Customization is one of Acumatica’s greatest strengths – and also one of its biggest risks when done incorrectly. Poorly designed customizations often lead to upgrade failures, performance issues, and long-term maintenance challenges.
Over time, teams working extensively with Acumatica tend to converge on a structured, repeatable approach to customization development. This article outlines those end-to-end best practices, from initial request through QA and deployment, and illustrates how automation and tooling can support them in practice.
This framework also serves as the foundation for our upcoming webinar on Customization Development Best Practices.
Every successful customization begins with clarity.
Most requests start with:
A best practice is to guide customers toward providing:
Using a simple requirements template helps reduce ambiguity and ensures critical context isn’t missed.
Rule of thumb: more information early almost always saves time later.
Before estimating or designing anything, it’s important to focus on discovery and validation.
The goal is not customization for its own sake, but to:
Written requirements are often interpreted differently by different stakeholders. To avoid misalignment, visual clarification is a widely accepted best practice.
Mockups help:
In practice, basic visualization often saves more time than it takes to create.
Before investing time in full documentation, many teams provide ballpark estimates:
This step prevents unnecessary effort on detailed specs for requests that may be postponed or re-scoped.
Once the approach and estimate are approved, the next best practice is to create a detailed Functional Specification Document.
The FSD serves as:
A document reviewed and approved before development begins
After FSD approval, work is commonly broken into structured delivery tasks using a work management system (such as Jira or equivalent tools):
All related artifacts are linked from that system:
This level of traceability supports:
Every customization should be developed using version control (Git or equivalent systems), with:
Each commit should:
This approach is critical for:
Effective customization development relies on consistent standards:
Readable, maintainable code directly reduces long-term ownership cost.
Automation plays an important role in making best practices repeatable and efficient.
At Sprinterra, developers use internally developed customization utilities to:
These tools are used daily by Sprinterra developers and have proven to significantly reduce setup time, manual effort, and configuration errors. While built for internal use, it is publicly available on Acumatica’s GitHub and actively maintained. Read the article about this tool.
Sprinterra developers also use automated validation tool to:
This approach helps catch problems early and reduces late-stage rework. Read the article about this tool.
Best practices include:
For customizations expected to live through multiple upgrades:
Once QA passes:
Clear acceptance criteria and structured feedback tracking are key at this stage.
A structured customization lifecycle helps teams:
It’s not just about writing code – it’s about engineering solutions that last.
In the upcoming webinar, we’ll:
Demonstrate how automation supports these best practices
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Upgrade-safe customizations follow supported Acumatica patterns, limit invasive changes, and are designed with future platform upgrades in mind. Clear requirements, consistent coding standards, and early validation all help reduce upgrade risk.
A Functional Specification Document provides a shared reference for development and quality assurance. It helps ensure requirements are clearly defined, reviewed, and approved before development begins, reducing ambiguity and rework.
Automation helps make best practices repeatable and consistent. It can reduce manual effort in environment setup, validation, and deployment, allowing teams to focus more on quality and design decisions.
Quality assurance verifies that customizations meet approved requirements and continue to function as expected. Test cases derived from specifications also support regression testing and help reduce issues during future changes or upgrades.
Automation helps make repeatable processes more consistent and less error-prone. It can assist with environment setup, packaging, deployment, and technical validation, allowing teams to focus more on design quality and less on manual tasks.
