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Acumatica announces AI Studio, new AI Lab customer feedback features

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Cloud ERP solutions provider Acumatica announced several updates and enhancements for 2025 that align with the company’s new AI-first product strategy, which involves looking at business problems from the ground up and then determine how applied AI can address these problem scenarios.

“Acumatica’s AI capabilities are designed to automate and eliminate error-prone manual processes and enable businesses to intelligently streamline workflows across industries,” said Acumatica chief engineering officer Miten Mehta. “From Generative AI assistants to smart automated sales workflows tailored to unique operational needs, our tools integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, making them immediately impactful. We’ve created a stable, secure foundation, ensuring businesses can confidently integrate AI technologies into their processes—whether AI-powered anomaly detection in manufacturing or intelligent assistants in construction—driving real, measurable results.”

Two major components of this will be enhancements to Acumatica Labs as well as the release of Acumatica AI Studio. Acumatica Labs will include a new customer preview program that enables early access to new features for testing and direct feedback, as well as advanced kitting, order orchestration, customer special orders, case closure notes, B2B ordering, document templates and AI-powered anomaly detection for those who sign up. 

Acumatica offices

Meanwhile, Acumatica AI Studio—a new feature in the larger platform—will let businesses automate their workflows without having to code. Chief Technology Officer Mikhail Shchelkonogov, during his presentation, showed how he could use it to automate report production, using the example of support case reports. After their engineering staff helps a customer with a technical issue, they must take all the case activities, analyze them, and report on things like what the problem was, what the root cause of that problem was, and how it was fixed, among other things. This is a complicated multi-step process. But Shchelkonogov, with the AI Studio, created a single button that directs the AI to gather all the information from the support case and then send it to the large language model to produce the report itself. He noted the AI even knew he spent 4 hours and 15 minutes working on that particular support case. 

He explained how he set up the button himself through the AI Prompt Editor that is part of the AI Studio. Effectively, the button activates a prompt he had already prepared which specified things such as the items he wanted to include in the closure notes, the format of the report itself, and additional information to be used to enrich the text (e.g. product descriptions from the Acumatica website.) He then tested the results, refined the prompt to his satisfaction and completed the automation. 

“Number one, I did not write a single line of code to do that. Number two, it was very fast. Number three, think of how many actions I automated. Now you can take it and go to any screen in Acumatica, think of the scenario you want to implement, and do it by yourself,” said Shchelkonogov. 

The AI Studio also provides data-driven insights in a secure environment. For example, during his presentation Doug Johnson, vice president of solution architecture, raised the example of an Alaskan company that makes scratch off lottery tickets. The insights feature combed through hundreds of thousands of records to find which of their salespeople were discounting too heavily, which were selling below margin and other performance statistics. They also used it to determine who was overdue with their bills (Johnson noted that billing can be challenging in Alaska due to mail delays, so standard patterns won’t work). They were able to find this information by entering a simple data query, which gathered the information and put it on a dashboard “so instead of 100,000 or a million records, you only have to look at 15.”

“Another thing here is the [AI determined] average days to pay. It varies wildly by customer. That is what AI really helps with, so they can focus on the right problem instead of focusing on people who just have mail issues at their place,” he said. 

Acumatica also announced several industry-specific solutions for the distribution, manufacturing, construction, retail and professional services industries. For professional services, Acumatica plans to implement a native ProjectManager integration for resource planning and project scheduling.

At this time, Acumatica hasn’t shared specific release dates for these updates.

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Accountants on IRS and PwC layoffs, accounting students and more

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Complimentary Access Pill

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

This week’s stats focus in part on the job titles seeing the greatest losses at the IRS during layoffs; as well as the states that have proposed or passed alternatives to the 150-hour rule; the percentage of master’s in accounting program applicants since 2020; the number of PwC employees laid off in May; the projected size of Deloitte’s new New York City headquarters; and the amount of 2026 HSA annual contribution limits, depending on coverage.

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CrowdStrike says DOJ, SEC sent inquiries on firm accounting

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CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. said U.S. officials have asked for information related to the accounting of deals it’s made with some customers and said the cybersecurity firm is cooperating with the inquiry.

The Austin, Texas-based company said in a filing Wednesday that it has gotten “requests for information” from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission “relating to the company’s recognition of revenue and reporting of ARR for transactions with certain customers.” ARR refers to annual recurring revenue, a measure of earnings from subscriptions.

The company said the federal officials have also sought information related to a CrowdStrike update last year that crashed Windows operating systems around the world.

“The company is cooperating and providing information in response to these requests,” the filing states.

U.S. prosecutors and regulators have been investigating a $32 million deal between CrowdStrike and a technology distributor, Carahsoft Technology Corp., to provide cybersecurity tools to the Internal Revenue Service, Bloomberg News first reported in February. The IRS never purchased or received the products, Bloomberg News earlier reported.

The investigators are probing what senior CrowdStrike executives may have known about the $32 million deal and are examining other transactions made by the cybersecurity firm, Bloomberg News reported in May.

Asked for comment about the filing, CrowdStrike spokesperson Brian Merrill said, “As we have told Bloomberg repeatedly, this is old news and we stand by the accounting of the transaction.” 

A lawyer for Carahsoft previously declined to comment on the federal investigations, and representatives didn’t respond to subsequent requests for comment about them.

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Elon Musk urges Americans take action to ‘kill’ Trump tax cut bill

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Tech titan Elon Musk ratcheted up his offensive against Donald Trump’s signature tax bill on Wednesday, urging that Americans contact their lawmakers to “KILL” the legislation.

“Call your Senator, Call your Congressman,” Musk wrote in a social media post. “Bankrupting America is NOT ok!”

The post came one day after Musk lashed out at the tax bill, describing it as a budget-busting “disgusting abomination” as Republican fiscal hawks stepped up criticism of the massive fiscal package. 

Trump hasn’t publicly responded to Musk’s comments, but the White House put out a statement Wednesday saying the legislation “unleashes an era of unprecedented economic growth.” 

And House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Musk is “dead wrong” about the bill and that the tax cuts will pay for themselves through economic growth.

Musk’s public condemnation pits him against the president at a critical time as Trump is personally lobbying holdouts on the bill. His campaign against the legislation threatens to stiffen resistance and delay enactment of the tax cuts and debt ceiling increase. 

Musk has attacked the legislation days after leaving a temporary assignment leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to cut federal spending. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer’s high-profile role in the Trump administration eroded his business brand and sales of his company’s electric vehicles plunged. 

The House-passed version of the tax and spending bill would add $2.4 trillion to U.S. budget deficits over the next decade, according to an estimate released Wednesday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO’s calculation reflects a $3.67 trillion decrease in expected revenues and a $1.25 trillion decline in spending over the decade through 2034, relative to baseline projections. The score doesn’t account for any potential boost to the economy from the bill, which Johnson and Trump argue would offset the revenue losses. 

Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth of about $377 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has become a crucial financial backer of the Republican party. After making modest donations most years, Musk became the biggest U.S. political donor in 2024, giving more than $290 million.

Johnson said Musk had promised to help reelect Republicans just a day before savaging Trump’s bill. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. 

Most of Musk’s giving was aimed at electing Trump but he also supported congressional candidates. America PAC, the super political action committee that Musk largely funded, spent $18.5 million in 17 separate House races. Though that total pales in comparison to the roughly $255 million he spent backing Trump, the spending means a lot in a congressional election, where challengers on average raise less than $1 million.

Control of the House will likely be decided by the outcome of fewer than two dozen close races in the 2026 midterm elections. The GOP’s chances of holding their majority would suffer a major blow if Musk were to withdraw his financial support.

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