Most modern ERP systems have features that exploit the importance of email as our primary interface with customers, vendors, and other contacts in general. We recognize that some professionals in sales and marketing lean on mail applications like Outlook to control their schedules and activities. Using the integration between Acumatica and Outlook can be a valuable tool for customer lifecycle management because of its ability to maintain a complete history of communication.
By using the Acumatica add-in for Outlook, you can process incoming and outgoing mails in your Outlook mailbox and search for leads, contacts, and employees in Acumatica that match the respective sender and recipient emails. You can also create leads and contacts, log communication activities, and manage cases and opportunities right from your mailbox.
Starting in 2020 R2, you can also submit Outlook PDF attachments for recognition (powered by Acumatica’s Machine Learning/AI) to create AP documents automatically. Bear in mind the process of using these functions with the Outlook add-in is manual (i.e., by pressing the named buttons on the right pane in the Outlook UI. See Figure 1.) and it handles one email at a time.
Figure 1. Outlook with Acumatica add-in
Acumatica add-in for Exchange takes it one step further by synchronizing contacts, emails, tasks, and calendar appointments between your users’ Exchange Server and Acumatica. Besides broader functionalities, Exchange Integration offers more flexibility to set synchronization policies and schedules for batch and automated updates.
If you are considering and weighing these two add-ins, make sure you answer the ‘Why’ question in addition to the ‘What’ question we covered in this post. Transactional volume, especially for AP document recognition and creation, can be a formidable driving force for the latter option to increase efficiency and save time.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
Eric.