Did you Know? Quoting Tips

quoting tips

Quoting a customer can be a delicate process, and sometimes you need to be able to issue a quote with detailed options. We’ve collated a few handy tips to help your sales team build the perfect SQLWorks quote.

If you’re putting together a more complex quote, it can sometimes be useful to give a customer options. You can create these by right-clicking on the line numbers on the left of each quote line, and selecting ‘Choose Option Group’ to place groups of lines under ‘Option 1’ ‘Option 2’ subheadings (1.)

These options are normally alternatives to each other, so you typically won’t want SQLWorks to total them together. You can remove the overall total by switching to the to ‘Extras and Project’ Tab in the top right of the quote header, and unchecking the ‘Print Totals’ checkbox (2.) This will remove the ‘grand total’ from the bottom of the normal quote template (please note that if you exclude VAT you’ll need to include an amendment to this effect, as depending on your settings, the total VAT may no longer be visible.)

If you need to include sub-total lines instead for each option group, the easiest way is to add a sub-total line at the end of each group. By right clicking on the grey background of any given line, you can choose ‘Toggle Line Type’ to change a line to display the sub-total of the group immediately above it, to be hidden or to become a comment line without any costs (3.)

The area around the line number will change to a different colour to reflect the line type (1), and the quote template will change to incorporate the new line type. This is useful to help keep your quote clear and tidy – to add a running sub-total, line gaps or comments.

With these extras it’s easy to build more complex quotes from SQLWorks, and give customers an informative choice.

A Quick Disclaimer: if you have a custom quotations window for your company/organisation, one or more of these quoting tips features may be disabled. If you need them – speak to the SQLWorks team!

Fact Sheet: Sales Leads

sales leads

Need to manage a sales leads pipeline for your business? SQLWorks CRM includes a comprehensive sales leads module which can help you manage your customer outreach.

Leads can be accessed within the CRM section of the main navbar (1.) and will load a table of leads with multiple coloured panels representing your sales stages (2.)

You can double click on a lead to open it, reorder your leads by clicking the column headers or click the ‘Q1’ ‘Q2’ ‘Q3 ‘Q4’ buttons along the top toolbar to filter by financial quarter.

Once a lead has been opened, you can record common sales qualification data including priority level, log a lead source, assign categorisation and note the contact details of your contact in the top half of the edit Lead window (3.) You can also give each lead speculative value, profit and conversion chance, and set a follow up date for further action which can display in the SQLWorks diary. In the lower panel (4) are your normal SQLWorks CRM tools – you can link phone logs, emails, tasks and drag in documents to be saved against your lead, and save a record of actions performed to progress the lead with a time/date.

By clicking the [+] button above the lead stages you can unlock each new lead stage – moving your lead down the sales pipeline.

As leads move through your pipeline, your brightly coloured lead stages in the main screen (2) display how many leads are active at that stage, what the total value of these are in turnover, and the total likely profit (calculated by multiplying each lead’s percentage by it’s turnover value and adding the sum of that stages leads these together.) You can load the leads active at any single stage by clicking on that stage, and the stages themselves can be set to match your own sales pipeline. ‘Receipted’ and ‘Lost’ sales leads will always default their quantity to 100% of value converted or lost, and will move a lead to ‘Closed.’ By clicking the ‘Load Open’ button in the top toolbar you can filter your list to exclude these closed leads, and just work on those that are active.

If you need a quick way to record new enquiries over the phone, you can create a new lead when making a new phone log by clicking the ‘leads’ tab in the new phone log screen. To save time, the details of your new lead will be automatically populated from those you recorded in the phone log.

Your leads are kept isolated from your main companies list to prevent bigger sales departments with large numbers of cold contacts swamping your SQLWorks Sales Ledger with non-customers.

At any time however, (for example when a Lead becomes a customer) you can click the ‘Conversion Tab’ in the lower half of the edit lead window to automatically save the company details gathered by your Sales agent as a new company in your main SQLWorks companies list.

In this way SQLWorks makes it simple to log new leads, record progress in detail between multiple sales staff, and estimate future conversion rates.

For CRM guidance and help: contact us today.

Did you Know? Debt History

Debt History

SQLWorks makes it easy to look back through the debt history of a given customer – using the Sales Ledger ‘Debt History’ tool.

By clicking on the ‘Debt History’ Tab within a chosen company’s Sales Ledger account you can view a summary of aged debt over the past 9 months, using data from your past invoicing.

The ‘Turnover’ and ‘Profit’ Tab display each month’s turnover and profit from that company’s sales account over several years.

The ‘Balance’ tab collates every dated invoice and credit note to build a cumulative running total of a company’s credit history, displayed in both sterling and foreign currency, and as a graph.

For a range of graph options, highlight the table you wish to illustrate, right click and select ‘Graph [Profit/Turnover]’ or click ‘Enlarge’ to enlarge the balance history graph.

SQLWorks supports line, bar and pie charts, in both conventional and accumulated displays – providing different ways to illustrate a customer’s past purchasing.

 

For help managing customer accounts with SQLWorks – contact our team today by clicking here.

Fact Sheet: Credit Control

SQLWorks Accounts allows users to control both credit limits for each company they sell to, and credit hold settings for their customers overall.

Each company’s credit limit can be found in their company information by selecting them from the list of companies with sales accounts in the Sales Ledger (1). Clicking ‘Edit’ from the top toolbar unlocks the company information for editing, and users can simply enter a chosen Credit Limit (2), before clicking ‘Save.’

Within Accounts Preferences, users can set a standard ‘Value for Credit Limit’ to apply to each new company by default. You can also change your ‘Credit Hold’ type for what happens when companies exceed their limit, chosen from one of four possible settings:

  • Manual – Where the user must check if companies have exceeded their credit limit, and choose who to place on hold or not. An utility can be run at any time to review current sales accounts.
  • Manual with Override – As above, but if a company is on hold, SQLWorks will prompt the user with notifications so that the user must choose whether to continue with the action or not.
  • Automatic – SQLWorks will place companies on hold or not, based on their credit limit and overdue invoices.
  • Automatic with Override – As above, but the user can be override this and choose to extend further credit if they choose.

If on ‘Automatic’ SQLWorks will also move companies with overdue invoices onto hold, but users can specify a number of ‘days grace’ to give customers under the ‘Sales’ Tab within ‘Accounts Prefs. Company’s automatically placed on hold will also have their orders placed on hold, unless overriden manually.

If using manual credit control, users can right click the list window in the Sales Ledger and launch the ‘Credit Control’ utility – here you can review your companies manually based on four criteria: ‘Days grace’ given for overdue invoices, ‘Put Accounts on Hold’ or ‘Take Accounts off Hold’ to add or remove holds respectively, ‘Include Outstanding Order as Part of the Credit Limit’ to include orders placed but not invoiced on a company’s credit limit.

The manual ‘Credit Control’ utility then generates a list of those companies which are on hold (but are now within agreed credit terms) or not on hold (but have exceeded their credit terms). The user must choose who to place on hold or remove from hold, based on their credit limit and ‘days grace’ for payment deadlines. You can remove companies from the list by selecting lines and clicking the ‘Filter’ Button.

If using automatic credit control, this filtering process is controlled by SQLWorks unless you choose to override a hold. Whether to use Manual or Automatic depends on your own businesses’ level of credit control.

By default, SQLWorks will always automatically hold orders for companies that have exceeded their credit limit, and (if you also use SQLWorks Stock) will not allocate stock to that customer.

For account managers, a useful tool can be to set a chosen company’s credit limit within SQLWorks to ‘0’ (always on hold) or set a highly trusted company’s credit limit to ‘-1’ (never on hold.)

In this way SQLWorks ensures you always have control over how much credit your business extends, and to which clients.

Please contact our team for more information about SQLWorks and managing sales accounts.