# How to add Microsoft Teams to Acumatica

> Source: https://netray.co/integrations/acumatica-microsoft-teams
> Publisher: Netray (netray.co), AI and integration engineering for ERP and manufacturing systems.
> Section: Integrations

## Short answer

Use Acumatica Business Events to call a small service, which posts adaptive cards into a Teams channel or a chat, and use a Teams bot or workflow to send the button click back to Acumatica through the REST API. Authenticate the people with Entra ID so an approval in Teams is attributed to the right Acumatica user.

## System

Acumatica

## Capability

microsoft-teams

## Intro

Many Acumatica customers run Microsoft 365, so Teams is where managers already sit all day. Approvals for purchase orders, expense claims, bills and change orders still wait in the Acumatica approval screens, and a notification email is easy to miss. Moving the prompt into Teams shortens that wait.

Acumatica already has the pieces: approval maps and automation, Business Events for outbound triggers, and a REST API for reading and acting on documents. What is missing is a bridge that turns an event into an adaptive card and a button click into a controlled API call.

The decision that matters is identity. Who is clicking approve, and does Acumatica agree that person can approve this document? Everything else is plumbing.

## Use Cases

### Purchase order approval cards

**Description:** An approver gets a card with vendor, total, requester and top lines, with Approve, Reject and Open in Acumatica buttons.

### Low stock and expedite alerts

**Description:** A channel for the buying team receives items that fall below reorder point from a Generic Inquiry, with a link to the item and open supply.

### Sales order credit holds

**Description:** When an order hits a credit hold, the finance channel sees customer, balance and order value, and a controller can release or leave the hold.

### Production issue triage

**Description:** When a production order is late or a material shortage appears, a thread opens for planning and the shop supervisor.

### Ask a question from Teams

**Description:** A bot answers read-only questions such as where an order stands or what is on hand, using the same role the person has in Acumatica.

## System Surface

- Business Events: trigger on a record change or a Generic Inquiry result and call a web hook, the natural start for a Teams card.
- Approval maps and automation: approval state is on the document, so the bridge should act through the actual approve action, not by editing status fields.
- Contract-based REST API: read PurchaseOrder, Bill, Expense Claim and perform actions where the endpoint exposes them; custom endpoints can add fields or actions.
- Generic Inquiries and OData: define what an alert or bot can see without exposing whole tables.
- OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect: Acumatica can sign users in through an identity provider such as Entra ID, which helps map a Teams user to an Acumatica login.

## How It Works

### Choose the Teams surface

**Detail:** Incoming webhooks and Workflows are the quickest for one-way alerts. A bot with adaptive cards is required if people should click and have something happen.

### Register an Entra app

**Detail:** Register the bot and the middleware, grant only the Graph and bot permissions needed, and decide single-tenant versus multi-tenant. Most internal builds are single-tenant.

### Map identities

**Detail:** Match the Entra user principal name to the Acumatica user email. Store the mapping and fail closed if no match exists.

### Wire Business Events

**Detail:** Create an event for approval pending or exception conditions that sends the document key to your service, which fetches details and builds the card.

### Act on the click

**Detail:** On a card action the bot calls Acumatica as that user where possible, or as an integration user that passes the approver identity and is checked server side.

### Update the card

**Detail:** After the action, replace the card with the result so nobody approves twice, and log the outcome as a note on the document.

## Example Flows

### PO approval in Teams

**Trigger:** A purchase order moves to Pending Approval.

**Steps:**

- Business Event posts the order number to the bridge.
- The bridge reads the order and resolves the current approver.
- An adaptive card is sent to that person in Teams.
- The approver clicks Approve and the bridge performs the approve action in Acumatica.
- The card updates to Approved with a timestamp.

**Result:** Approvals complete in minutes without opening the ERP, and the audit trail shows the real approver.

### Shortage alert thread

**Trigger:** A scheduled Generic Inquiry finds production order components short for the next week.

**Steps:**

- The bridge groups shortages by item and buyer.
- A message per buyer goes to the purchasing channel with the item, shortfall and open POs.
- The buyer replies in the thread to claim it.

**Result:** Shortages are owned by a named person the same morning they appear.

## On Prem

Teams is a cloud service, so an on-premises Acumatica needs an outbound path to your bridge and a way for the bot to reach the ERP. The usual pattern is a bridge in a DMZ or a small Azure subscription that talks to Acumatica over a site-to-site VPN or an inbound rule limited to its address. If the question-answering bot uses a language model, run an open-weight model on your own hardware and let Teams carry only the question and a short answer, keeping ERP data inside your network.

## Security

- Never let the bot approve as a generic integration user without passing and verifying the human identity.
- Keep card content limited to what the channel members are allowed to see; private channels and group chats leak easily.
- Use least-privilege Entra permissions and review consent grants.
- Rate-limit and log every action taken from a card.

## Options

### Workflows or webhook alerts only

**Fit:** One-way notifications to a channel with a link back to Acumatica.

**Effort:** A day or two.

### Custom bot with adaptive cards

**Fit:** Interactive approvals where you have Azure and bot framework skills in-house.

**Effort:** Two to six weeks including identity mapping.

### Partner build with Netray

**Fit:** Approvals plus a grounded read-only question bot, optionally using a private model.

**Effort:** Scoped per use case.

## Pitfalls

- Acting as a shared integration user makes every approval look the same in the audit log.
- Approvals by delegation or approval-map substitution can differ from what the card assumes; read the live approver.
- Cards sent to an approver who has left the company or changed role will sit unread; handle reassignments.
- Adaptive card size limits truncate long line lists, so show the top lines and link out.

## Faq

### Does Acumatica integrate with Microsoft Teams out of the box?

**Answer:** Core Acumatica sends notifications by email, and Microsoft 365 integration exists for areas like email and calendar. A Teams approval card experience generally needs a Business Event, a bridge service and a bot, or a marketplace app if one is available for your version.

### Can approvers approve from their phone in Teams?

**Answer:** Yes, adaptive cards work in the Teams mobile app. The approval still runs through Acumatica's own action, so approval maps and permissions continue to apply.

### Do we need Power Automate?

**Answer:** Not necessarily. Power Automate can handle simple alerts with HTTP calls to the REST API, but custom logic, identity mapping and error handling are usually easier in a small service you control.

### Can the bot create documents?

**Answer:** It can, but start read-only. Creating draft documents for human review is a reasonable next step. Posting transactions directly from chat is rarely worth the risk.

### Will this work with Acumatica Cloud and on-premises?

**Answer:** Yes. The REST API and Business Events behave similarly in both. The difference is network routing: Cloud is reachable by default, while on-premises needs a managed path from the bridge.

## Search terms

acumatica microsoft teams integration, acumatica teams approvals, teams bot for acumatica, acumatica adaptive cards, acumatica purchase order approval teams, acumatica business events teams, acumatica entra id teams, microsoft teams for acumatica erp

---
Talk to an engineer: https://netray.co/contact?intent=erp_ai | Machine catalog: https://netray.co/agent/catalog.json