Customize Your Business Insights with Acumatica's Custom Weeks
This content explains how Acumatica’s custom weeks feature can solve challenges with standard business reporting, and how it helps businesses gain better insights into their operations, with a focus on seasonal businesses.
(a) Challenges
Many businesses find that standard calendar-based reports don’t accurately reflect their operational cycles. This is because these reports are based on rigid weekly reporting periods. Using standard weekly reporting periods can feel like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, as they may not align with a company’s unique business cycles. This misalignment can make it difficult to properly decipher reports, as it is like reading something in a totally different language. For instance, a swimwear company’s peak season, typically late spring through summer, overlaps standard calendar weeks, making sales trend analysis difficult. Relying on standard reports can obscure true business trends and lead to poor decision-making.
(b) Solution: Custom Weeks and Their Benefits
Acumatica’s custom weeks feature allows businesses to define their own reporting periods to match their specific operational needs. Instead of being tied to standard calendar weeks, businesses can create custom weeks by setting their own start and end dates, essentially building their own custom calendar. This enables a clearer picture of business activity during peak seasons or other key periods.
Key benefits of using Acumatica’s custom weeks include:
- Improved Scheduling: Businesses can align resources and production with their actual business cycles, avoiding the need to scramble to catch up.
- Accurate Reporting: By using data that reflects how a business actually operates, they can make informed decisions about inventory and staffing. Custom weeks provide better visibility into trends within a season, not just the big picture. You can see when certain styles take off or when things slow down.
- Enhanced Efficiency: By using customized reports, you can reduce time wrestling with clunky reports and instead focus on what matters.
- Better Decision-Making: With custom weeks, you can anticipate staffing needs much better and avoid last-minute scrambles. Also, you can spot potential supply chain bottlenecks in advance.
- Holistic View: Custom week data seamlessly integrates with all other Acumatica features like reports and dashboards, allowing you to use it to make decisions across the board.
In summary, with Acumatica’s custom weeks, businesses are no longer slaves to the calendar’s definition of a week, and are in control of their time and reporting. This will enable better decisions, improve overall efficiency and ultimately lead to success. To set up custom weeks, you need to enable custom configurations in the system, choose the relevant year, and define your custom weeks by setting their start and end dates. If you are wrestling with rigid reporting periods in Acumatic, reach out to Tayana Solutions. They can help you get set up and make sure it’s tailored to your specific needs.