Streamlining Acumatica Time Entry with DMC’s Chronos Application

Accurate timekeeping is critical to the success of professional services organizations. It enables us to accurately track and manage our clients’ time, provides insight into how long different tasks take, and helps us allocate that time effectively. But when you work across multiple clients and projects, completing a timesheet at the end of a particularly busy week can feel as time-consuming as the client work itself.

At DMC, time entry also connects directly to projects, budgets, billing, labor costs, and ultimately the financial health of our business. That’s why, in addition to adopting Acumatica as our ERP platform, we integrated it with Chronos, a time-entry application developed by DMC to simplify and streamline time tracking. Together, these systems reduce the administrative burden of time entry while centralizing the project and financial data that rely on accurate timekeeping.

Improving ERP Usability with a Custom Time-Tracking Application. For a professional services organization, time entry is essential, but entering that time is administrative work. With hundreds of employees potentially splitting their days among several projects and activities, even small inefficiencies can add up.

DMC custom-developed Chronos to provide a more intuitive and efficient time-tracking experience tailored to the way employees work. Originally developed independently of Acumatica, Chronos was later integrated with the ERP platform to combine its user-friendly interface with Acumatica’s project management and financial capabilities.

Employees enter their time through Chronos, while the data flows into Acumatica for project management, accounting, billing, and other downstream business processes. Rather than replacing Acumatica’s ERP functionality, Chronos complements it by providing a specialized user experience for time entry.

Chronos can also use attributes stored in Acumatica to determine which options are relevant to each employee. For example, an engineer and a marketing employee perform different types of work, so they may see different labor classifications when logging their time. Chronos filters these selections based on the employee’s profile, simplifying the interface and helping employees choose the appropriate options.

Validation rules provide another layer of control. Chronos can prevent invalid combinations, such as recording a particular type of time against a customer when that combination is not permitted for billing. This helps improve data quality before information reaches downstream projects and financial processes.

From Time Entry to Customer Billing

Submitting time is only the beginning of the workflow.

Employees can record work across multiple projects in Chronos. Once submitted, those entries flow into Acumatica, which serves as the source of truth for subsequent project and financial processes.

Project managers can then review the imported time as part of their normal project-management workflow:

• Reviewing time recorded by engineers
• Correcting or reclassifying entries when necessary
• Marking appropriate time as non-billable
• Identifying billable time that has not yet been invoiced
• Distinguishing it from time that has already been billed

That review matters because an invoice involves more than accumulated hours. Project managers and accounting may need to coordinate project status, billing dates, customer charges, labor, materials, and purchase commitments before issuing an invoice.

Keeping those activities within Acumatica, teams gain a consistent view of the information supporting billing decisions while reducing the risk of errors that can arise when critical processes span across multiple systems.

Creating a Single Source of Truth

The integration also addresses a broader challenge: data consistency.

In DMC’s previous workflow, project and labor data existed across multiple systems, creating additional effort to maintain consistency. When someone corrected a record in one application, they had to make sure to change it in other applications as well.

With the current architecture, Acumatica serves as the authoritative record. Chronos makes it easier to capture time, but downstream project and financial information ultimately comes back to the ERP.

As a result, project managers, engineers, and accounting teams can make decisions with greater confidence, knowing they are working from a consistent set of records.

It also establishes a clear governance model for reporting and analytics: when discrepancies arise, Acumatica serves as the authoritative source for reconciliation.

Building Integrations Around a Modern ERP

Chronos is only one component of a broader integration ecosystem.

DMC’s Acumatica implementation also requires information to remain synchronized across systems such as Paylocity for HR and payroll functions and Microsoft identity management systems. Employee records, user identities, projects, and other business data must remain consistent as information moves between applications.

This is where DMC’s systems integration experience becomes particularly valuable. Integrating an ERP with specialized applications requires more than simply transferring data between systems. Effective integrations must account for APIs, business rules, validation logic, identity management, data ownership, and the business processes that depend on accurate information.

The principles DMC applies when developing integrated systems for clients are the same as those used internally: selecting the right platform for each function, establishing a clear source of truth, and creating a seamless user experience across connected applications.

The Result: A Specialized UI with Centralized Data

Acumatica and Chronos address different aspects of the same challenge.

Chronos provides employees a purpose-built interface that simplifies detailed time entry and reduces administrative effort. Acumatica serves as the operational backbone, connecting time data to projects, budgets, costs, billing, inventory, and financial reporting.

Together, they provide an efficient time-entry experience without sacrificing the centralized visibility and process control that drove our ERP implementation in the first place.

For organizations with similarly complex project, ERP, and application requirements, the lesson extends beyond timekeeping. A central ERP does not have to provide the ideal interface for every workflow. With the right integration architecture, specialized applications can improve the user experience while ensuring critical business data remains governed by the ERP.