position where the warehouse manager is concerned about the AR.

Nirav S. (42:55)
Business it.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Peter Nicholson (43:25)
dates like that's not his domain. He shouldn't have to worry about that. ⁓ so just watch out for that one 'cause ⁓ yeah, we had a few issues where suddenly the invoice was d was due in two days. And of course to Acumatica, we've now got an AR aging issue to the customer, they're now pissed off because they're going, Guys, you I'm on thirty day terms, you've only given me two and and we found that the issue was that one little checkbox. So yeah that's a that's a tip.

Nirav S. (43:27)
Yeah, no, exactly. Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Good tip. Good tip there, Peter. Good tip. Good.

Peter Nicholson (43:58)
any other caveats with this? I think you mentioned one about this kind of it for me it kind of fails site silently, right? When you're doing it as a manual process, you click that button to process, you get that error message immediately when something hasn't been able to process and you can find it in the trace of why it hasn't gone. ⁓ this will just silently fail. And it will it also does them sequentially as well. So if like the third out of fifteen shipments fails.

Nirav S. (44:14)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (44:27)
the other ones also fail in that schedule. So they do sa they do fail silently. So when you enable an automation schedule, just keep an eye on it for the first few days or few weeks, just to make sure it's still firing off successfully.

Nirav S. (44:34)
Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (44:44)
⁓ the other thing, just because I seem to be in a data governance mindset recently, ⁓ someone should own this. find someone that's responsible for maintaining automation schedules. Maybe put in a cadence of every quarter we go through all of our active ones to make sure they're still relevant ⁓ and they're still correct with the right parameters that we should set up. So someone should maybe that's defined by domain.

Nirav S. (44:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Peter Nicholson (45:11)
You know, AR look after the finance ones, warehouse look after the inventory ones, whatever. But make sure that s that the business knows who owns it.

Nirav S. (45:22)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, always to tie it, you know, tie tie a name to somebody. Just you know, sometimes you always have to come back and look at these automation schedules and ⁓ you wanna understand who initially created it and why they created it, right? it's it's it's like, you know, anything else, right? It's there has to be some sort of data governance and monitoring. Are we still is this still the right approach here? Should we be adding another filter, right? Is this maybe causing more work because we have to go back and undo things because it was initially automated now

You know, we have to pull that back a little bit. So yeah, I that that's a great point. You know, like anything else, it's a continuous ⁓ review of your business processes. You know, are they you know, this should fall into it at automation schedules.

Peter Nicholson (46:04)
And another one for Acumatica, if you're not using these processes, step through each process screen because dependent on your preferences, you might have things like hold document upon release. So you might be preparing all these invoices and you're thinking, great, I'm invoicing all of my customers. But you're just creating a bunch of invoices that are just held, that haven't been released.

And haven't all then been sent to the customer. So just check, you know, chase it, chase an invoice through and make sure it's getting all the way to the point of which it's fully released and it's being emailed out to the to the to that customer because you don't wanna sit and forget and go, hang on, it's been two months and we haven't had a single payment come through. And yeah, and you're sitting there with like two thousand invoices all on hold.

Nirav S. (46:44)
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (46:53)
So yeah, chase it through. That's what we did. We went from a super manual one by one shipment to let's start batching them through the process screens, chasing it through all the way to it's it's finished, and then and we started adding the automation to to the various steps when we were happy. And along the way you might go, hang on, no, that one customer we have to do differently. That's absolutely fine. Filter it out in the condition.

Nirav S. (47:16)
Filter it out. Exactly. Exactly.

Peter Nicholson (47:19)
Good. Thank you very much. I think that's a great demo of an underutilised part of the system, but crucial one, because these are the th kind of things that compound over time. And these are these kind of pockets of ROI you can find when you've got that AR person that's moaned pre Acumatica about how busy they are and having to invoice and they spend six hours a day doing. Well, here we go.

Nirav S. (47:27)
Yeah.

yeah.

Peter Nicholson (47:46)
This will free up their time. So that that justification that you made to the CEO, CFO, around "time saved" Well, we can save two hundreds two hundred hours a year on on you know this particular domain. Well, this is where you'll find it. You'll find it in these places. These are the time sinks, these non-value add but required steps that you just have to do. Automate them, set and forget, monitor, and then

Nirav S. (47:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

This is where you'll find it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (48:12)
you can focus your staff on more value added, revenue generating, cost reduction opportunities.

Nirav S. (48:20)
Yep.

Yeah. And this is this is a very low cost, high value, like you said, right? type of type of process. So and I think everyone should be thinking along these lines. And when they do their ERP implementations, how do we automate? Right? AI automation, you know, business events, how do we take more of that true admin, admin mundane work day to day out of someone's schedule?

And have them do more high value tasks at the end of the day. So

Peter Nicholson (48:50)
So if a screen in Acumatica has a process all button, you can certainly put it on a schedule. so set the filters, set the time, and let it run. and just check it's doing what you think before you fully trust it. if you want a hand setting this up properly, the schedules, conditions, the bits that we flagged around the caveats.

Nirav S. (49:04)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (49:12)
then his team at AdCirrusERP do exactly this for a living. So AdCirrusERP.com you can find them there. Um, Nirav didn't pay me to say that, it's just I'm used to used to having to say that. if you if you want me to moan or bash you around the head with data governance, you can find me petnicolson.co dot uk. everything I do, I blog about this stuff as well on LinkedIn and on my personal site. So check it out.

Nirav S. (49:27)
Yes right. That's right. Absolutely.

Peter Nicholson (49:35)
If you got something out of this, make sure you follow the show wherever you're listening. Spotify, Apple, YouTube. it will also go on YouTube because today was a video demo. so check it out there so you can actually see us setting up this automation schedule. Make sure you leave a review if you found it insightful. It genuinely helps us. We do this completely for free. There's no adverts, there's no sponsorship. We just do it for the love of it, as much as you can you can love an ERP. so with that.

Nirav S. (50:01)
Yeah.

Peter Nicholson (50:03)
Thanks for listening and Narav, I'll catch you in two weeks for the next episode.

Nirav S. (50:05)
Yeah.

You got it, Peter. Thank you, sir.