8 Things We Like in Acumatica 2026 R1

Acumatica releases tend to follow a pattern: a headline feature gets all the attention, a handful of genuinely useful improvements slip through unnoticed, and the release notes clock in at a length that guarantees nobody reads them cover to cover. 2026 R1 is no different — 460-odd pages — but after going through it with Nirav and Emily, this one feels different in substance. There are features here that will change how people work day to day, not just how demo environments look on a projector.

Here's what stood out.

Acumatica Payments finally closes the Shopify gap

If you run Shopify and Acumatica, you've lived with a reconciliation headache around refunds and B2B payments. Process a refund in the ERP? It didn't update Shopify. Take a payment against a B2B terms order in Acumatica? Shopify didn't know about it.

2026 R1 closes that loop. Refunds in Acumatica now sync back to Shopify. B2B payments taken in the ERP get pushed to Shopify Payments. It sounds small, but if you've ever spent a morning trying to reconcile partial refunds, marketplace fees, and timing differences between an e-commerce platform and your AR module, you know this isn't small. Having the same payment processor on both sides makes the reconciliation dramatically simpler.

BigCommerce gets the same treatment, which is a nice touch.

The customer portal now looks like a customer portal

The previous Acumatica customer portal was, to be generous, a stripped-down ERP screen. Functional, but nobody was excited to use it. The rebuilt version in modern UI is a different story. It actually looks like a self-service storefront — product images, order history, payment status, overdue balances, and case management all in one dashboard.

The interesting debate is adoption. B2C, this is straightforward — customers expect a portal experience. B2B is harder. Your customer already has their own ERP, their own purchasing workflows. Asking them to also log into your portal to place orders can feel like asking them to do their job twice. Nirav made a good point: the portal isn't trying to replace e-commerce for B2B. It's for the Grainger-style relationship where the buyer needs visibility into order status, quotes, manufacturing stages, and supply chain updates. That's a different proposition entirely.

InsightXL is long overdue — but Velixo isn't going anywhere

InsightXL is Acumatica's new Excel add-in that provides a live connection to ARM. You open Excel, pull in financial data, change a parameter, and the report refreshes in place. No more exporting, no broken connections, no copy-paste from the ERP into your month-end pack.

This is something Business Central, Sage, and SAP have had for years. Acumatica is catching up. The question everyone in the room at summit was thinking: what does this mean for Velixo?

Honestly, not much — yet. Velixo has been doing this for years and does far more than InsightXL currently offers. The write-back functionality alone — being able to submit a forecast or a budget back into Acumatica from Excel — is something InsightXL doesn't touch. Most VARs will still recommend Velixo for anything beyond the basics. InsightXL solves the biggest pain point for controllers who just need their month-end management pack to pull live data. Whether Acumatica expands it further or leaves it there remains to be seen.

Draft orders flowing in as sales quotes is quietly brilliant

Shopify draft orders now come into Acumatica as sales quotes rather than just sitting in limbo. The sales team or CSR picks up the quote, works it with the customer, converts it to a sales order in Acumatica, and that order flows back to Shopify.

This matters because B2B transactions usually involve a negotiation phase — pricing discussions, volume agreements, terms. Previously, that entire phase was invisible in the ERP. Now it hits the CRM module as a quote, which means pipeline visibility, win/loss tracking, and a proper sales cycle. It bridges the gap between "someone's interested" and "we have a firm order."

The AI assistant is better than anything in Dynamics — and it's still in preview

This is the one where I'll be direct: every Copilot agent demo I've seen in Business Central has been underwhelming. The Acumatica AI assistant demos show genuinely useful outputs. A customer service agent asking "what were our top 10 customers by revenue last quarter?" and getting an answer — without knowing what a GI is, without building anything, without asking IT — that's meaningful.

The advantage Acumatica has here is structural. The AI doesn't talk to raw database tables. It works through DACs — the data access layer that carries business semantics. When you ask about "active customers," the DAC defines what active means. That's a richer context than bolting an LLM onto a flat table and hoping it guesses correctly.

But AI is only as trustworthy as your underlying data. If your due dates are wrong, your pricing is stale, or your inventory counts are off, the AI will give you confident, well-formatted wrong answers. That's worse than no AI at all, because people trust things that sound authoritative. The AI Studio and its system-prompt capabilities will help with guardrails, but the real governance is boring: keep your data clean.

GI improvements that nobody will blog about (except me)

Two small changes that matter if you're pulling data out of Acumatica at scale. First, you can now suppress the record count query on a GI. That count query — the one that powers the "1 to 50 of 3,500 records" pagination — runs separately from the data query, and on large datasets it's slow or fails entirely. If you're feeding GIs into Power BI via OData or loading into a lakehouse, turning that off is a meaningful performance gain.

Second, nested GIs can now inherit parameter values from the parent. Previously, if your parent GI was filtered by date range or branch, the nested GI just ran independently with no context. Now filter values cascade through. Not flashy. Functional. Solves a problem that's generated thousands of community forum threads.

The classic UI sunset has a date — act now

2026 R1 is the last release where the classic UI toggle still works. When R2 ships later this year, it's gone. If you've got customisations, custom screens, or custom workflows built against the classic UI, you have roughly six months to test and migrate. This isn't a "we'll get around to it" situation — Acumatica has drawn the line.

If you're on an always-current plan, this is urgent. If you're not, you have more breathing room, but the direction is clear. Start testing your screens against modern UI now while you still have the fallback option.

GL anomaly detection is no longer experimental

Journal entry anomaly detection has been promoted from experimental to a proper, supported feature. It watches for unusual transactions — an unexpected branch posting, an abnormally large purchase order amount, a journal entry that doesn't fit the pattern. It's the kind of thing that catches problems before they become audit findings.

Not glamorous. But if you've ever discovered a rogue journal entry three months after the fact during a reconciliation, you know exactly why this matters.

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This is from episode S4E10 of The ABCs of ERP & Beyond