Acumatica Modules and Features (Complete 2023 Guide)

Understanding and comparing ERP features shouldn’t be a daunting task. Yet, with the myriad of options available and the often opaque distinction between base features and add-ons, it can feel overwhelming.

That’s precisely why we’ve created this comprehensive guide to illuminate Acumatica features and modules for all users and would-be users. This article will discuss how Acumatica features are packaged and licensed as well as explain which features are included in which package.

So let’s get started!

The key to demystifying the Acumatica platform is by understanding the jargon on its website and marketing material.

Lets do a brief translation:

Add On: Acumatica’s term for module. An add-on is a group of similar features that Acumatica sells in addition to its base software. If you are looking on the website, the pages under the “Product” menu tab are all Add ons. Essentially, the rest of the website is set up to explain the benefits of different add on configurations.

Edition: An Edition is a group of Add-Ons that Acumatica has bundled together that fit a particular industry. On the website they can be found under the solutions tab.

Once you get these two terms straight you should be able to navigate Acumatica content with a better understanding and communicate with partners on their terms. Lets continue the discussion by diving into the most important topic, Add-Ons and what’s included in them.

Notable Acumatica Add-On Modules

Acumatica Financial Management Module (Always Included)

First, of course, is the Finance Module. Acumatica’s Finance Add-on is considered an add-on but is included in every package Acumatica offers. You do not have to use the financial tools but they will be included every time.

Here are the key features included:

• General Ledger: flexible accounts and subaccounts to enter batches, transactions, and vouchers. Simplified reclassification of expenses.
• Accounts Payable: bills, credit/debit adjustments, prepayments, track vendors and balances, initiate payments (print checks, initiate ACH, credit cards), vendor price-lists
• Accounts Receivable: invoices, credit/debit memos, overdue charges, credit limits, credit terms, write-offs, receive and apply payments, statements, price lists, dunning letters
• Account Management: track customer and vendor accounts, multiple account locations
• Banking: manage cash transactions, credit card payments, deposits, and bank reconciliation.
• Bank Imports: import bank transactions using .csv, .qbo, .qfx, or .ofx file formats.”
• Bank Feeds: Automatically download bank transactions from financial institutions into Acumatica. Includes 1 bank account for testing. Available for USA, Canada, and UK.
• Currency Management: Automatically download and maintain exchange rates; track payables/receivables in the vendor/customer currency; perform currency translations and revaluations. Maintain transactions in a single base currency. Prepare consolidated reports.
• Customer and Vendor Visibility: restrict viewing customers and vendors by branches, companies, or company groups.
• Credit Card Processing: pay bills and collect invoices using integrated credit card processing. Use native integration to Authorize.net or a third-party ISV.
• Tax Management: configure tax tables or connect to external providers to manage sales, use, VAT, and withholding taxes
• Reporting and Data Analysis: use generic inquiries, pivot tables, Report Designer, or Analytical Report Manager (ARM) to modify hundreds of included reports/dashboards or build your own
• 1099 Reporting: track 1099 payments to vendors and produce reports
• Commissions: track salesperson sales by period
• Time Management: attach activities to data transactions and link those activities to timecards for approval and tracking, track shifts
• Approvals: assign work and set approvals based on document details.
• Document Management: attach documents to data transactions for auditing and tracking
• Automation: workflows, scheduled processes, notifications

The tools above amount to a powerful financial management system. One that empowers any business with the functionality they need to track daily financial operations, produce accurate, insightful, and compliant financial statements, efficiently close their books, manage multiple entities, and do it all through the lens of a personalized dashboard from a single sign-on, on a mobile platform.

For more information on Finance Module, Click Here.

Acumatica Inventory Management

Acumatica’s Inventory Management module is designed to help businesses efficiently manage their inventory and stock levels and to provide visibility into their operations. The Acumatica Inventory Management is included in most Editions of Acumatica but is not mandatory.

Its main features are:

• Stock Items:  manage inventory with multiple units of measure, lot/serial tracking, multiple valuation methods, replenishment, packaging
• Warehouses: unlimited real/virtual warehouses and inventory locations; track costs, replenishment, and manage physical counts by warehouse
• Operations: perform inventory receipts, issues, and transfers 
• Kitting: create specifications for stock and non-stock kits, assemble and disassemble kits
• Matrix items: mass create/update similar items with different attributes. Different color shirts for example.

For more information on the Inventory Management Module, Click Here.

Acumatica Order Management

Acumatica’s Order Management module is designed to help businesses efficiently process and fulfill customer orders, and to provide visibility into their order management operations. Like Inventory Management, Order Management is included in most Editions of Acumatica but not mandatory.

Its main features are:

• Sales Orders Control: manage sales orders, returns, and exchanges. Fulfill orders by creating shipments and drop shipments. Invoice completed shipments. Print pick lists, ship and shop using common carriers when you purchase carrier integration.
• Sales Orders without Inventory Control: create sales orders and SO invoices for non-stock items.
• Purchase Orders Controls: manage purchases, vendor returns, and blanket POs. Receive items and track landed costs.
• Purchase Orders without Inventory: manage purchases and blanket POs. receive non-stock items on purchase receipts.
• Requests and Requisitions: manage requests, create requisitions, track vendor bidding, and automatically create sales/purchase orders
• Related Items: setup upsells, cross sells, and substitutes for stock and non-stock items.
• Special Orders: specify stock items as special order items and assign a separate cost layer.

To learn more about Acumatica’s Order Management Module, Click Here.

Acumatica CRM

The CRM module is designed to help businesses manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle.

Its main features are:

• Reporting and Dashboards: Accelerate decision-making with reporting tools that deliver customized views of your business overall and focused views of departments and functions.
• Sales Automation: Get a full view of opportunities and contacts. Gain efficiency with workflow-assisted lead assignment and sales management. Automatically link sales orders to quotes and opportunities.
• Business Intelligence: Deliver a 360-degree view of customer activities and information with drill-down capabilities, so everyone in your organization can better serve the customer.
• Integrated Marketing: Manage leads, improve conversions, measure campaigns, communicate with contacts, and more. Capture leads from web forms, lists, and events.
• Service and Support Automation: Reduce response times and support costs, Create a case from captured web forms or manual entry. Assign and escalate cases per policies. Ensure accurate billing with integrated financials.
• Lead Management: Assign leads to sales or partners according to customized criteria and data. Automatically generate lists based on user-defined criteria, like purchase history, to support custom campaigns.
• Account and Contact Management: Use AI with machine learning to capture business card contacts via mobile image recognition. Convert leads into accounts. Link contacts to activities, tasks, opportunities, cases, and documents.
• Email Management: Create emails with predefined, branded templates for rapid distribution.

For more information on Acumatica’s CRM Module, Click Here.

Acumatica Project Accounting

Acumatica’s Project Accounting module is designed to help organizations better manage and track the financial aspects of their projects, enabling them to make more informed decisions and improve their financial performance.

Its main features include:

• Project Quoting & Budgeting: manage project budgets, create change orders, and track budget vs actuals. Create project quotes and convert to projects.
• Project Billing: manage milestone, time and materials, cost plus, and other scenarios. Prepare pro-forma invoices.
• Project Inventory: track inventory costs and quantities issued to a project
• Time Entry and Billing: enter timesheets and re-bill based on time, costs, or other scenario 
• Multi-currency projects: track project budgets and invoices in the customer currency, manage profitability in the base currency, store transactions in any currency

For more information on Acumatica’s Project Accounting Module, Click Here.

Acumatica Payroll

The payroll module is designed to help organizations manage and process employee payroll, including tracking time and attendance, calculating and paying employee salaries and wages, and handling tax compliance and reporting.

Its main features are:

• Employee payroll setup: Allows users to enter and maintain employee payroll information, including salary or hourly wage rates, tax withholding and deduction details, and benefits and leave entitlements.
• Time and attendance tracking: Allows employees to clock in and out, track hours worked, and request time off through a web portal or mobile app. Managers can review and approve time off requests, and the payroll module can automatically calculate pay based on the approved time worked.
• Payroll processing: Calculates employee pay based on hours worked, salary rates, and any applicable deductions or withholdings. The module can also generate pay stubs and other payroll-related reports, such as tax forms and direct deposit notifications.
• Tax compliance: Handles tax compliance and reporting, including the calculation and remittance of federal, state, and local payroll taxes. The module can also generate tax forms and reports, such as W-2s and 1099s, as required by law.
• Multi-currency and multi-language support: Allows organizations to process payroll in multiple currencies and languages, making it easier to manage payroll for international employees or subsidiaries.

For more information on Acumatica’s Payroll Module, Click Here.

Acumatica Field Service Management

One of the unique offerings from Acumatica that separates it from other ERPs, is the inclusion of a native Field Services module. Acumatica’s field service module is designed to help organizations manage and optimize their field service operations. It offers a range of features to help companies schedule and dispatch field technicians, track and manage inventory and assets, and handle billing and invoicing for field service work.

Some of its main features are:

• Scheduling and dispatch: Allows users to schedule and dispatch field technicians to service calls, and provides tools for tracking technician availability and capacity.
• Inventory and asset management: Helps organizations track and manage inventory and assets, including tools for ordering and receiving inventory, tracking inventory levels and location, and managing warranty and maintenance information.
• Billing and invoicing: Allows users to generate invoices and quotes for field service work, and includes tools for tracking payment status and creating reports on billing and revenue.
• Service level agreements (SLAs): Provides tools for managing and tracking service level agreements, including the ability to set performance targets and track progress against those targets.
• Mobile app: Offers a mobile app that allows field technicians to access job information and update status in real time, even when working offline.
• For more information on Acumatica’s Field Service Module, Click Here

Other Acumatica Modules/Add-Ons

Global Financials

Acumatica Global Financials allows users to create companies with different base currencies inside a single tenant. This is usually useful for business who are international or do a lot of overseas sales.

The add-on lets you assign different base currencies to related companies to enable the option to share inventory items, customers, and vendors across related companies. You can also centralize approvals and get near real-time consolidated reports.

Intercompany Accounting

For businesses with multiple companies to manage Intercompany Accounting is available. With intercompany accounting you can automate accounting across multiple companies and manage them from a single sign on.

The add-on includes the ability to do:

• Create automatically balancing transactions involving branches in different companies.  Includes the automatic accounting and balancing of intercompany transactions based on GL account mappings.
• Create due-to and due-from accounting entries for transactions that span companies.
• Establish branches and companies as vendors and customers to automate buy/sell transactions AR/AP and SO/PO between entities.

Deferred Revenue

The Acumatica Deferred Revenue module is designed to streamline the process of managing payments and schedules for unearned/deferred payments.

It automatically calculates deferrals based on schedules, helping businesses adhere to revenue recognition rules. This enhances financial accuracy and can contribute to improved business efficiency and cash flow management.

Contracts

The Contract Management Add-On lets users set up and manage recurring customer contracts.

With features for:

• Setup
• Activation
• Renewal
• Recurring charges
• Overage billing.
• Contract templates
• Contract items

Fixed Assets

The Fixed Assets Add-On is all you need to manage fixed assets from acquisition to disposal.

Features include:

• Multiple books, depreciation methods, and calendars.
• Mange splits, additions, and transfers
• Automated creation, depreciation, and management of fixed assets including splits, additions, transfers, disposal, revaluation
• Create books to apply tax bonuses or apply different depreciation methods

Shipping Carrier Integration

Integrate with shipping carriers so you can get rate quotes, create shipping labels, get tracking codes, and get final shipping costs.

Native Support for:

• FedEx, UPS, Custom: integrated USA domestic shipping with FedEx and UPS plus the ability to create additional carrier integrations using the Acumatica platform.
• Stamps.com: integrated shipping using Stamps.com for USPS including shipments from the USA to international destinations.
• ShipEngine: integrated shipping using ShipEngine for 20+ carriers including originating shipments from USA, Canada, UK, Australia to international destinations.
• EasyPost: integrated shipping using EasyPost for 100+ carriers including originating shipments from USA, Canada, UK, Australia to international destinations.

Advanced Expense Management

Support for expense receipts, expense claims, and corporate credit cards including advanced processing and reconciliation of receipts.

• Enable employees to enter expense receipts, submit expense claims, and be reimbursed for expenses incurred using personal accounts or corporate credit cards.
• Customers can take a picture of receipts on a mobile phone and Acumatica automatically creates an expense receipt.
• After downloading credit card transactions, automatically assign employees and expense codes based on custom matching rules. Notify employees and attach photos of receipts to the created documents.

Outlook and Gmail Plugins

Native email integration with Outlook and Gmail:

• Create contacts, leads, opportunities, support cases, and submit AP bills from inside Outlook. Log email activities to ERP entities with one click.
• Log email activities to ERP entities with one click. Module specific features do not work without purchasing CRM, construction, AP document recognition, etc.
• Gmail Integration provides similar, but not identical, functionality as the Outlook plugin from inside Gmail.

Acumatica Editions

As mentioned earlier, in addition to a stellar set of Financial Management tools, Acumatica brings a lot more to the table. In order to provide business tools for a wide array of industries as well as manage the costs for individual companies, Acumatica organizes its functionality into “Applications,” “Modules,” and “Editions” so businesses can pick, choose, and pay for only the tools they need.

Editions can be thought of as groups of modules and applications that Acumatica has bundled together for specific industries.

General Edition

The General Edition is the industry-agnostic set of business tools that includes the financial management module and access to the Acumatica xRP platform.

The General Edition is Acumatica’s blank slate in which a user can add on only the specific functionality they need.

Distribution Edition

The Distribution Edition is tailored to businesses that rely on logistics and effective supply chain management to stay in business. The Distribution Edition contains Financial Management, Inventory Management and Sales Order Management.

With the Distribution Edition, businesses can manage inventory in real-time, streamline order times, get a clear view of their profitability by warehouse, product line, and location, automate cross-company transactions, and minimize costs by optimizing their purchasing processes.

Manufacturing Edition

The Manufacturing Edition is a complete multi-site, cloud-based manufacturing control, and planning system. The Manufacturing Edition comes with Financial Management, Inventory Management, Sales Order Management, and access to Manufacturing Foundations tools.

Manufacturing Foundations (Included in Manufacturing Edition)

Manufacturing Foundation gives access to common screens such as setup/preferences (BOM preferences, Product Order types, overhead, machines, tools, shifts, labor codes, work centers), processing screens (create/close/print production orders), and Entry screens (Labor, Material Issue, Moves, Receipts, WIP adjustments), and select inquiries/reports.

Manufacturing-Specific Add-Ons (Not Included Automatically)

Discrete Manufacturing  

A multi-level bill of materials with revisions, work centers, labor, materials, tools, overhead, routing documents, and more. 

Shop floor management with tracking of labor, materials, scrap, and work in progress against plan.

MRP

Material resource planning integrated with forecasting, scheduling, purchasing, sales orders, and inventory replenishment.

Product Configurator

Add configurable made-to-order product capabilities to manufacturing foundations.

Estimating

Add simple or complex estimates, revision control, fixed and variable overheads to core manufacturing.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling

Add finite capacity scheduling, employee skill levels, tool scheduling, available to promise, and what-if to core manufacturing. Engineering Change Control Manage engineering changes to your products and your associated data.

Engineering Change Control (ECC):

Manage pending changes, approvals, versioning, and review change history for your bills of material and routings. Control effective dates and coordinate changes with purchasing and production staff.

Manufacturing Data Collection

Automate shop floor transactions using a mobile scanning device. Use the Acumatica mobile application to issue material to production orders, move production orders between operations, and record time against production orders to improve efficiency and data accuracy.

Construction Edition

Acumatica’s Construction Edition allows construction companies to manage projects, budgets, documents, and reports as well as take advantage of pre-built connectors to critical industry-niche applications such as Procore, Proest, CFMA Benchmark, DocuSign, and more.

The Construction Edition comes with Financial Management, Project Accounting, Sales Order Management, and access to Construction Foundations tools automatically.

The Construction Edition allows access to optional add on modules like Project Management, Retainage, and Cost Codes.

Construction Foundation (Included in Construction Edition)

Foundation includes features only available in construction edition for managing construction processes for general contractors, home builders, subcontractors, specialty contractors, and land developers.

• Compliance: reduce liability risk with specific compliance management to track lien waivers, insurance policies, certificates, notices, and safety notices through configurable options.
• Subcontracts: improve efficiency and manage costs by tracking project subcontracts from creation to change management, compliance, and final payment. 
• Construction Reports: construction specific reports include AIA, work in progress, construction bonding, and substantiated billing.

Construction Project Management

Manage your projects using RFIs, issues, drawing logs, change requests, changes orders, daily field reports, photo logs, and submittals.

Retainage

Withhold money on vendor payments and track retainage on customer invoices throughout the project.

• AP Retainage: withhold amounts from vendor bills to a liability account, until work is substantially complete.
• AR Retainage: track and bill withheld retainage and associated sales taxes on customer invoices throughout the life of the project.

Cost Codes

Additional classification for accounts providing an effective way to organize, manage, track, analyze, and budget project work.

Specify cost codes on GL transactions, bills, invoices, sales orders, purchase orders, project transactions, and cash transactions for detailed reporting.

Retail-Commerce Edition

Acumatica’s Retail-Commerce Edition is designed to allow its users to maintain a consistent customer experience across all of its sales channels by tightly integrating its CRM and financial functionality with popular eCommerce and fulfillment platforms. The platform includes Inventory Management, Financials, Order Management, and Shopify and BigCommerce native connectors. With options for POS integrations.

Through Acumatica’s Retail-Commerce Edition, users can centralize visibility for all of your sales channels, automate key fulfillment processes, optimize inventory levels, streamline customer services, and much more.

Retail Commerce-Specific Add Ons

BigCommerce Integration (Included)

Connect Acumatica ERP to your BigCommerce site for omni-channel sales and fulfillment. Includes a connection to BigCommerce to sync sales orders, shipments, invoices, customers, inventory, pricing, and returns. Requires separate purchase of BigCommerce.

Shopify Integration (Included)

Connect Acumatica ERP to your Shopify site for omni-channel sales and fulfillment. Includes a connection to Shopify to sync sales orders, shipments, invoices, customers, inventory, pricing, and returns. Supports Shopify B2B entities (price list, customer organizations). Requires separate purchase of Shopify.

Amazon Integration

Automatically download transactions (orders, payments) in near-real-time from Amazon US sites.

What is the xRP Platform? (Always Included)

You may have seen information in Acumatica marketing material and the website referring to an xRP platform. While seeing the feature list of the xRP platform you may even think it is a separate project entirely.

However, you’ll be happy to find out that the Acumatica xRP platform is the framework that all Acumatica functionality was built on.

The xRP platform is the collection of tools that allow Acumatica to do many great things such as connect to other applications, store data, work on mobile devices, customize Acumatica functionality, and so much more.

Final Thoughts

I hope this guide brought some clarity to you on your search for a new ERP. If you have any questions or if you think there is something I have missed, please reach out in the comments.