Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, recap their firsthand experience at Acumatica Summit 2026 in Seattle, framing it as a year of evolution rather than revolution for the cloud ERP platform. Now backed by Vista Equity Partners, Acumatica is positioning itself not just as a system of record, but as a system of intelligence, with AI deeply embedded across workflows, reporting, and user experience. The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS:
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. Brought to you by CPA practice advisor with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:09
welcome the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, you might see that we’re in a little different place. We’re working out of Brian’s office in Knoxville today, and it is a pleasure to have you join us. We have been on a bit of a road show recently. Haven’t we?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:26
Brian, been to Seattle, we’ve been to Nashville. So we’ve seen Acumatica, we’ve seen NetSuite, we’ve been to CES in Vegas, you know? And we’ve still got Zoho coming and the thought leader symposium in Dallas. So it’s going to be a busy first quarter.
Randy Johnston 00:42
It is, but today, we wanted to actually summarize our learnings from Acumatica summit in Seattle. Now, Acumatica, as a software company, has been around for some time. They were founded in 2008 today, they have 10,000 plus installations on their platform almost 600 users, about 700 employees. Now this particular company was acquired by VISTA Equity Partners in 2025 and they’ve continued to evolve their cloud, ERP platform, and it’s actually a quite gorgeous platform. We’ve recommended it for some years now. We were lucky enough to be invited to attend various events and interview various customers of the platform over the days that we were there. So on the first day keynote, we got to see John case, the CEO, and we’ve known John for a while, but also Sanket Acker car, who is the president and CEO COO of the organization, talking about some of the new evolutions in the product. And then from an AI perspective, we got to see met and meta talk about the digital replicas that they were doing as well. So lot of different things going on, but the key AI release inside acumatic is referred to as AI studio, which is being released in 2026 are one on the platform. So all pretty interesting and big announcements for the vendor. Now, Brian and I were kind of front row observers on both day one and day two, and we’ll talk more about the day two goings on in just a minute. So Brian, I just want to stop and say that’s kind of the framework for our listeners. What other things would you like to call
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:38
out from Well, this was a year of evolution rather than revolution. Okay, so there were some things that were a big deal. You know, the AI Studio is a big deal. The model, context, protocol that they’re releasing in it is a big deal. They are really going forward quite a bit. You know, they did have a change in product leadership. So Ali John, that we’ve known for many years, that’s been their chief product officer has stepped down, and there’s a new chief product officer in place, and it’s, you know, so you really felt like we witnessed the passing of the baton, in particular on day two, when Ali came out for the keynote, and we got to speak with him and interview him afterwards in a kind of a group gaggle, with a group of other press. And it was a good it was a very good event. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s exciting. And they’re, they, they continue to make improvements in a wide range of different areas
Randy Johnston 03:32
they do. And the new Chief Product Officer, John Pollock, seemed quite good and quite literate, and had learned a lot in the three weeks that he had been in Acumatica. That’s a quick learn for anybody. Yeah.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:44
I mean, he, I mean, you know, you can’t get through all the new employee training in most places in three weeks, and he’s got to get ready for keynotes and all kinds of things, yeah.
Randy Johnston 03:52
So Acumatica is actually positioning itself as a system of intelligence, not just a system of record. That’s an interesting position, because they have aI deeply embedded across their workflows. They’re reporting the user experience, and AI studio is really central to that, because it enables both partners and customers to customize that. The roadmap for Acumatica includes event driven ERP, and they have a modern UI. They did call out that the modern UI was not adopted as widely as they would like, that you could turn it on, turn it off. We heard the same thing, by the way, at the NetSuite event that you know, a small percentage of the users are using the new modern AI, but they also had continued to develop each of their vertical markets, so they spent some time discussing evolution in manufacturing, in distribution, in construction and professional services and other sectors that they worked in. So in the big picture of things, they had some pretty good. Good rollouts in their technology, including some things that happen over in data warehouse, if you want to talk about those.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:08
Brian, sure the one of the things, one of the things that has been a challenge for some Acumatica users has been some of the reporting engines, okay, and so they kind of showed their way forward with that. They have an Excel based add in that there that will let you do your own custom reporting inside of Excel, with it pulling data out of Acumatica through the API. We also saw that they had a vision for data warehousing and materialized views on AWS using data lakes and lots of export tools. So it’s a, you know, they haven’t replaced the as it were, the alternator. It’s the reporting engine inside this business engine that is Acumatica. But they’ve definitely created some additional tools to help make it more effective.
Randy Johnston 05:51
Yeah. So as it turns out, you did very specifically ask about the reporting engine. I thought you were nice in your question, by the way, you know, well,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:00
it’s the white whale with their, you know, if you think of the movie, the book, Moby Dick and, you know, they’re chasing that white whale. This is kind of the same thing. We’ve talked about this for a while with Acumatica, but they’re, they have a bigger vision than I expected in this. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 06:15
So another thing that became, you know, I’ll say confusing yet enlightening, that so it was on both sides, was the discussion about AI assistants that were operational helpers inside the workflows. And they demonstrated several of those, as well as then the AI advisors, which suggested and guide the decision. So, for example, the AI systems could spark spot margin erosion, and, you know, be able to produce, you know, some content or suggested actions in that they also had an AI based cross sell assistant
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:51
that was particularly impressive in how it was able to find the most likely purchase for that particular customer based on History and based on prior purchases by similar customers.
Randy Johnston 07:02
Yeah, so, you know, that was done live, but also they did have some video pieces, but, you know, Brian and I actually talked about, you know, how we would show these various elements this year, and that was one of the more interesting things to call out. But they also have Amazon integrations inside their platform. Other competitors, by the way, have Amazon integration, Zoho being example, and Amazon,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:28
and we’re talking about Amazon stores as well, you know, because we were talking about, previously, about the data warehouse that was using AWS data lakes as a way of storing all the data. So the Amazon data services arm, as opposed to working with Amazon stores where we’re selling things on a retail basis.
Randy Johnston 07:47
And there were some of the customers that talked about the hundreds of Amazon stores that they had so tracking the various product sales and the way Amazon does chargebacks and the fees and the logistics, it’s a mess to deal with Amazon in general. So there was some new technology to help track that a little more accurately, well beyond that, just a general rule of thumb is Acumatica has been heavily hosted or SaaS oriented. They have a private cloud subscription. They also, however, have traditionally allowed their product to be run on premise, but even the on premise versions have a little bit of an et phone home feature for licensing and updates. So they have priced based on the consumption model,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:38
so there’s not an individual charge for individual users having logins, and that is very different than pretty much everybody else in the market,
Randy Johnston 08:46
and that is really trying to drive getting everybody inside the system. You know, so much of the time we make economic decisions about adding users based on how much it costs per user per month, as opposed to what functionality do we need. They also did illustrate how, for certain users, that they could tailor the interface to make it where you only saw what you needed in the screen that was accessible to you, which I thought was also a pretty important item. Also on their website, they have a pricing calculator that they introduced over the past year. And that pricing calculator gives you the TCO of implementing ERP, and it is everything from licensing to implementation to maintenance and other items related to that.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:39
It’s a lot of acronyms, Randy, lol, OMG, oh, I guess
Randy Johnston 09:43
I so used to talking in TLAs that I didn’t even think about too many three letter acronyms. But the vendor is handling a substantial number of transactions. About 500 billion in transactions, with about 60 million product shipments. Their payroll integration has been widely leveraged because they do costing all the way back into construction and other areas. So here’s platform where you can get payroll from the vendor itself, and that’s a pretty good deal. The other thing that I was thought I should have known, and I realized I just didn’t know that they have a pure QuickBooks Desktop to Acumatica migration tool, and that’s interesting, because of the evolution that’s happening with QuickBooks probe, enterprise and so forth. And many vendors would like to have a QuickBooks Desktop migration tool, but unfortunately, a lot don’t, but it looks like Acumatica does. And then beyond that, they’ve also got the multi global company capabilities with multi currency and multilingual and so on. So are there other key things, Brian, that you thought were of note?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:10
Well, I thought that Acumatica did a good job of promoting their different industry versions, which is one of their strengths. They talk quite a bit about manufacturing, distribution, retail, construction and professional services. And we actually got updates on each of those industry groups during the day two keynote. You know, they they also implement emphasized AI first, unfortunately, because of the scheduling of a lot of the presidents, we didn’t get to see all of the sessions that we wanted to this year. But, you know, we did get quite a bit about their AI vision and where they envision it going in here, you know, the again, the there was a round table we had also with the chief product officer in there, and John Pollock. And, you know, they, he did a good job of talking about how they’re focusing on building a personalized ERP experience that uses your behavioral data and large language models to try to adapt how systems work. They’re also trying to embed AI to speed customization and speed response to needs in here. You know, however, they did say that they need their partners to they actually announced a new education event that’s going to be held this summer in Denver at the gaylord that’s partner only to help step to help trans transfer that knowledge from Acumatica about how to best use their system and what all those best practices are to the partners so they can get more consistent adoption.
Randy Johnston 12:31
Yeah, and this new event, acumatic ascent, is actually a pretty smart thing for them to do, because, you know, we talk about upskilling frequently. But when you consider that the partners need Up skill, Brian, I think it’s wise to invest that way.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:48
Well, you can’t I mean, in with AI changing as rapidly as it is, you know, the outline the Roman numerals of the outline of what we need to know about AI are changing monthly, and so it’s critical that they have some events, because it’s so easy to fall behind in this foot race
Randy Johnston 13:04
we’re in right now. Yeah, now. The other thing is in the past year, and you’ll hear Brian and I repeat this throughout other this podcast and others that 2025 we considered the year of ages, this year of 2026 and beyond, we consider right now, the year of MCP, the model context protocols, which are overlays, two systems that the AIS can talk to. And Acumatica announced and showed their MCP and how it worked with Claude and how you can do queries. And the queries were very intelligent, and it really made the system quite usable. And it furthers that vision that I think I’ve been developing over the last few years, as we’ve talked about it, Brian, where you can talk to systems and they’ll respond intelligently, but importantly, like on the MCPS, you can have an MCP that talks to your accounting system or your system of record, if you will. You know,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:06
it kind of reminded me of some of the business analysis things I did when I was in industry back in the 90s, where, you know, you talk to the CFO, and he or she’d say, This is what I want you to do. And you need to go talk to this person and get this data, and you need to go talk to this person and get this data, and then you’re going to need to take this data and manipulate it this way. And so what’s happening now is where I had to do human to human discussion 25 years ago. Now we’re doing, we’re getting, we’re giving the direction. We’re the CFO asking the AI to do this, and then the AI is talking to this MCP bot that is going to go interrogate the other systems and get the information that we need to do things. Now, it doesn’t take the right methodology every single time, but it’s it’s a transitional technology to where the AI will be able to do many more, much more robust activity.
Randy Johnston 14:56
Yeah, it’s pretty stunning how you can talk cross. Systems, because you can hook an MCP to two through four or five different type of systems, and it does all the communication between the systems and gets the context pretty right, considering how new the technology is. So we were pleased to see the MCP from Acumatica as well. So Brian, any other parting thoughts on what we learned at Acumatica summit this year? You’ve attended consistently for a long time? Yeah, it’s year because of wife’s health,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:30
acumatic remains one of my favorite ERPs again. I like the licensing model. I like the Industry Focus. I think the AI focus that they have right now is good. I’m quite excited about the forthcoming some of the more forth, some of the forthcoming work with data lakes and other tools to feed these things. I think the MCP is going to be table stakes in the very near future in the RP. So I’m very pleased to see that they’ve announced that I’m going to miss Ollie John. You know, I think John Pollack’s going to be a great Chief Product Officer, but Ollie John has really been just a pleasure to deal with over the years. And Ollie, if you’re listening to this, we’re going to miss you very much.
Randy Johnston 16:05
Yeah, Ali, Johnny is a very nifty guy. Now, one other final parting thought. Brian and I interviewed a variety of customers of Acumatica, one of which was my client. So you know, I had inside baseball, but Brian had not dealt with them before, so he was maybe a little surprised at how much I asked and learned from the client as well. But I want to tell you that these were very broadly different businesses, from manufacturing to service industry and so forth. And each one of the interviews that we did, I learned something about how they use the platform and how things were really working, and generally, yes, would Acumatica pick kind of the best or customers talk to us, I suspect. But we were asked some pretty prying questions along the way, and they were equally straightforward, saying, Yeah, this doesn’t look as well for us, and so forth. But overall, I couldn’t have been more pleased with the customer interactions and the interactions with all of the Acumatica team that we dealt with.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:16
And I think it’s important to note that where the system didn’t do things, there were well thought out workarounds and well thought out best practices that the partner brought to bear to solve those problems, you know, to automate those problems, to make it work. So, great product. Very excited to spend some time with them. It’s always a pleasure to go to Seattle. We actually got to go to a couple of our favorite restaurants while we were out there, the Metropolitan grill and Daniel’s broiler. And, you know, it’s nice to it was just a very nice trip, and learned a lot of good things, yeah.
Randy Johnston 17:47
And you know, it was in the new Seattle Convention Center, which we had not been in, which was also a good experience. So all around, I don’t know how it could have been a much better trip. Hopefully, our little summary for you will let you see what happened there. One final comment on LinkedIn, I posted many pictures as the event was unfolding using the hashtag pound Acumatica Summit. So if you’d actually like to see some of the slide content that they used, some of the messaging, you can almost reverse feed my LinkedIn from back to front, and you’ll have the whole thing, including their pillars of development and many other things we actually I recommend that you take a look at those slides, because there is a lot of detail in my pictures from pound Acumatica summit on LinkedIn. So we appreciate you being with us and again for this accounting Technology Lab, we’re pleased to report of our least recent tour and trip to Seattle for Acumatica Summit. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:54
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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