March 2016 - SQLWorks

Understanding Ledgers

SQLWorks includes four main ledgers for customer transactions: Sales Ledger, Purchase Ledger, Sundry Cash Ledger and Petty Cash Ledger

For accounting, these transaction ledgers are collated into two analysis ledgers, your live Nominal Ledger and your Bank Ledger as described below.

 

Transaction Ledgers (Sales/Purchase/Sundry Cash/Petty Cash)

Your Sales and Purchase Ledgers control account centric transactions for selling and buying to a particular customer/supplier, typically involving an ordering process and a separated invoicing and payment process (i.e. debt and credit).

Sundry Cash Ledger is for payments to and from those whom you have no ‘account’ with, and therefore is best suited to financial transactions that have no delay in payment (for example, a simple cash sale). Because of this, your Sundry Cash Ledger should be used for direct sales & expenditure, or for moving funds into and out of your Petty Cash Ledger.

Each record in any transaction ledger will appear automatically in your nominal audit. SQLWorks follows standard double entry bookkeeping rules, in that each financial transaction has two associated nominal postings. When running a nominal audit SQLWorks uses your nominal profile in preferences and the list below to automatically generate the audit records from the records in the transaction ledgers:

Financial Transaction Type Side 1 Posts to: Side 2 Posts to:
SL Invoice Invoice Line Nominal Code Creditor Account
SL Credit Note Credit Line Nominal Code Creditor Account
SL VAT Creditors VAT Control Code Creditor Account
SL Receipt Bank Account Nominal Code Creditor Account
SL Currency Variation Variance Control Code Creditor Account
SL Settlement Settlement Control Code Creditor Account
PL Invoice Invoice Line Nominal Code Debtor Account
PL Credit Note Credit Line Nominal Code Debtor Account
PL VAT Debtors VAT Control Code Debtor Account
PL Payment Bank Account Nominal Code Debtor Account
PL Currency Variation Variance Control Code Debtor Account
PL Settlement Settlement Control Code Debtor Account
Cash Book Cash Record Nominal Code Bank Account Nominal Code
Cash Book Income VAT Creditors VAT Control Code Bank Account Nominal Code
Cash Book Expense VAT Debtors VAT Control Code Bank Account Nominal Code
Petty Cash Petty Record Nominal Code Petty Account Nominal Code
Petty Cash Income VAT Creditors VAT Control Code Petty Account Nominal Code
Cash Book Expense VAT Debtors VAT Control Code Petty Account Nominal Code

 

Bank Ledger

Your Bank Ledger records the actual record of payments and receipts. A payment can be exist in any of your three main transaction Ledgers (Sales/Purchase/Sundry Cash). Here you can group and organise payments into deposits to exactly match your Bank statement during the bank reconciliation process.

Your Bank Ledger can include multiple bank accounts, against which to record different types of payments. Each account must have a different nominal code that is used when automatically posting the payment records from SL, PL & SCL in the nominal ledger. Note that you cannot enter a payment/receipt record in SL, PL or SCL without selecting the bank account first.
 

Nominal Ledger

Whilst your Bank Ledger records the actual movement of funds, your Nominal Ledger also considers debit and credit transactions from the invoices in your Sales/Purchase Ledgers. The Nominal Ledger gives you a constantly updated window into the profit and loss for each part of your business. By using the ‘audit by year’ you take a snapshot of your business from which you can view P&L, Balance sheet, Trial Balance and drill down into actual live data.

Your Nominal Ledger audit pulls live data from the all of the financial transactions in your Sales and Purchase Ledgers, and from all of the records in Sundry Cash Ledger and Petty Cash Ledger. The value is posted to the nominal code stored on the record and the other side of the nominal posting is decided automatically as explained above, VAT is also posted automatically to the VAT control account.

The nominal ledger also loads nominal journals, non-financial records that serve only to move figures between nominal accounts. Certain processes in SQLWorks create journals automatically, such as end of year appropriation and changes that affect stock valuation.

The Nominal Ledger can have up to three tiers: Nominal codes, Analysis codes (i.e. Sub Nominal codes), and Department codes, each of which can be crosschecked against another to breakdown spending or revenue in different segments of your business for more targeted analysis. The nominal audit creates a record of the value against each individual combination and then pools together the data as per your reporting requirements.

Your Nominal Ledger provides an understanding of your accounts, which includes amounts owed and owing as well as gained or lost, for financial analysis.

 

Understanding Ledgers

 

Did you know? Changing Your SQLWorks email password

If your company email password has changed, SQLWorks won’t be able to integrate with your email – here’s how to fix that.

You can update your SQLWorks integrated email password via ‘Preferences’ in the main Nav Bar (1). Clicking ‘User Prefs’ will open your company’s SQLWorks users, giving you access to some of your own accounts settings by clicking your own name on the user list.

This opens the Employee Info window shown above. In the bottom right panel your email settings are saved (2) – here you can update your User ID and Password, along with other integrated email settings such as your email signature.

Higher security user settings can only be changed by a designated system administrator, or the SQLWorks team by formal request.

 

Contact us for more information: 01272 375999

Did you know? Stock Costs

Stock comes in many different forms, so SQLWorks stock ledger can be set to value stock, per item, in four different ways – known as stock costs:

  1. Default Purchase Cost – specify a purchase cost against any stock item in any currency, and when you buy in that currency, SQLWorks will match the costs using the appropriate exchange rate.
  1. Average Cost – this is an average taken across all purchase invoices over the total quantity of stock. Accurate to up to 4 decimal places, this can be recalculated with a right click or set to automatically update via Preferences > Accounts Prefs > Stock. If no stock is available average cost will estimate an average from recent sold stock using your invoices.
  1. Standard Cost – Your custom valuation, not derived from any financial transactions in the system, and used to give a stock item an arbitrary value.
  1. Batch Cost – Used for advanced warehousing, batch cost records the cost of each item from a specific purchased batch, and can vary between batches, allowing for more accurate manufacturing, re-sale and accounting.

On costs/landed costs, accounting for extra stock costs obtained with freight charges, duties and import taxes, can also be recorded specifically or as averages, and users can specify whether to include or exclude on-costs from their stock valuations.

When generating reports in SQLWorks, users can specify the default valuation for your stock from among the stock cost methods, choosing the one most appropriate for your business. By setting a default cost type, this also affects your Sales Ledger, directly affecting profit and associate reports.

 

Learn more about SQLWorks stock today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/stock/

Fact Sheet: Projects

Project management is a powerful function of SQLWorks CRM, which allows users to collaborate on bigger projects and coordinate work from different areas of your business.

With careful planning, you can use SQLWorks’ Projects tool to more easily collate your team’s efforts towards an overarching goal onto a single dashboard, saving time and money.

‘Projects’ can be accessed under the SQLWorks CRM dropdown in the main navbar (1) and displays your live projects within the list panel (2). Key information and editing buttons for the selected project is displayed at the top of the main window (3).

SQLWorks Projects acts as a collection point for entries from across SQLWorks (including financial elements, tasks, documents and much more) relating to a chosen project, in one place under the correct tab (4). You can create new linked items (of any type) direct from projects by right clicking the correct window from within the project screen, which will also added in the relevant section elsewhere in SQLWorks. For example, a new phone log created inside “projects” will also display in SQLWorks phone logs.

This becomes most powerful in reverse however – when creating new entries elsewhere in SQLWorks, users can tag this as part of a specific project. This is the case for almost any SQLWorks item (including individual lines from quotes, orders or invoices for project costings) which can all be linked to an open Project.

SQLWorks can have multiple project types for managing different sorts of projects at once, each with their own data capture or layout – for example, financial projects may require access to financial entries from SQLWorks Accounts. The SQLWorks team can add new project types for your business on request.

For staged projects, a SQLWorks project can be segmented into saved ‘Stages’ which prompt automatic action when reached, for example emailing a contact or completing a task.

Security groups prevent unauthorised users from accessing restricted projects, or sections within a certain project (for example: confidential data) and this can also be configured on request by the SQLWorks team.

SQLWorks Projects can help you easily gather information and organise stages of a more complex set of related jobs, or pool the work of a larger team in a coordinated way.

 

For more information on SQLWorks CRM tools, contact our team today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/contact-us/