Acumatica Customizations
Overview
​
Acumatica customizations enable you to change or add screens/forms, reports, General Inquiries (GI), business logic of forms, database and to build new embedded apps. These customizations are done online with the Acumatica ERP Foundation using an Acumatica Code Editor, which is part of the Acumatica xRP Development environment, or with Microsoft Visual Studio. A full list of groups of possible customizations is given in the paragraph below.
In the Acumatica ERP, customizations are stored seperately from the Acumatica ERP software into a project. That means that when a customization adds eg. another column to a Generic Inquiry, that implementing such a customization doesn't require the reload the Acumatica ERP Foundation software. You just import the customization, and publish it. It also means that when the Acumatica ERP Foundation software is upgraded to a new release, my customizations are not wiped out. They make just work fine with the new release.
In addition these customizations can be subjected to security (access) rules and workflow incl. approval rules. Added fields are also available to existing and new reports.
SInce simple customizations can be done by non-IT people, they can be done fast but satisfying most of your specific business requirements.
An example of a customization done by a person with some IT experience is shown below. It shows how you can enable any form in Acumatica ERP to upload data from an Excel sheet when there is no import/upload tool (import scenario) available yet in Acumatica ERP.
Groups of Customizations
​
Customizations can be grouped as follows:
-
Simple Customizatons by non-IT people such as:
-
Changes to a form/screen
-
Changing filters in a Generic Inquiry
-
Changing existing reports
-
-
Customizatons by people with some IT experience
-
Customizations requiring the use of Microsoft Visual Studio
Simple Customizations
​
Simple customizations enable people who need to change their forms quickly to accomodate their business function needs, to do so by themselves.
The video (5 mins) shows how you can add fields to a Purchase order form and even to the database!
The video (8 mins) shows how you can add fields to an Opportunity form and even to the database!
The video (5 mins, 2020R1) below shows how you can link any entity (master record) to another entity (master record) without any programming. For instance a purchase order to a sales order.
Since the entity is a database field, the value in that field is dynamic, and changes automatically over time. That field will always have the up to date value such as eg. the purchase orders for an item.
The video (5 mins, 2018R1) below shows how you can change the validation dropdown list in any screen/form in 5 mins. This can be done by non-IT people!
Another example of a customization that can be done by non-IT people, is moving an action in the toolbar menu form the actions list to a separate toolbar menu item so that it is more visible. This example is actually described by one of our customers in a blogpost.
Customizatons by People with some IT Experience
​
Customizations that require some IT Experience may involve the knowledge of public data classes, and of how to insert some programming code. The programming is mostly only a few lines that you can get from a web application developer.
The video (8 mins) below shows how you can add a department field in the journal transactions forms so that you know to which department a journal transaction (eg. a purchase of a large printer) belongs. It is a bit complex since you need to know which database tables and fields to use, and which attributes to apply.
Blogs by Acumatica Technical Support people
​
Several Acumatica technical support people have started blogs where they give examples on how to make changes. Some of these blog sites are listed below:
-
See also our Free Resources webpage, and more specifically the one of Tim Rodman . The website of Tim Rodman has links to several other techsupport websites and forums.
Customizatons requiring usage of Microsoft Visual Studio
​
Customizations that require usage of MS Visual Studio will be needed when you want to change the business logic of a form. For instance for a sales order coming from an E-Commerce site, the items in the sales order have to be in stock, else a message will be send to the E-Commerce site that the item is out of stock.
The video (4.5 mins) below shows how you can create a form on any website and use it to publish information to Acumatica using web services. Watch a simple 3-step process of: (a) locating and linking Acumatica web services to an ASPX website, (b) creating a simple web form, (c) using C# code to publish the form results to Acumatica.
Importing and Publishing Customizations
​
Your company can do some simple customizations such as adding a new data field/column in a General Inquiry. Once you have done a customization, you need to publish it.
If somebody else did the customization on another ERP test site, and you want it on your ERP test site, you need to get a copy of the customization (zip file), import it, and then publish it. Always test it on an ERP Test site that has the same data (snapshot) as your ERP production site, else you could crash your ERP production site.
The video ( 2 mins, 2017 ) below will show you how to import and publish a customization.