Acumatica consumption licensing sizes an Acumatica Cloud ERP subscription by the volume of business the system processes rather than by the number of people who log in. The vendor’s SaaS FAQ states the principle directly: “Acumatica does not charge by user”, and the right consumption level depends on the load placed on the system at peak times, which for most customers is the number of commercial transactions processed each month.[6] The EULA lists the possible bases of a licence: copies, modules, the number of users, the transactional volume, the number of Tenants, the number of logical CPU cores and the number of Acumatica websites, “as set forth in your Acumatica Order Form”.[4] This article covers the metrics a licence manager has to count.
Transaction Tier Consumption Licensing
Commercial Transaction Volume
The April 2026 Licensing Guide defines licensing “based on the monthly Commercial Transaction Volumes (CTVs)”. The Commercial Transaction Volume for a month “is equal to the single highest volume of transactions” among eight types: sales orders of any order type, shipments, AR invoices, customer payments, purchase orders, purchase receipts, AP bills and AP payments.[1] The types are not added together. The guide’s worked example has a company that in one month processed 800 AR invoices, 700 customer payments, 400 AP invoices, 200 vendor payments and 500 sales orders (300 quotes and 200 orders). Its CTV is 800, the highest single type, and the correct tier is S1, which allows 1,000 commercial transactions per month.[1]
The example counts quotes among the sales orders, which shows that the “of any order type” wording reaches record types that users may regard as pre-sales.
Tiers
The Transaction Tier chosen must accommodate the maximum CTV. Table 4 of the guide lists the maximum monthly CTV per tier:[1]
| Tier group | Tiers and monthly CTV maximum |
|---|---|
| S | S1 1K, S2 1.5K, S3 2K |
| M | M1 3K, M2 4K, M3 5K |
| L | L1 7.5K, L2 10K, L3 15K, L4 20K |
| X | X1 30K, X2 50K, X3 75K, X4 100K |
| E | E1 150K, E2 200K, E3 300K, E4 400K, E5 500K |
| P | P1 750K, P2 1M, P3+ above 1M |
Exceeding the maximum in any given month of the subscription year “creates an out-of-compliance situation, which may require you to increase your Transaction Tier level mid-contract”. The guide adds that increased CTV typically signals commercial growth.[1] The same guide names a License Monitoring Console as the facility for viewing licence information so customers know their consumption.
Earlier guide: CTV plus ETV and a three-month test
The October 2023 guide, which applies to products sold before April 2024, had two ceilings per tier: the monthly CTV and a monthly ERP Transaction Volume (ETV), for example S1 with 1K CTV and 20K ETV, and P3+ above 1M CTV and above 20M ETV. It defines ETV as the number of times an object is created or modified, which happens each time a user saves a form, and notes that one save can generate several ERP transactions and that customizations can raise it. Compliance required that monthly CTV and ETV “must not exceed the volume allowed by the Subscription Agreement for any three (3) months during a trailing twelve (12) month period”.[2] The EULA and the SaaS Agreement carry the same three-month trigger as a material breach.[4][5]
The April 2026 guide words the test differently (any month) and treats ETV as a daily recommendation rather than a tier ceiling. The documents are not reconciled in the text, so the Order Form and the contract version in force determine which test applies to a given customer.
Named User Licensing
Named User licensing “is based on the number of individual users licensed to use the Acumatica Cloud ERP system”. Each named user “must have his or her own username and password; the sharing of usernames by more than one individual is not permitted”. The licence does not limit users that can be created, only users that can be enabled.[1] Table 5 sets the entitlements:
| Essentials | Select | Prime | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Named users included | 5 | 10 | 10 | 35 |
| Maximum named users | 10 | 30 | 100 | Unlimited |
| Web API connections included | 5 | 5 | 10 | 10 |
| Compliance basis | Named users and CTV | Named users | Named users | Named users |
Essentials “is subject to compliance under both Named User Licensing and Transaction Tier Consumption Licensing”, so an Essentials customer must watch both counts.[1] The Essentials maximum of ten is also stated as a system constraint, and the guide notes that Essentials users are always named users.
Under the earlier guide, Small Business Edition customers used Named User licensing with five named users included (upgradable to ten, or twenty for the General Business Edition) and each licensed named user received an API user.[2]
Web API connections
Web API connections are counted separately. API users or connections “are not allowed to access the system via the user interface”, and every non-browser client consumes a connection except the Acumatica mobile application, which connects through a browser. Connections whose external applications fail to log out stay occupied, and the system prevents further logins when the maximum is reached.[1]
Users on consumption subscriptions
On consumption-based subscriptions Acumatica does not limit the number of users, but “the number of users actively using the system can impact performance and user experience”. The guide’s recommendation table assumes an even mix of casual and regular users and gives recommended active users of 10 for Essentials, 25 for Select, 100 for Prime and a scalable figure for Enterprise.[1]
Legacy Concurrent User licensing
Advanced and Enterprise customers that were not a good fit for consumption could, under the October 2023 guide, choose Concurrent User licensing, which permits “a set number of users to concurrently log in”. For offers defined only by transaction tier, the guide maps user bands to tiers: 1 to 10 users to S1-S3, 11 to 25 to M1-M3, 26 to 50 to L1-L2, 51 to 100 to L3-L4, 101 to 250 to X1-X4, 251 to 500 to E1-E5 and 501 or more to P1-P3.[2] The April 2026 guide does not describe this model.
Legacy Resource Level licensing
The May 2018 Supplement describes a model “based on the number of logical CPU Cores activated” for Private Cloud Perpetual and Private Cloud Subscription, with resource levels from Small to 4X-Large recognising at most 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 logical cores. In SaaS the level was tied to maximum transactions and concurrent users. The supplement states that a January 2018 review found performance problems and that Acumatica “recommends Transaction Tier licensing”. The October 2023 guide says customers who purchased before 2018-04-01 may use Resource Levels.[3][2] See Resource Level (logical CPU cores).
Firm constraints and recommendations
Beyond the licence metric, the April 2026 guide sets “firm” constraints per product that “cannot be extended” unless SaaS Reserved Resources are added:[1]
| Constraint | Essentials | Select | Prime | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lines per transaction | 1,000 | 2,000 | 2,500 | 6,000 |
| Serial numbers per document | 2,000 | 4,000 | 7,500 | 12,000 |
| Web API connections | 5 | 10 | 20 | 60 |
| Web API requests per minute | 50 | 100 | 150 | 300 |
| Import records per day | 2,500 | 5,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 |
| API concurrency (queue) | 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| Parallelism | 1 | 2 | 3 | 8 |
Separate recommendations (Table 7A) set daily ERP transactions at 2,000, 5,000, 12,000 and 30,000 and daily commercial transactions at 100, 250, 750 and 1,000 for the four products at their highest tier. Exceeding them “will result in noticeable performance degradation” and potentially violations of the Fair Use Policy.[1] Recommended maxima for inventory items, active fixed assets, customers with open balances and integrations also grow with the product.
Tenants and entities
A single tenant can contain unlimited entities, which share customers, vendors, employees and the chart of accounts. Whether consumption or user licensing applies, “the licensing stipulations will be applied to the total consumption or user count across all companies and tenants”. Extra tenant packs exist for Select, Prime and Enterprise.[1] Consolidating several legal entities into one tenant therefore does not reduce CTV, and adding a tenant does not add an allowance.
Practical points
- Export monthly counts per transaction type and use the maximum, not the total.
- Treat integration and batch activity as consumption: scheduled processes and REST API writes generate ERP transactions as well as user saves.
- Check which guide family and which three-month or single-month test the contract states.
- Count API users separately from named users.
Out of scope
This article does not cover edition and module entitlements, storage and Reserved Resources, or prices; none of these is published as a list.