Acumatica Cloud ERP is a business-management suite sold by Acumatica, Inc., a Delaware corporation.[4] Its licensing is unusual among ERP vendors because the principal chargeable dimension is not the number of people who use it. The vendor’s pricing page says customers pay “for the functionality you need” and not for user seats, and that pricing is tailored using three factors: the applications needed, the expected usage and resource requirements, and the deployment preference.[7] In practice the licence is a bundle of an edition, a set of modules, a consumption level (a transaction tier) and a deployment model, all documented in a Licensing Guide that sits beside the contract documents rather than inside them.
The wiki treats the Licensing Guide and the agreements on the vendor’s agreements page as the authoritative sources.[9] The guide says it “does not supersede, replace, or modify any of the legal documentation covering use rights”, and that Acumatica may update the document without advance notice.[1] A software asset manager therefore reads the guide to learn how entitlements are measured, and the End User License Agreement (EULA) or Subscription SaaS Agreement to learn what happens when they are exceeded.
Products and editions
Acumatica publishes two Licensing Guides. The current one applies to “products introduced on or after April 2024” and defines four product sizes: Essentials, Select, Prime and Enterprise.[1] Essentials is aimed at smaller organisations and includes five named users. Select is described as designed for small businesses, typically up to fifty employees. Prime targets the lower mid-market, up to two hundred employees. Enterprise is described as suitable for any size of organisation that needs advanced financial and ERP functionality “in a reserved resource environment”. The earlier guide, dated October 2023, used the sizes Small Business, Advanced (10 to 250 employees) and Enterprise (250 or more employees) and remains the reference for products sold before April 2024.[2]
Each size is combined with an industry edition: Distribution, Retail, Manufacturing, Construction, Professional Services or General Business. The edition fixes which modules are included and which can be added.[1] Details of the modules and add-on packs are in Acumatica editions and modules.
Metrics
Two metrics carry most of the licence.
Transaction Tier Consumption Licensing measures the monthly Commercial Transaction Volume (CTV): the single highest volume among eight transaction types (sales orders, shipments, AR invoices, customer payments, purchase orders, purchase receipts, AP bills and AP payments). The customer picks a Transaction Tier from S1 (1,000 a month) up to P3+ (above one million a month) that accommodates its maximum CTV.[1] Consumption-based subscriptions do not cap the number of users, although the guide warns that the number of active users affects performance.
Named User Licensing counts individuals enabled to use the system. It limits the number of users that can be enabled, not the number that can be created, and each named user needs a personal login. The guide lists included and maximum named users per product (for example Essentials 5 and 10, Enterprise 35 and unlimited) and treats Essentials as subject to compliance under both named users and CTV.[1]
Older estates may still carry other measures: Concurrent User licensing, a monthly ERP Transaction Volume (ETV) ceiling attached to each tier, and Resource Level licensing based on logical CPU cores for private cloud.[2][11] The full treatment is in Acumatica consumption and named-user licensing.
Counting and floors
The guide sets firm system constraints per product (lines per transaction, serial numbers per document, Web API connections, API requests per minute, daily import records, AI Insights records) and separate, non-binding recommendations such as daily ERP transactions. The constraints “are firm and cannot be extended”, except by adding SaaS Reserved Resources.[1] Storage floors apply to dependent services: a purchased sandbox must carry storage equal to production, and Backup Access Services must match the production capacity.
Deployment models
The guide covers two deployment models. A SaaS Subscription is hosted by Acumatica and its fee covers the software, hosting hardware, connectivity, firewalls and backups. A Private Cloud Subscription (PCS) lets the customer deploy and manage the software on its own servers or have a reseller or third party host it. Outside SaaS, licences for products such as Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server may be required and are not included.[1] The EULA also defines a Perpetual License, but the earlier guide records that Acumatica stopped selling Private Cloud Perpetual licences as of July 2021.[3][2] See SaaS Reserved Resources and deployment.
Programs
- Always Current upgrades SaaS customers to each new release. Flex replaces it for Prime and Enterprise customers who want to choose their own upgrade date.[1]
- Price Cap limits renewal increases for PCS and SaaS to 10% a year, subject to conditions (see the compliance article).
- SaaS Fair Use Policy lets Acumatica act when a customer’s consumption is excessive for the shared service.
- APEX is a fixed-scope implementation package with a 180-day go-live assumption, governed by supplemental terms.[10]
- Direct Support (Basic and Premier) is sold under a separate Support Subscription Agreement.[5]
- Evaluation, Not For Resale, education and other no-fee licences are temporary, limited licences that Acumatica may end on ten days written notice.[3]
How the contract documents fit together
The EULA covers Perpetual and Subscription Licenses for software that the customer runs; the Subscription SaaS Agreement covers the hosted Service. Both define the Licensing Guide as guidance, require a signed Acumatica Order Form, and contain “Use Reporting” clauses: the product monitors user counts, transaction volumes and resource utilisation, and sustained overuse is a contractual breach.[3][4] The Artificial Intelligence Terms are incorporated into either agreement and prevail over it for AI Features.[6] Acumatica states that it sells exclusively through partners, so the Order Form and invoices usually come from a reseller.[8]
Practical points for licence managers
- Collect the Order Form first: the edition, tier, modules, named-user count, storage and any Reserved Resources are defined there, and the Licensing Guide revision in force at signing may differ from the current one.
- Use the product’s own License Monitoring Console to read CTV and user counts; the guide describes it as the central place to view licence information.[1]
- Track the monthly maximum of the eight transaction types rather than totals.
- Record which licensing guide family applies (pre-April 2024 or later), because the compliance test differs between them.
Out of scope
This article does not cover reseller margins, implementation services priced by partners, third-party Marketplace applications licensed by their own vendors, or the cost of Windows Server and SQL Server for private deployments. The Acumatica Cloud ERP price list is not published; the wiki records no prices.