A veteran Acumatica consultant walks through the platform's built-in dashboards and reports, showing how sales managers drill into live data. The native tools work well out of the box, but custom reports get expensive fast, and nontechnical users hit walls when they need ad-hoc analysis or to pull data across silos.
So let's talk about Acumatica built in analytics capabilities. I've been in this industry for about 20 years now and it's so exciting to see the built in reporting and capabilities available in Acumatica. It's one of the best among the competitors. So if you are using Acumatica, you're really well served by that part of the product, which is my specialty. About a year and a half ago, Akumatic incorporated Power BI as part of the toolset. So you now even have even more power with the possibilities. Looking at dashboards, reports and key performance indicators, let me go through a quick demo of what Acumatica has available built in. So we have a baseline for my presentation. Let me just make my face a little smaller here. So this is one of the dashboards available from Acumatica is a sales manager dashboard. Pretty nice looking, easy to understand what you're looking at. Top customers, sales by month opportunities. So bringing data from different places of Acumatica. And as I put the mouse over a data point, I can see more details. So very intuitive. And another great functionality is let's say I want to see the details behind March 2015 numbers. I just click on this bar, it will natively drill down into Acumatica to show me a table that will have the underlying records. So in this case I see the salespeople for that particular month and the totals for that particular month. So pretty straightforward to drill down from a bar or a chart into the underlying table populating that particular data point. If you're looking from a, let's say a more regular, or in this case a financial report, I'm looking at the property and losses rolling 12 month. So I see the P and L accounts for each period. I see a column on the far right, I see the totals and by the same token, if you see one of these numbers and you want to see more details about it, just click on it and natively it will drill down into an underlying table showing the numbers behind that particular total. So in this case I see the account details for that particular month and the totals. Pretty straightforward. Now I also heard many challenges that people face sometimes with some Acumatica Systems, like on ERPs, you know, there are some challenges. So the first one is pretty common among all ERP systems. Acumatica does actually a pretty good job with the out of the box canned reports and dashboards. So if you have average needs for reporting in dashboards, you're really well served. However, some organizations have a lot of requirements they call customer requirements for reports and dashboards. And if that's your case, typically you, your team or your consulting company might spend days, weeks and even months building and customizing reports to your team. And this can be an ongoing issue. You know some organizations, they are very data hungry and they're always asking for different questions for different reports. Licensed dicing and this can become a really costly part of your business to keep up the request from business people when it comes to reports and dashboards. Next challenge is when it comes to advanced analytics. So just to give an example here, if I'm in this dashboard and natively when I click to drill down it goes always to the underlying data showing the summary of this bar by given perspective. My example when I click here, I see by salesperson by month total. What if you want to drill down into something different? It's possible to do it. Yes it is. But usually to make the kind of drill down into something different across different modules and whatnot can become very complex. It might require a lot of hours from experts to do that job. Usually in a more advanced analytics platform. A drill down or drill through from one place to another and is something that even users with little training can do. And that's not something built in with the analytics capabilities of Acumatica. If you need advanced analytics, you have to use another tool like Power BI in us that we really take it to the next level. Next end user empowerment, the Acumatica built in functionality. It is overall easier, much easier to use than many of the competitors reporting platform. But still overall you need to be fairly technical or have the time to go through quite a bit of training to become self sufficient. So if you're a business, a busy business person that needs to be empowered, that need to be doing your own reports and dashboards, the frameworking in Akumatica might be too complex for them. They might need, you know, these people, these business people that don't have the time to go to the technical training, most likely they'll have to, you know, when they have a new request they have to put a request in the ITQ and wait until that particular reporter dashboard has been customized for their specific needs. And you know, nowadays people need to make decisions quickly. They can't wait and they don't want to wing it. So if people need end user empowerment for reporting, the analytics platform from Acumatica might present some challenges. Finally, data silos consolidation. Pretty much every organization has several data silos. You know, you might have Acumatica for your erp, maybe for your CRM as well. Maybe use another CRM system like Salesforce. Maybe you have a POS system, a payroll outside of Acumatica, and from a business standpoint, you want to see all of your data together. You want to consolidate your data silos to do really well data consolidation. Maybe you have a multi company different Acumatica sites. Maybe you have some businesses that are using Acumatica, some other business are using other ERP systems and you need to bring them together. You need to do multi company consolidation. If you don't have a data warehouse, that can be very challenging and very time consuming. So also, Acumatica doesn't have an enterprise level data warehousing capability readily available to be deployed. So that might be also another challenge.
