Acumatica tweaks its cloud ERP for professional services firms

Acumatica has released a new “edition” of its cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software tailored to the needs of mid-size professional services firms.

The number of potential customers for Acumatica’s new functionality — or similar products from competitors — is huge. Globally, the professional services market, including legal, engineering, and consulting services, is expected to reach $6.5 trillion in 2024, according to The Business Research Company.

Acumatica already offers industry-specific editions of its cloud ERP software for construction, manufacturing, distribution, and retail, and now sees the time as ripe to adapt it for a new market.

Professional services leaders are particularly sensitive to the importance of the tools and technologies they use, with 85% saying  they significantly impact the quality of their work, according to an August 2023 survey of 213 of them by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The new Professional Services Edition of Acumatica’s cloud ERP software includes tools and applications to support resource management, customer relationship management (CRM), project planning, scheduling, accounting, and time and expense management.

Time management is specific to the Professional Services Edition as it helps enterprises capture time spent by employees or crews on specific projects or services.

Four customers have already gone public about their adoption of Acumatica’s Professional Services Edition. Two South African digital services providers, Digital Planet and Incubeta, and New York non-profit Mozaic replaced Sage with Acumatica Professional Services Edition, while Envent, a Canadian manufacturer of oil and gas analyzers, chose it to replace a hodge-podge of spreadsheets, databases, and accounting packages, according to Acumatica.

For its other ERP editions, Acumatica claims customer wins against the likes of enterprise software vendors SAP and Oracle NetSuite, and several versions of Microsoft Dynamics, as well as companies stepping up from small business accounting packages such as QuickBooks or Sage.

The new edition isn’t the only change in Acumatica’s cloud ERP: Earlier this month, it announced its half-yearly platform update, including a new AI-powered user interface and numerous other AI functions.