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Most mornings, someone in your business opens the same screen, sets the same filter and clicks the same button. Tomorrow they'll do it again. Acumatica will do all of it for you — on a timer, in the background, with no code, no integration and no consultant. It's called an automation schedule, it's already baked into the system you pay for, and it's one of the most underused features in it.

This week Pete and Nirav get hands-on. Nirav shares his screen and builds an automation schedule live from scratch — auto-invoicing confirmed shipments — while Pete brings the view from inside a business that went live on Acumatica almost a year ago and has only recently started switching automations on. (Emily's off this week, so it's two seats today: the partner and the data side.)

What you'll take away:

• Why automating a process in Acumatica is now configuration, not customisation — and why that changes who's allowed to do it
• Automation schedules vs business events: proactive on a timer, versus reactive on a trigger
• The "learn to fly the plane first" rule — why Pete's team ran everything manually for six months before automating a single thing
• Which processes to automate on day one, and which to leave alone until the business has found its rhythm
• How to build a schedule live from any process screen, plus the green-button rule for spotting candidates in seconds
• The one checkbox — use shipment date for invoice date — that can quietly knock two weeks off your customers' payment terms
• Why automation schedules fail silently, the sequential-stop trap, and the governance habit that keeps them honest

Whether you've just gone live or you've been on Acumatica for years and never noticed the little clock icon, this one pays for itself in time saved.

Key moments

• (01:51) The feature nobody talks about
• (03:56) Build it in a sandbox first
• (06:20) Customisation vs configuration
• (10:04) Learn to fly the plane first
• (19:52) Demo: where the schedules live
• (30:00) Building one live: auto-invoicing shipments
• (36:45) The green-button rule
• (41:28) The checkbox that steals payment terms
• (43:58) Silent failures and who owns the schedules
• (47:19) Where the ROI hides

Resources & links

• 🎥 Watch the live demo on YouTube — this was a screen-share episode, so you can see the schedule being built.
• Nirav Shah and the team set these up for a living — AdCirrus ERP · nirav.shah@adcirruserp.com
• Pete writes about ERP, data and governance at petenicholson.co.uk · info@petenicholson.co.uk
• Free Acumatica training on this topic lives in Acumatica Open University.

Follow the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and leave a review if it was useful — it genuinely helps. No ads, no sponsorship, just two people who like ERP a bit more than is strictly healthy.

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A small business owner posted on r/ERP that they'd outgrown their patchwork of spreadsheets and SaaS apps — and had heard they'd need an ERP "once they hit a certain size." They just couldn't work out where that line was. The post sat unanswered. So Pete, Nirav and Emily took the question on.

No top fives, no checklists this week — just a straight conversation about what actually pushes a growing business onto an ERP, what holds it back, and whether the leap is as scary as it sounds.

In this episode:

• Why the first real signal is frustration, not revenue — and how owner burnout quietly turns into business risk
• Why hiring another body rarely fixes a broken process (it just moves the burnout around)
• The silo trap: how sensible point-solution decisions — Shopify, ShipStation, QuickBooks, Fishbowl, a bit of Google Docs — stop adding up
• Putting a number on the pain: the value-justification time study and cost per transaction
• Treating a modern ERP like a 24/7 worker with its own hourly rate
• When you're not ready for an ERP — and the one question to ask any VAR before you sign
• Why 80% of spreadsheets carry errors, and what that does to your weekly numbers

The line that summed it all up: you don't grow into an ERP, you stop growing without one.

Related episodes:

• S04E13 — How to Choose an ERP: Where Do You Even Start?
• S2E04 — When Do You Need an ERP System? 5 Signs You've Outgrown Spreadsheets
• S3E06 — How to Build the Perfect ERP Implementation Team

The ABCs of ERP & Beyond is hosted by Peter Nicholson, Nirav Shah, and Emily Browning. New episodes every two weeks on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and everywhere else you catch your podcasts.

Got a question like the one that sparked this episode? Drop us a comment or message — we read them, and they make for good episodes.

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Choosing the wrong ERP is one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make — and it rarely happens because the software was bad. It happens because the company never worked out what it actually needed before it fell for a slick demo. The tech demo always works. That's the entire point of the tech demo.

In this episode Pete, Emily, and Nirav walk through how to choose an ERP properly, from both sides: the inward look at your own business, and the outward look at the market. It's the first time the show has tackled the selection question head-on — and the short version is that almost all the work happens before you ever email a vendor.

What we cover:

• Why "it's old" and "it's expensive" are symptoms, not reasons — and the real question to ask: what can't you do today that's costing you money?
• Why fit beats age every time (a 15-year-old system that still fits the business is not a problem)
• The "do nothing" option — and why a lot of what you want from a new ERP, you can do without one
• Know who you are: revenue, users, sites, countries, industry, compliance — the facts that quietly shrink your shortlist
• Why you choose on fit first and cost second (ROI shows up in years three to six, not year one)
• Why "know your processes" is the most important step — and the test that proves whether you actually do
• Ask why you do something, not what you do — and let your project manager be the internal consultant
• Non-negotiables vs preferences in disguise — and the one-line test that separates them
• Where to start the market research: G2, Compare Software, Info-Tech, industry associations, Reddit, and yes, AI
• How to handle demos: every demo works, so your job is to break it — on your data, with your hardest questions
• Why the implementation partner matters as much as the ERP, and the red flags that should make you walk

If you're about to be handed the "which ERP should we get?" question — or you're the one handing it over — start here. Done properly, choosing an ERP takes four to eight months. This episode is how you spend that time well.

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Every ERP project starts with someone saying "we need to do something about our systems". The two real options on the table are usually upgrade or migrate — and most teams treat them as if they're the same kind of project at different scales. They aren't. They're different operating models, with different costs, different risks, and different reasons to choose them.

This is the first episode in our mini-series on the upgrade vs migrate question. Pete, Emily, and Nirav lay out the framing — what actually makes a project an upgrade versus a migration, why vendors keep mis-labelling one as the other, and how to do the cost comparison properly so you don't pick the wrong path on day one.

What we cover:

• Where the "we need to do something" conversation actually comes from — and why the trigger shapes the answer
• Why "do nothing" is also a decision (and the boiling frog problem that hides its cost)
• The real definition of an upgrade versus a migration — and the test that tells you which one you're actually doing
• Why most "upgrades" are migrations in disguise, especially anything with the word "cloud" bolted onto an existing product
• How to do the cost comparison properly — sticker price versus total cost of ownership versus the cost of doing nothing
• Why migration is sometimes the cheaper option, even though it never looks that way on the quote
• The hidden cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet — internal preparation

If you've been handed the "should we upgrade or migrate?" question — or you're about to be — this is the framing episode to start with. The rest of the mini-series will go deeper on each piece.

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Six-month ERP implementations get a bad name because most "six-month" projects are really twelve-month projects with a six-month deadline glued onto the front. The software is rarely the problem. The problem is everything around it — decisions, data, scope creep, and the unwillingness to go standard.

In this episode, Pete, Emily, and Nirav walk through the five conditions that have to be true for a six-month ERP implementation to actually finish in six months.

What we cover:

• Why a reliable internal team that can make decisions quickly is the difference between six and twelve months
• How to spot whether your business is actually simple enough for a fast implementation — and what kills it (integrations, special pricing rules, custom reports)
• The case for going standard with a clear MVP, and why customisation tolerance should be near zero
• What to look for in a VAR who will challenge you instead of just nodding along
• How to know if you've picked the right ERP for the timeline you want

If you've been handed a six-month deadline and you're trying to work out whether it's achievable or whether someone's set you up to fail, this one's for you.

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Acumatica 2026 R1 is live — 460 pages of release notes, and we've read them so you don't have to. Pete, Nirav, and Emily walk through what actually stood out, what's genuinely useful, and why this particular release deserves your attention sooner rather than later.

In this episode, we cover:

• Acumatica Payments on Shopify — how closing the refund and B2B payment gap between your storefront and ERP simplifies reconciliation
• The redesigned customer portal — what it looks like now, why it actually resembles an e-commerce experience, and whether B2B customers will use it
• InsightXL — Acumatica's new Excel add-in with a live connection to ARM, and what it means for Velixo
• The AI assistant and AI Studio — why Acumatica's approach is ahead of Dynamics Copilot, and the data governance question nobody's answering yet
• GI enhancements, GL anomaly detection, and the classic UI sunset — the things that aren't flashy but will affect your day-to-day

Acumatica 2026 R1 Official Release Notes here: https://community.acumatica.com/supported-releases-67/acumatica-2026-r1-downloads-and-release-notes-34865

Oh, and Emily Browning is now officially our third permanent co-host. Commiserations to her.

If you're on Acumatica or evaluating it, this is the release review episode to listen to.

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Most businesses have an inventory problem. The question is how big. In this episode, we're joined by Ben Hussey, Co-CEO of Katana Cloud Inventory, to talk about why so many growing businesses struggle with inventory visibility — and what they can do about it.

Ben shares how Katana was founded after its creator realised he had no real-time view of demand and supply across his own manufacturing business, and why the rise of multi-channel e-commerce has made the problem exponentially harder. When orders are flowing in from Shopify, Amazon, and distribution channels simultaneously, Excel and traditional ERP systems simply can't keep up.

We dig into the practical side: how to assess whether you have an inventory problem (start with a single SKU and audit it end-to-end), who needs to be involved in that conversation, and how to quantify the cost of doing nothing. Ben shares a story of a customer who discovered $120,000 worth of inventory they didn't know they had — simply by gaining a single view of their stock.

The conversation moves into change management — arguably the biggest barrier to success. Ben explains Katana's "strangulation technique" for phased adoption and why the most common trigger for falling back to old ways isn't resistance to new tools, but staff turnover when new hires aren't trained on the systems already in place.

We also cover how macroeconomic forces — tariffs, the Middle East conflict, supply chain disruption — are reshaping how businesses approach planning, costing methods (moving average vs FIFO vs LIFO), and supplier diversification. Textile and apparel companies increased inventory purchases by 50% overnight following recent geopolitical events. The question is whether the rest of the market has caught up.

Finally, we get into AI. Ben talks about where it's already useful (data analysis, workflow mapping), where it's arriving whether you like it or not (agentic commerce on Shopify, launching end of month), and why your product data accuracy is about to matter a lot more than your website copy.

**Guest:** Ben Hussey, Co-CEO of Katana Cloud Inventory — katanamrp.com

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👋 JOIN THE CONVERSATION:
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There comes a point in every e-commerce business where the patchwork of Shopify, spreadsheets, ShipStation, and QuickBooks stops working. Orders are flowing in, but nobody has a single view of what's happening — and you're managing three screens just to fulfil one order.

In this episode, Peter and Nirav break down the five essential steps every e-commerce business should take before integrating with an ERP system. From cleaning up your product data to choosing the right connector (and why they're not all created equal), this is the groundwork that sets you up for success — or sets you back ten steps if you skip it.

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👋 JOIN THE CONVERSATION:
Have you experienced an ERP data migration, or are you planning one? Share your thoughts, experiences, or ask questions in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

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Enjoyed the content? Subscribe to our channel and hit the bell icon to stay updated on the latest episodes. We bring you expert insights, valuable tips, and real-world case studies from the ERP realm and beyond!
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