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Acumatica Summit reveals how construction firms are leaving money on the table by not optimizing systems they already own
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SEATTLE — Picture this: An accounting clerk spending eight hours daily manually invoicing shipments, one by one, unaware that her company's software could complete the same task in 15 minutes with batch processing. When a consultant showed her the feature, her reaction was immediate: "How are we going to get this done every day?" followed quickly by relief when she discovered she'd been sitting on the solution all along.
That scenario, shared at Acumatica Summit 2026's construction and field services session, illustrates a problem costing construction companies thousands of hours and untold dollars annually: They're not using the systems they already paid for.
"Why are we not using our ERP system?" asked a presenter who spent 20 years as a construction operations director before joining Acumatica. "What's stopping us from fully optimizing our ERP system? Sometimes we just don't know what it can do."
The presenter recalled joining a construction company with a beautiful, well-organized warehouse—racks, bins, logical layouts, everything in its place. Except in the ERP system, where everything was simply labeled "Warehouse."
Workers would receive materials, put them away in physical locations, then later wander around trying to remember where they'd stored items when it came time to pick them for jobs. The company knew warehouse location tracking existed in their system. They'd just postponed implementation and never gotten around to it.
"We were able to get the locations in and become very efficient and effective," the presenter said. "The warehouse manager said, 'Why haven't we done this before?' It was probably a time thing and just not knowing."
That's the pattern that emerged throughout the session: features postponed during initial implementation, never revisited. Training that focused on basics, not optimization. Workarounds that became permanent fixtures because no one realized better options existed.
Another example hit closer to the bottom line. The same company was purchasing and receiving inventory but simply expensing all costs to get materials into the warehouse—freight, duties, broker fees, all of it. They weren't using landed cost functionality to properly allocate these expenses to inventory value.
"The benefit of that is when the CEO and the salespeople were doing negotiations with vendors and customers, they knew the margin percent they wanted to get," the presenter explained. "We had dialed our margins in. They knew they were accurate, and it gave them confidence in those negotiations."
Getting landed costs working properly required coordination with freight forwarders and shipping vendors to obtain invoices before materials shipped out—otherwise costs couldn't be properly allocated. It took effort. But once implemented, executives stopped guessing at margins and started knowing them.
An attendee from the audience added another common optimization: accounts payable invoice recognition. "That often gets overlooked," he noted, describing how the feature automatically reads vendor invoices and matches them to purchase orders, eliminating manual data entry that overwhelms accounting departments.
One attendee, a veteran of numerous implementations, pointed to a fundamental mistake companies make during the critical conference room pilot phase—the sessions where businesses map their processes to the new system.
"I think a lot of companies make mistakes by having executives in the conference room instead of the people who do the actual work," he said. "There's some ridiculous statistic out there like 77% of the workforce is disengaged. And we wonder why. It's because we're not asking their opinion—how do you do your job? How can we make your job easier?"
The dynamic changes dramatically based on who's in the room, he noted. Executives might think they know how work gets done. The person actually doing it knows the workarounds, the pain points, the 10 extra steps nobody talks about.
This connects to Acumatica's unlimited user licensing model, mentioned multiple times during the session. Unlike systems that charge per user—creating incentives to restrict access—Acumatica allows everyone to have appropriate system access without additional cost.
"With our unlimited license, that allows everyone to have access, which is different than almost every system out there," a presenter noted. The model supports getting actual workers involved in configuration and optimization rather than limiting access to executives and administrators.
The session revealed several commonly overlooked features that construction companies should be using:
Email Templates and Audit Trails: One company forces salespeople to use templates for sending credit applications, keeping finance in control of what documents go to customers. The emails automatically store in customer activity logs, creating audit trails. "If you're not the next person to come in and look at that history, it's there for the next person," a presenter explained. These templates can also tie directly to specific transactions—invoices, shipments, adjustments—creating complete documentation trails.
Case Management: When customers take deductions or file shortage claims, construction companies can track everything in case management rather than scattered emails and spreadsheets. All information stays connected to the customer and transaction records.
Inventory Recalculation: An attendee described a common scenario: inventory items get stuck in the system, so companies move them to an excluded warehouse and manually adjust them out during year-end financials—every single year. "We could just schedule the recalculation of inventory," he said. Many don't know the scheduled recalculation feature exists. Some companies now run it automatically every weekend.
Dashboards (or "Accountability Boards"): One customer renamed dashboards "accountability boards," and presenters liked it enough to adopt the term. Pre-built dashboards exist for AR clerks, AP clerks, shipping clerks, and other roles. Companies can set these as user homepages so critical data appears immediately when employees log in. "What are our shipments today? Are there any late shipments?" a shipping manager can see instantly. Yet many companies don't know these dashboards exist or that they can be customized and assigned as default views.
Multiple attendees emphasized business events—automated triggers that execute when certain conditions are met—as transformative for construction operations.
One company described implementing business events after getting comfortable with basic system usage: "We focused on crawling first, then walking, and then running. When we were in the walking and running phases, we tried to introduce business events to automate some of our processes, and that has led to our end users now appreciating Acumatica even more."
A recent example: A construction company paying vendors through ACH wanted to automatically notify vendors of payment amounts and which invoices were being paid. A business event was configured to trigger when payments close, grab the vendor's email from their profile, attach payment details and invoice information, and send notifications—all automatically.
"Once they learn how hard it is, and all of a sudden it's done for them, everybody's happy," a presenter said. "You get validation from finance all the way through. If it's receiving and it impacts through finance, it makes a big difference."
One attendee offered a practical tip: Don't set business events to trigger on every single record insert. "Sometimes it can be a real pain," he said. Instead, schedule them to run in batches—once or twice daily based on when records were created. For multi-location operations, this allows different branches to send customer invoices at regionally appropriate times rather than all at once when batch processing runs.
This brings us back to that accounting clerk spending eight hours daily on manual invoicing.
After shipments are picked, packed, and confirmed, invoices can be released one by one—or processed in batch mode. Most manual processes in Acumatica can be batched. And batches can be scheduled to run automatically.
"We could say, okay, every day at 5:30 PM, the shipping department should be done, shipments are confirmed, we want to batch process these on a schedule and it will automatically trigger," a presenter explained. The same applies to emailing invoices, confirming shipments, processing payments—dozens of tasks.
For that clerk processing hundreds of shipments manually, batch processing reduced her workload from eight hours to 15 minutes. The system handles the bulk automatically and flags exceptions that need attention.
"That customer actually said, 'Oh my God, you just saved me eight hours,'" the presenter recalled. "That's the power of this."
The caveat: Get comfortable with manual processes first. "I would recommend you get comfortable first before you do that type of optimization," the presenter advised. "You want to make sure users understand the manual process because technology is written by humans—it's not perfect. There's going to be a hiccup somewhere."
When the presenter asked how many companies actively use test environments, only about a third of hands went up. Yet test environments might be the most important optimization tool available.
"If you don't have a test environment, I would recommend getting one," the presenter said, describing spending significant time in test as an ERP administrator. "I always had a pretty recent copy—I would take a snapshot of our live system, put it into test. If there was something I needed to do and I didn't know how, I wasn't trying it in live. I've had people call me because they tried it in live. It's painful to fix."
Test environments serve multiple purposes: training new users without risk, testing customizations before updates, validating batch processes and business events, trying new features. Companies can maintain multiple test environments for different purposes—one for finance optimization, another for warehouse processes.
The presenter recommended making test environments visually distinct—different colors, obvious indicators—so nobody mistakes them for production. "I was making it red or orange or something that really stood out, something different than our company colors."
Construction companies face unique timing challenges—shipments that happen in one financial period but get invoiced in the next, creating reconciliation headaches.
"There is a setting that often gets overlooked, where you can have it be based upon the shipment date instead of the date we process the invoice," an attendee noted. This single setting change can eliminate month-end and year-end financial period problems.
Other overlooked settings include numbered sequence configurations (one company changes numbering annually so they can instantly identify which year opportunities came from) and email notification preferences that synchronize ship dates with invoice dates.
"We obviously cannot sit here today and go to every setting, every optimization," the presenter acknowledged. "Each company is different. We're going to give you resources on how you can optimize yourself."
When asked who works in financial modules but isn't using budgeting functionality, numerous hands went up. "I hear this all the time," the presenter said. "Are you using budgets? A lot of times it's no, but we'd like to."
The capability exists—simple budgets, complex budgets, budget comparisons on financial statements showing actual versus budgeted amounts. "Extremely, extremely beneficial," the presenter emphasized. But like many features, it's postponed during implementation and never revisited.
The solution isn't complicated: Get training on budgets. Learn how to add budget information to P&L statements. Make it a priority rather than a someday project.
Acumatica offers a free mobile app. When asked how many construction companies are using it, only a few hands went up.
For construction and field service operations, mobile access is transformative—project managers checking job status from sites, field workers updating time and materials, supervisors approving purchases remotely. The presenter acknowledged that mobile often gets postponed to phase two implementations: "After you're established, then we can advance."
But phase two never comes unless someone makes it a priority.
The session highlighted several resources construction companies should be using:
Yearly VAR Checkups: "I was quite good as an ERP administrator, but there were times where my experience wasn't enough," the presenter said. "I would reach out to the VAR and they'd say, 'Yep, we've seen that, we have a solution.' I would highly recommend scheduling sessions to walk through your business beginning to end." VARs can identify inefficiencies, suggest overlooked features, and help with upgrades and optimizations.
Help.acumatica.com: The help system includes release notes for new features, documentation for every field in every screen, examples and workflows. As of version 2501, clicking the question mark icon on any screen opens contextual help explaining every field on that page. "We use it for training all the time," a presenter said. "Even though we train constantly, we don't remember every single field, and with every version—275 pages of release notes on average—we're going to forget."
Ideas Board: Need functionality that doesn't exist? The Acumatica ideas board lets customers suggest enhancements and vote on others' suggestions. Product teams monitor these ideas, comment on them, provide workarounds, and build popular requests into the software. "We have seen these things built right into the software," the presenter said. "They are listening and giving responses."
Generic Inquiries: Need custom data views or reports? Generic inquiries let users create custom queries without coding. VARs can help build these for companies without technical resources. "They can help you write those different generic inquiries," the presenter noted.
Version upgrades came up repeatedly during the session. Companies on old versions miss new features, security updates, and optimization opportunities.
"You need to upgrade by the third version," a presenter explained. "We release 275 pages of release notes on average per version. That's a lot. We want to encourage you to stay current. It allows you to do these new optimizations and features and functions."
Critical advice: If you have customizations, validate them for new versions before upgrading. This is especially important for major version changes. The modern UI that came with version 2501, for example, changed backend code and table structures, potentially affecting customizations.
Companies should take snapshots before version upgrades and test thoroughly in test environments before touching production systems.
The session's message was clear: Construction companies are paying for powerful systems but using a fraction of their capabilities.
That accounting clerk spending eight hours on manual work? She's not alone. Across the industry, workers are grinding through tasks that could be automated, executives are guessing at margins that could be known, and companies are wandering warehouses looking for inventory the system could locate instantly.
The solutions aren't coming in future releases. They're already there, waiting to be turned on.
"The only thing that does not change is change itself," the presenter said. "That's just life. It's also business. Hence the need for optimization."
For construction companies wondering where to start: Talk to your VAR. Set up a test environment. Ask workers—not just executives—what makes their jobs harder. Look at that eight-hour task and ask whether it really needs to take eight hours.
The answer might be hiding in plain sight, in a feature you already paid for but never turned on.
Note: This article is based on the "Construction and Field Services: Building the Future with New Innovations in Acumatica" session at Acumatica Summit 2026, held January 27-30, 2026, in Seattle. The session was led by Acumatica product managers and business analysts specializing in construction solutions.
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