Going through an entire Acumatica implementation for the first time with a client, I figured I had my hands/plate/glass filled to just about capacity, with me being the person responsible at my company to lend expertise to our new customer from a Distribution perspective. Bringing in Historical and Open A/R, setting up customers, vendors, and items properly, as well as figuring out processes from all ends of the Distribution spectrum on software, that as a company, we were relatively new to, seemed like a daunting enough task without also being asked to handle the online ordering end of the application.
However, when prodded a bit by our client to move the Customer Portal process along, I delved into an area of the ERP world I had no familiarity with whatsoever, mostly due to the fact that developers and programmers handled such customer needs in my past with other software programs I have implemented.
The Results….of what I was expecting to be a fruitless effort on my end?
An Acumatica Customer Portal that was not only ridiculously easy to configure, but also one in which I could only envision will help our customer base greatly as far as revenues are concerned, allowing their salesman to enter orders real-time while on the road….or have their customers place transactions in the portal themselves!
I can’t take all of the credit in making this occur, as the Acumatica instance I worked on in this case was one hosted in the cloud, so the Support team from the software vendor themselves takes responsibility for the install/deployment, where if purchased by your client from the “get go” will be taken care of at the same time the production site is installed.
But once the portal was active, it was in our court:
- Make sure you have enabled the CUSTOMER PORTAL in System Management’s ENABLE/DISABLE FEATURES window as per below….
- Set-up the USER TYPE as per below in your Production Site, adding the 2 roles within said user type, which will give the customer portal visitor all of the necessary rights required to place orders and view their financial statuses….nothing more, nothing less (note the LINKED ENTITY is a CONTACT, rather than an “Employee” like your internal Acumatica end-users are classified as)…..
….with the out of the box PORTAL USER role, your customers/salesman will be able to place orders, as well as see some limited reports from Acumatica in order to give the logged in user an idea of where they stand financially with your firm.
- In the window below, you will want to set-up the customer portal address, in order for the automatic email templates going out to your customer contacts to have the proper link for them to log into.
- And then finally we would need to do the last bit of work necessary in Acumatica, creating your CUSTOMER CONTACTS, either by importing in mass, or adding individually…..as per below.
…whereby doing this process on the CONTACTS tab of the individual customer, you have associated said contact with the specific Business Account/Customer automatically.
Also, in the contact card itself, you will want to ensure that if said contact is to have CUSTOMER PORTAL ACCESS, the “User Info” tab must be filled in accordingly as per below…whereby once you create the LOGIN name, an automatic message will be sent to the user with their login name, password, and link to the portal, as per second screen shot.
- Once logged in, and after being asked to change one’s password, your customer’s welcome screen will appear as so…..
….where they will be able to see their “customer specific” prices and inventory levels that they can purchase based on your Acumatica production server’s real-time data….thus able to add items to their respective Shopping Carts…..
….viewing images and other descriptive information that have been loaded at the item card level in the Production site as per below, with an option to ADD TO THE CART within the window itself.
…..the ability to look at past orders, and view whether SHIPMENTS have gone out for delivery…..
…..as well as checking out account balances owed by your customer to your client on their own.
Simplistic and effective…….pretty awesome stuff laid out by the folks over at Acumatica!
