April 2016 - SQLWorks

Did you know? Stock by Account

Stock by account

It’s often useful to be able to see what a company has been quoted for, ordered, or has been invoiced for, over a longer period of time.

SQLWorks provides a useful summary of this information under each company’s ‘Stock by Account’ table.

Opening a company’s Sales Ledger Account in SQLWorks and clicking the ‘Stock’ Tab in the main window will display a table that breaks down a company’s stock data by month. Users can choose the financial year to observe, filter by Product, Stock Group or more, and choose to count the number of quotes, orders or invoices.

This is a useful feature for repeat customers, providing a quick and easy summary of activity on a customer’s sales account over the course of 12 months. For a more detailed list of stock or custom items quoted, ordered or invoiced, click the ‘Detail’ tab and specify the date range with which to search that company’s sales account.

Either table can also be exported to Microsoft Excel if needed, so that SQLWorks can always report your sales account activity in the way that is most convenient for you.

 

Contact our SQLWorks team for more information: 01271 375999 

Fact Sheet: Quoting

Fact Sheet Quoting

SQLWorks Accounts includes a line by line quoting tool which allows you to build custom sales quotes.

Quoting can be accessed from a company’s sales account within your SQLWorks Sales Ledger (1) in the main Navigation bar under the ‘Quotes’ Tab. Here your quotes for the selected company are listed in date order, with details of lines inside the quote previewed in the table below.

Create a new quote by clicking the ‘New Quote’ (2) button, which opens the quoting window. The details of the selected company are listed at the top of the quoting window (3), with the first line of the quote listed in the panel below. You can populate your quote with extra lines by right clicking this panel and clicking ‘Add new Line’, change the order in which lines appear or make amendments.

If using SQLWorks Stock, saved stock items can be quoted for from the dropdown list on the left of each quote line, or type in the free form text box to add custom items such a labour or other extra costs. If your stock items have default costs saved, these are automatically entered as the RRP, unless you specify different amounts and margins.

SQLWorks allows you to add multiple quote ‘options’ by right clicking the digit on the far left of each line, assigning each quoted item to a group. This is useful for putting quote options; ‘Option 1’, ‘Option 2’ etc. for a potential customer to choose between.

The command buttons at the top of each quote allow you to ‘Preview’ or ‘Print’ a quote for sending, ‘Halt’ a quote into your ‘Halted Items’ for further work later, ‘Save & Close’ the quote as it stands or ‘Cancel’ your changes.

Right clicking a quote opens up options for using that quote, including printing, emailing, duplicating or splitting a quote. By duplicating a quote you can work with multiple saved revisions, and splitting a quote allows SQLWorks to cross-check a quote against your Stock Ledger, fulfilling and order based only on what you currently have in stock.

Once your quote has been printed or emailed out to a customer, that quote is locked to everyone but your company’s SQLWorks administrator, exactly as the customer received it.

Your quotes will be made into to a formal PDF format which includes your company details and logo, and is designed by the SQLWorks team to match the formats of your existing company documentation and letterheads.

If your quote has been accepted, right-clicking and selecting ‘Send Quote to Order’ (or ‘Send Quote to Invoice’) will then move your quote on to the next stage of the sales process without the need to re-key any of the line items.

 

Contact Lineal today for more information on SQLWorks quoting: 01271 375999

Did you Know? Prompt Notes

Working in a larger team means that a post-it note can easily get lost – so SQLWorks lets you leave prompted reminder messages for other members of your team, called Prompt Notes.

Your prompt note will pop up when another SQLWorks user opens a specific company entry from the company’s list, a specific company’s account, project or all of these, and can be used to set reminders for all members of your team when accessing that company record.

Prompt Notes can be set from your SQLWorks default preferences for any chosen company by clicking ‘Edit’ from the toolbar, and selecting the ‘Prompt Notes’ Checkbox.

Choosing ‘None’, ‘Projects’, ‘Accounts’ or ‘All’ from your SQLWorks Preferences sets when the message should appear. Selecting ‘None’ restricts your prompt note to the company’s Companies List entry only.

Prompt notes are a useful tool for leaving warning messages, designated contact points or other client-specific information, and ensuring everyone gets a prompt for an important reminder.

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.