A couple of weeks ago, I laid out an idea for ARC.
Does ARC stand for Acumatica Reporting Club? Well, I can’t say for sure. For more on the name “ARC”, go checkout the last post (click here). Note that this also applies to ACCEO, Lexware, MYOB Advanced, and VISMA which are built on top of Acumatica.
Acumatica is growing rapidly. The most recent customer count that I’ve seen is 3,000 customers which I learned a couple of months ago from Wayne Schulz (click here).
And things are starting to shake-out regarding where to go for information. If you want geeky developer help, check the Acumatica Tag on Stack Overflow.
If you want a general user group, checkout the Acumatica User Group on LinkedIn where I fight on a weekly basis as administrator of the group to keep it free from spammy marketing posts that aren’t related to Acumatica.
But what if you want help with reporting? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a central place for knowledge on reporting in Acumatica using the different reporting tools that are available?
Well, I’m creating such a place. And I’m calling it “ARC”.
If you haven’t seen my last post on the topic, here’s another link to it (click here).
At the bottom of the post, I explained that it would be a membership site with a monthly fee of $99.
A Free Club?
But I realized that you can’t deliver consulting in a forum that multiple people have access to.
Consulting really needs to be done one-on-one because of the sensitivity of the data in each specific company’s reports.
Actually, I was already thinking this way in the beginning, but some of the comments that I got on the bottom of the last post and also from people emailing me directly confirmed this.
Because of this, I was never really planning to charge for ARC, but I thought I’d put the idea out there and see how people responded.
I do have an idea for a reporting product that I would charge for, but more on that in a future post. Let’s get ARC launched first.
My first thought was just to make ARC free, but I really do want ARC to feel like a “club” and not a “community”. I want the participants to feel like “members” who feel like they are a part of something special. Also, I want to keep out bots and other creepy crawly artificial intelligence things that try to work their way into human gathering places.
So I’m going to charge a small lifetime membership fee, just to make sure that people who join are serious about it.
The Lifetime Membership Fee: $10
That’s $10 for lifetime access to all things reporting in Acumatica.
And it will be public so Google can index it and take people there when they are Googling for information.
No membership needed to view the forums. You only need to pay the $10 if you want to create an an account and post something.
There are 7 separate forums that will all be launching at the same time:
- Acumatica Dashboards
- Acumatica Pivot Tables
- Acumatica Analytical Report Manager (Financial Report Writer)
- Acumatica Schema
- Acumatica Report Designer
- Acumatica Generic Inquiries
- Microsoft Excel and Power BI with Acumatica OData
Right now I’m seeding some content so it won’t feel empty when you login and I’m also working out a few technical things before launching ARC officially.
I’ll do another blog post to announce when ARC officially becomes available. If you want to be notified, just sign-up to Receive New Posts via Email on the right-hand side of this page.
Or, if you want to be notified before ARC becomes officially available and have the opportunity to become a member before everyone else, then you can sign-up for this email list (Update June 30th, 2017: ARC Forums have launched, so no more email list). I’ll be sending out email updates to the list to let you know how things are coming along. Also, I’ll send out an email to the list that allows you to sign-up before I announce it here on the blog.
But just know that this will be a $10 lifetime membership fee. No $99 per month like I mentioned in the last post 🙂