Upgrades are a critical component of customer satisfaction and overall sentiment in the Acumatica ecosystem. Ensuring a smooth and efficient upgrade process is paramount, as it significantly impacts how end-users perceive Acumatica, their VAR (Value Added Reseller), and the ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) they rely on. This article delves into the “why” and “how” of effective Acumatica upgrades, covering common pain points, best practices, and innovative solutions, including Sprinterra’s comprehensive approach.
Why Upgrades Matter: Goals and Impact
Adherence to upgrade best practices is crucial for enhancing the client experience. A wide variance exists in client upgrade experiences, which often correlates with inconsistencies in VARs’ processes and best practices for managing these upgrades. The goal is to foster a collaborative community effort to continuously improve upgrade handling, leading to happier clients and a healthier ecosystem.
Several significant upgrade milestones are on the horizon, including the September “always current” wave and the upcoming 25R2 release, which will feature the modern UI fully available, adding another variable to consider during transitions from classic to modern interfaces.
From a financial perspective, investing heavily in pre-upgrade activities like thorough sandbox testing on the front end typically leads to smoother production execution and less intensive post-upgrade support. Conversely, a lighter initial testing approach often results in a more reactive, resource-heavy support phase once the upgrade is live. In most cases, dedicating time, money, and effort upfront proves to be a much more efficient and affordable process.
Common Pain Points and Shortcomings in Acumatica Upgrades
Several recurring challenges can hinder a successful Acumatica upgrade:
- No Sandbox or Sandbox Testing: Surprisingly, less than half of Acumatica upgrades are executed with a sandbox in place. This is a major driver of post-upgrade issues, akin to embarking on a road trip without a map. Every upgrade should ideally have a sandbox for testing.
- Managing ISVs: Coordinating with multiple ISVs presents a common hurdle. Questions arise regarding who to contact, testing best practices from their perspective, which screens are affected, and if new customization packages are needed.
- Managing Customizations (“Gremlins in the System”): When customizations are managed half-heartedly or outside of best practices, they can lead to unexpected behavior or unintended consequences. Issues include customizations that partially work but have side effects due to insufficient or misdirected testing, customizations that no longer work, and customizations that may present maintenance nightmares in the future. Additionally, client environments often feature customizations from various sources—in-house expertise, third-party consultants, VARs, or Acumatica itself—leading to a broad range of coding protocols, some of which may not follow best practices.
- Hidden “Gotchas”: These are small but cumulative issues that appear after an upgrade. Examples include:
- General Inquiries (GIs) or reports not populating or showing error messages due to obsolete fields or outdated joins.
- Import scenarios, automations, or business events not triggering as expected.
- Out-of-the-box functionality or reports behaving unexpectedly. These issues can often be identified with adequate sandbox testing.
- Client-Led User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Issues: Often, the client-led UAT process for an upgrade either doesn’t happen or doesn’t occur to the necessary extent.
Solutions and Best Practices for Mitigation
To improve the upgrade process and mitigate these pitfalls, consider the following best practices:
- Use a Sandbox: This is the simplest and most straightforward way to ensure a quality and healthy upgrade. A sandbox provides a dedicated environment for testing, allowing all “kinks” to be worked out before the actual upgrade.
- Create an ISV Library (Rolodex): Maintain an internal store of information for each ISV. This should include:
- General contact information.
- Who is the main point of contact?
- Best practice processes for upgrade testing.
- ISV recommendations for approach.
- Who handles testing (ISV or VAR)?.
- Any charges for testing.
- Whether a new customization package is typically required with upgrades. This comprehensive overview helps manage each ISV’s portion of the upgrade effectively, preventing miscommunication and ensuring proper protocols are followed.
- Automated Testing: Focus on automating standard workflow testing. This can cover:
- Creating, paying, voiding, and reversing AP bills.
- Cutting checks.
- Running import scenarios.
- Executing business events and automations.
- Accessing GI screens and report screens to check for errors. Automated testing is highly beneficial for repeatable, out-of-the-box functionalities, providing results on whether a screen access or a sequence of steps is successful.
- Track Client UAT Activity in the Sandbox: If you rely on clients for UAT, monitor their activity within the sandbox. Out-of-the-box functionality and custom packages can help track who logs in and what they do. A lack of activity from a user responsible for specific testing (e.g., AP testing) can be a red flag, indicating potential black holes where upgrade success is unknown.
- Dedicate Time to Customization Maintenance:
- Go Beyond Validation: Don’t just check if customizations publish in the new version. Thoroughly test their functionality by checking screens, ensuring everything displays as intended, and verifying workflows. A simple customization might publish but not work as expected if it was built for a previous version.
- Allocate Time for Code Tweaks: Dedicate time for recompiling code and making necessary tweaks when more complex packages require in-depth maintenance.
- Assess Code Health: Be aware that customizations from various sources might follow different coding protocols. Tools exist to assess the health of a customization package, ensuring it adheres to Acumatica’s core tenets and minimizing future maintenance or complete rewrites.
The Ideal Upgrade Life Cycle: A Comprehensive View
An ideal Acumatica upgrade follows a structured, comprehensive life cycle:
- Planning, Communicating, and Validating Functionality:
- Map the Client’s Instance: Identify existing customizations, their complexity, and ISV integrations.
- Define Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly outline who is involved from the VAR, end-user, and ISV sides.
- Create a Project Plan: Detail timelines, tasks, and ownership.
- Assign Tasks: Break down the upgrade into component parts and allocate responsibilities.
- Sandbox Creation and Staging:
- Allow Ample Time: Ensure plenty of time for adequate testing and resolving any identified gaps.
- Purpose: The sandbox serves as a staging area for customizations and updated ISV packages, ensuring everything is ready before cutover to the live system.
- Comprehensive Testing:
- System Integrity Testing: Test standard workflows, GIs, reports, import scenarios, business events, automations, and other out-of-the-box functionality. This is where automated testing can be highly effective.
- Integrated Connections: Test all integrated connections.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Finalize core pieces through thorough UAT.
- Deployment to Production:
- Off-Hours Execution: Typically performed after hours.
- Sanity Checks: Have a resource available to publish customizations and conduct basic sanity checks to confirm everything is functioning as expected based on sandbox testing.
- Monitoring and Support:
- Readily Available Support: Be available for the client in case of anomalies or emergencies.
Identify Issues: A well-executed upgrade should result in minor “low-hanging fruit” support requests (e.g., “Where did that button go?”) rather than critical functional failures (e.g., “I can’t run a check” or “This process fails”). Persistent critical errors (like unavailable GIs or reports) indicate that the upgrade process needs to be revisited, as these should have been caught in sandbox testing.
Sprinterra's Approach to Upgrades
Sprinterra has developed a comprehensive upgrade program designed to streamline the process, incorporating all the discussed best practices. A key differentiator in Sprinterra’s approach is their early-stage preparation:
- Proactive Customization Review: As soon as a new Acumatica version is released, Sprinterra immediately reviews and prepares client customizations for compatibility.
- Automated Customization Tool: They use an internal automated tool to:
- Assess the validity and compatibility of customization packages with the new version.
- Identify necessary code changes and maintenance.
- Assess the health of the package (adherence to Acumatica’s core coding tenets).
- Estimate the complexity and level of effort required to update the customization.
- Pre-Sandbox Preparation: Customizations are prepared in Sprinterra’s own environments before the client’s sandbox is even created. This ensures that when the sandbox is spun up, customizations are already ready, allowing immediate functional testing without the initial technical heavy lifting of validation and recompilation.
Beyond this early preparation, Sprinterra’s program also includes:
- Automated System Integrity Testing in the sandbox.
- ISV Management: Working with ISVs based on their accumulated “ISV Rollodex” of best practices and handling all correspondence.
- Deployment to Production: Including customizations, sanity checks, and ongoing support post-upgrade.
Sprinterra offers hybrid models, allowing VARs to manage the overall upgrade while Sprinterra handles specific components like customization work. Their program is broken into three components: system integrity testing, ISVs, and customizations, which can be handled individually or as a complete package.
Pricing for Sprinterra’s upgrades is not based on time and material, but rather on:
- Client Complexity: (e.g., manufacturing, distribution, e-commerce).
- Customization Complexity: The level of effort required to update them.
- ISV Component: A tiered list (gold, silver, bronze) determines charges. Commonly used, straightforward ISVs are included without charge, while less common or high-effort ISVs may incur a fee.
The upgrade program is often structured as an annual agreement, ensuring that early-stage preparation can commence as soon as a new release is available, with the understanding that the upgrade will be executed. Sprinterra also utilizes a customized Acumatica Portal as a library to track customer customizations, their testing status (QA, sandbox, production readiness). They can also store source code if approved by the client.
Available Tools and Resources
Several valuable tools and resources can aid in the Acumatica upgrade process:
- builds.acumatica.com: This website is a central hub for Acumatica resources. You can find:
- Release notes for all versions.
- Updated report designers.
- Acumatica instances for local testing environments.
- Add-on software tools (e.g., eSign, Gemo integrations).
- Known issues published in release notes.
- Sprinterra’s Customization Assessment Tool: This tool, available through Sprinterra, provides an assessment of:
- Customization package complexity.
- Compatibility with the target version.
- Adherence to Acumatica best practices in coding. It generates a report highlighting areas that need addressing before upgrading.
- Sprinterra’s System Integrity Testing Tool: This automated tool helps cover core functionality testing. It includes standard workflows, reporting, GIs, automations, business events, and import scenarios, identifying potential errors prior to upgrade execution. As of now, it’s programmatic, automating manual processes, with AI components in testing.
- Acumatica Community: A valuable resource for:
- Finding known issues and release notes.
- Checking forums for discussions and experiences related to specific versions.
By understanding the challenges, adopting best practices, leveraging available tools, and potentially partnering with specialized providers like Sprinterra, organizations can significantly streamline their Acumatica upgrades, ensuring a smoother transition and a healthier, more efficient system.
For comprehensive Acumatica services, support, and upgrades, including their specialized upgrade program, consider reaching out to Sprinterra.
Sprinterra offers a range of services designed to enhance your Acumatica experience and ensure smooth upgrades:
- Comprehensive Upgrade Program: Sprinterra’s annual upgrade program is built to make the upgrade process efficient and clean, handling technical heavy lifting early by preparing customizations as soon as a new Acumatica version is released. This program covers system integrity testing, ISV management, and customizations.
- Automated Customization Tool: This tool assesses the health, complexity, and compatibility of customization packages with new Acumatica versions, highlighting areas needing attention and adhering to Acumatica’s coding best practices.
- Automated System Integrity Testing: Sprinterra utilizes and offers a tool that automates testing of standard workflows, GIs, reports, import scenarios, business events, and automations, helping to identify potential errors before an upgrade is executed.
- ISV Management: Sprinterra helps manage Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) by maintaining an “ISV rollodex” with best practices and contact information, ensuring proper coordination and testing protocols are followed during upgrades.
- Support and Monitoring: Sprinterra provides ongoing support following an upgrade, addressing anomalies and ensuring a smooth transition to the new version.
- Flexible Engagement Models: Sprinterra offers hybrid models where they can handle specific components of the upgrade process, such as the customization piece, for VARs.
- Internal Tools: Sprinterra uses a customized Acumatica Portal to track customer customizations and their testing status, and they have the ability to store source code with client approval.
To learn more or discuss your specific needs, you can contact Garrett Rochell, the Director of Growth at Sprinterra, directly at Garrett.Rochell@Sprinterra.com. He is available to share best practices and engage in discussions about successful upgrades .
