Month-end close cut 86%: two weeks to two days.
Portacool outgrew a legacy financial system and spreadsheet-heavy manufacturing processes that limited visibility across finance, inventory, and production. Acumatica Manufacturing connected those processes and gave managers more timely operational data.
- Company
- Portacool
- Industry
- Portable evaporative coolers and cooling media
- Founded
- 1990
- Replaced
- Legacy finance system + spreadsheets
- Solution
- Acumatica Manufacturing Edition
Company & challenges
Founded in 1990, Portacool manufactures portable evaporative coolers and specialized cooling media. As product lines and sales channels expanded, its legacy finance system could no longer give managers a dependable view of manufacturing, inventory, and order activity.
The original customer story also reported growing demand for its Kuul evaporative media among data-center customers.
Portacool relied on spreadsheets for manufacturing planning and financial reporting. Employees exported data into Excel and manually entered financial figures into a separate reporting package. The system offered limited shop-floor functionality, and teams struggled to see costs by channel, SKU, market, or customer account. Inventory counts and warehouse records also depended on paper.
These gaps became particularly difficult during pandemic-era supply-chain disruption. Portacool needed one reliable source of data to manage production, material requirements, purchasing, inventory, and reporting without waiting for manual spreadsheet updates.
The solution
Portacool evaluated ERP options and selected Acumatica Manufacturing Edition. According to the source case study, implementation took seven months. Before go-live, the finance team cleaned up data and simplified processes, while employees trained on the new system.
The benefits
Faster close and more useful reporting
Month-end close fell from approximately two weeks to two days, an 86% reduction in elapsed time. The team reduced repetitive data entry and created reports by sales channel, along with dashboards for profitability by SKU, market, and customer account. Managers could review production, financial, and inventory data sooner and investigate exceptions without assembling spreadsheets.
Inventory counts and traceability
Portacool replaced a paper-tag counting process with a barcode-based physical-count workflow in Acumatica. Inventory counts that had taken four days could be completed in less than a day. Lot and serial tracking also gave the team more detailed information about components, finished goods, inventory costs, and production history.
Shipping and quality control
A Pacejet Shipping integration reduced shipping-processing time by more than 40%. Acumatica’s open API also linked Portacool’s in-house quality-control application to manufacturing and customer-service records. With a product serial number, staff could review case history, bills of materials, revisions, and production details to support parts replacement and quality follow-up. Digital checklists replaced stacks of paper used for manufacturing inspections.
- Reduced month-end close time by 86%, from two weeks to two days.
- Cut physical inventory counting from four days to less than one day—a reduction of more than 75%.
- Reduced shipping-processing time by more than 40% through a Pacejet Shipping integration.
- Gained real-time visibility into production, inventory, and manufacturing costs.
- Connected quality-control and manufacturing workflows, with improved lot and serial-number traceability.
Solution stack
Source: Acumatica Customer Success — Portacool.
Do manufacturing, inventory, quality, and finance still depend on separate spreadsheets or systems?
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