AcumatiCares
At the Acumatica Summit this January, I enjoyed reconnecting with the Acumatica Community—not only with customers and partners, but also with my fellow employees. As Acumatica’s Country Manager for the United Kingdom and Ireland (UKI), it’s not often I get the chance to catch up with the North American cohort. One of the best parts of my job at Acumatica is the people.
While we can’t always meet face-to-face, the next best thing is staying connected through our active online Acumatica Community portal. The site has become a one-stop-shop for discussion forums, announcements, and regional user groups. This last item—the user groups—has become particularly popular within the Acumatica Community.
The True Value of Acumatica User Groups
User groups are a great way to meet Acumatica users in your area and share knowledge through networking, round tables, or informal chats. These groups, and the greater Community portal, also offer the opportunity to surround yourself with an experienced support system. When users encounter unanswered questions, Acumatica’s online Community provides easy access to answers from subject-matter experts who provide trusted resources.
Coming back from Summit, I received a message from a customer based out of North Northamptonshire, asking if we have any regional user groups in the UK. He wanted an online community for sharing feedback and engaging with his regional counterparts.
It makes sense. In the last year, the Acumatica UKI user base increased by 42%. There’s a tremendous need to serve this growing Community by creating a platform through which their voices can be heard. This is especially important since Acumatica users in the UKI have unique challenges that may require approaches different from those taken in North America.
To address these needs and extend the advantages of Acumatica’s Community to the UKI, today I’m pleased to announce that we’ve created our first UKI Acumatica user group.
Introducing the UKI Acumatica User Group
A more dynamic and digital world demands more connected and collaborative solutions. And it’s our hope that, with the creation of the UKI Acumatica user group, we’ll continue to build upon our collective knowledge. We’ll help our UKI customers become more efficient and drive exceptional execution, and we’ll use their feedback to inform our product roadmap.
The new UKI user group will help address country and region-specific challenges. For instance, the UKI has fiscal and statutory compliance considerations that don’t apply to North America—like the digital record requirements of Making Tax Digital (MTD) and the annual changes driven by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). There are also specific localization factors, such as the various languages and regional terminology in the UKI, different address and date formats, and UKI-specific bank feeds.
Beyond requirements at home, it’s also more common for UK-based businesses to operate internationally, specifically in EU countries, and this means they have to adapt to multinational regulations and trade specifications, like e-Invoicing, which the EU will make mandatory in 2024.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for Acumatica users in the UKI, which is why this user group and the Community it will build are so critical.
Expanding the Acumatica Community Worldwide
As the Country Manager for the UKI, I get to work with our growing Community of customers and partners to ensure we understand the needs of UKI-based small and midsize companies, so we can help them thrive. One part of my job is ensuring our customers have everything they need, so they can focus on growing their businesses and delivering exceptional customer experiences—without worrying about the day-to-day regulatory compliance running a business in this region demands. In addition to addressing the unique needs of our UKI customers, this new Community user group also reflects Acumatica’s culture of making information available and accessible to all.
In our recently updated Customer Bill of Rights, we state that our customers have the right to “Take advantage of all knowledge and resources developed across a broad community of employees, partners, and customers.” One thing that sets Acumatica apart from the competition is our commitment to our Community. We’re grateful for customer feedback, and now the customer from North Northamptonshire who wrote that post-Summit message can officially say he is a founding member of our first UKI user group.
We hope member participation in this online ecosystem will help foster even more innovations within the UKI companies that have adopted Acumatica products and services. We believe it will help forge meaningful relationships among Acumatica customers, partners, and employees—nurturing those relationships with feedback, ideas, and vibrant discussion.
If you’d like to join our UKI user group, or see our listings in other regions, you can send a request directly on our user group landing page. To see any of our other community offerings, visit our community site.
At the heart of it, Acumatica is an ecosystem of partners, customers, and creators who are invested in seeing tomorrow’s leading businesses grow on their terms. So, let’s celebrate the creation of the first UKI user group, look forward to what we will discover together, and imagine how we will build a better future for all.
