Acumatica Construction Edition vs Penta

Acumatica Construction Edition is a cloud construction business management solution for small and midsized general contractors, MEP professionals, specialty trades, home builders, and heavy civil contractors. Its financial and project tools cover job costing, project management, progress billing, cost projections, retainage, commitments, and subcontractor management, with advanced project reporting. Field teams can use mobile devices to submit time and expenses, update RFIs, send daily reports, and annotate drawings and photo logs. Change order workflows support unit-rate, retainage, and cost-only changes and can link drop-ship workflows. The platform supports browser access and mobile use on Android and iOS, with public- or private-cloud deployment. Acumatica describes an open platform with APIs and integrations including STACK for takeoff and estimating, Procore, SmartSheet, Office 365, DocuSign, and Adobe. Listed security measures include role-based controls, MFA, encryption, audit trails, backups, and disaster recovery. Acumatica says it meets or exceeds standards including SOC 1/2/3, GDPR, and FDA. Pricing is custom, based on applications, usage, resources, and deployment preferences rather than user seats, and sales run through its partner channel.

Penta is a construction ERP for specialty contractors, combining financial management, payroll, job costing, and field service. Financial tools provide real-time insight, integrated job and service costing, role-based workbench panels, multi-level reporting, and automated intercompany entries. Payroll handles timecards, job-cost integration, prevailing-wage calculations, multi-union payroll, tax reporting, and an employee portal. Job costing brings together accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, payroll, estimation, and forecasting for reporting and current cost visibility. Field service includes customer setup, work orders, dispatching, mobile job details, invoicing, payroll integration, and financial reporting. The system supports progress billing, retainage tracking, commitment tracking, and advanced project reporting. Listed integrations include OnBase, REQUORDIT, DTI, Rhumbix, Procore, SAP Concur, Avalara, and XOi Vision. PentaConnect APIs cover project management, accounts-payable routing and payments, service management, and timecards. Penta Cloud Hosting runs on AWS and is stated to be SOC 2 Type II certified. Pricing is available on request.