importing –

If you’re new to SQLWorks, importing your existing data to SQLWorks can seem daunting. Fear not! We’ve prepared this handy guide to make this process easier.

Decisions about your data are yours – but at any stage, you can ask the SQLWorks Team for help.

 

About Your Data

Data imported into SQLWorks is categorised in two types: Static and Transactional.

Static data is fixed lists of ‘things’ – including companies, contacts, address, your stock list, warehouses and more. Transactional data includes list of transactions, stock movements and financial ledger entries like orders, invoices, credit notes and more. Static data must be imported first, followed by transactional data.

 

Finding Your Data

Both your static and transactional data comes from whichever system(s) you use currently – this could mean importing from a number of sources, including:

• An old software program (e.g.: Sage)
• A patchwork of spreadsheets (e.g.: Microsoft Excel)
• A legacy database program or file (odbc compatible)
• Nowhere (because you’re a new or paper-based company)
• Some combination of the above

It’s up to you what data you place in SQLWorks, however whilst some data is almost always needed SQLWorks (even if entered new), other data is optional. As a rule, names, codes, accounting and VAT entries will need to be imported, but the optional parts of how your business model works (e.g.: records of quotes, or past stock movements) are optional.

 

How To Import:

All data for importing into SQLWorks needs to be given to the SQLWorks team in one of two formats:

• An agreed file format exported from another software (e.g.: Sage export file)
• A comma or tab delimited spreadsheet, .CSV or .TXT file. (e.g.: If using Excel, it is helpful to save the files as a .CSV in the ‘save as’ menu)

If you provide data to the SQLWorks team in spreadsheets (or .CSV/.TXT files) these will need column headings grouping certain types of the data together. For example, in a stock list, all your stock codes need to be in the same column, under an identifiable heading such as ‘Stock Code.’ The SQLWorks team can help you with this stage if you get stuck.

Depending on what SQLWorks modules you will be using, you will need to import files for the following data (see table below). Compulsory data within these are marked – for example: every Company imported must have a name.

 

	SQLWorks Core	CRM	ACCOUNTS	STOCK
Static	Companies Name Company Code   Contacts Name   Addresses Line 1		Sales Accounts Name Company Code Purchase Accounts Name Company Code Nominal Codes Name Nominal Code
Transactional			Outstanding Sales Orders Company code   Outstanding Purchase Orders Company code   Outstanding Sales Invoices Company code Date Amount VAT   Outstanding Purchase Invoices Company Date Amount VAT   Bank Rec   1 Bank Account Name, Acc & Sort Codes   1 Petty Cash Account Link to Bank Account
Optional Static		Sales Leads   Projects Project Code	Nominal Departments Name Department Code   Nominal Analysis Codes Name Analysis Code   Nominal Subheadings Name   Budgets Amount	Warehouses Name Number   Stock List Stock Item Name Stock Code Sale Price Purchase Cost Current Stock Quantity   Warehouse Bins Number
Optional Transactional		Tasks   Phone Logs   Actions   Emails	Historic Sales Quotes Company Date   Historic Purchase Quotes Company Date   Historic Sales Orders Company Date   Historic Purchase Orders Company Date   Historic Sales Invoices / Receipts / Credit Notes Company Date Amount VAT   Historic Purchase Invoices / Payments / Credit Notes Company Date Amount VAT   Purchase Invoices (Historic)	Stock Movements Stock Code Date

 

 

consolidated invoicing –

If you have customers who prefer to have their bills collated onto a single monthly or weekly invoice, SQLWorks can administrate the consolidated invoicing process for you.

Consolidated invoicing can be activated under the ‘defaults’ tab of the chosen company in your SQLWorks Sales Ledger by changing consolidations from ‘None’ to either ‘Monthly’ or ‘Weekly’, depending on how often you would like your invoices to be consolidated together.

Because this is a change to how invoices will be issued, this option is only open to those with sufficient accounts admin privileges, and will issue a warning message before saving the new invoicing settings for that company.

When a new invoice is now added for that company under the ’transactions’ tab, a delivery note can be printed as normal, but the invoice cannot be printed, emailed or otherwise sent individually whilst consolidated invoicing is still activated for the chosen company.

When you are ready for your invoices to be consolidated, click reports in the top right corner, and choose ‘Report Un-printed Invoices’ as when using SQLWorks bulk invoicing. SQLWorks will prompt asking if you wish to consolidate the invoices of those accounts for which this setting is activated, and once approved will begin consolidating invoices.

All outstanding invoice lines for the required companies will be consolidated onto the last invoice of the month/week in which it is dated, and can now be emailed/printed for invoicing as normal.

Your Quotes and Orders remain unchanged, but individual invoices will now be hidden from view, replaced by the new consolidated invoice ready for sending. In the event that you have outstanding consolidated invoices from previous months/weeks unpaid, these will also be ready for re-sending.

In this way you can easily invoice repeat customers without excessive paperwork, and ensure that you keep the number of transaction entries on a single SQLWorks sales ledger account to a manageable minimum.

SQLWorks can help streamline your customer invoicing: find out how.

Banking

SQLWorks includes a Banking Ledger to your record and plan all financial interactions with your bank accounts, monitor your statements and reconcile transactions.

Bank Accounts can be found under the ‘Bank’ button within ‘Accounts’ (1) and your bank accounts are displayed in the top left (2) – with the details of the selected account (including branch address, account numbers, sort code, balances and currency) all shown on the top panel. (3) From the Bank section you can also access your ‘Sundry Cash Ledger’ (for cash accounting), ‘Petty Cash Accounts’ and Foreign Exchange data (under ‘ForX.’)

Your unreconciled transactions are displayed under the main ‘Unreconciled transactions’ tab in date order. To reconcile, move to the ‘Statements’ tab, select a statement, and double click on an unreconciled item to set it as reconciled (or vice versa)

If you use printed cheques as a part of your business, you can access your unprinted cheques via the ‘Unprinted Cheques’ tab, which can be used in conjunction with a cheque printing machine or dot matrix printer.

Should you need to add a new bank account for your business, you can do so from the top toolbar by clicking the ‘Add A/C’ button. Each new Bank Account will require a unique Nominal Ledger code for that account and a currency chosen from your list of default currencies.

Your new account can be set as the default bank account in Accounts Preferences by saving its number in the ‘Default Bank Account’ field under the ‘Finance’ Tab. SQLWorks should normally be used to treat Credit Cards as bank accounts, with statements processed in a similar manner.

SQLWorks is designed to keep your banking as transparent as possible, and ensure that it’s always easy to match up the contents of your bank ledger to your real world finances.

 

For accounting software that matches your business: speak to us about SQLWorks today.

bulk invoicing

Bigger businesses can find it useful to send out invoices in batches (‘bulk invoicing’) – here’s how to do that in SQLWorks.

Click the ‘Reports’ button in the top right hand corner of your Sales Ledger and select the ‘Unprinted Invoices’ option. This loads a new window displaying any invoices which haven’t yet been submitted to a customer for payment.

You can select individual or multiple invoices (or choose a range of invoices by invoice number) and send these automatically by clicking the ‘Print/Email’ button.

Whether your invoices are printed, emailed or both can be set for each company in the Sales Ledger under the ‘Print & Orders’ Tab –  under Default Print Settings you can choose how to send invoices to that client, and set an invoicing contact email for that company.

This same tool can also be used for automatically sending statements to customers in your Sales Ledger, by entering a contact email address for statements and choosing a format for sending.

In addition, you can set SQLWorks to send Sales Ledger Statements based on amount – choose ‘No’ to never send this customer  a statement, ‘Yes’ to send if the customer has an outstanding balance, and ‘Always’ to always send a statement regardless of outstanding credit.

Both the automatic sending of invoices and statements in SQLWorks, in bulk, allows you to easily get through larger volumes of customer billing.

 

For support and advice, please contact our SQLWorks team today – 01271 375999.

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 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

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.

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.

 

 

SQLWorks Purchase Ledger is your main accounting ledger for your ordered items and purchase transactions with other companies.

Purchase Ledger can be found under the ‘Accounts’ heading in the main NavBar (1) and helps manage each stage of the buying process. Any chosen company from your Companies List can be given a purchase Ledger account, and appears in the list panel (2).

In the main window the top panel displays purchasing information relating to that company, including contact details, outstanding invoices and default settings for your purchases from that company, such as a credit limits and nominal codes.

The first ‘All Outstanding’ tab in the lower panel shows a useful summary of your unreconciled payments, customer quotes, outstanding purchase orders and halted items. From left to right tabs headed ‘Orders’, ‘Transactions’ and ‘Unreconciled Items’ (3) allow you to enter each stage of purchasing by clicking on it – keeping a close track on orders placed and received, and money owed.

Unlike your Sales Ledger, items must follow a dual progression to account for both order and invoicing – by logging ‘receive orders’, SQLWorks can support staged deliveries, or other orders that are delivered and invoiced separately by your suppliers.

Users with SQLWorks advanced stock module can track incoming stock items as ‘In Transit’ whilst awaiting delivery, while all users can take account of part orders, expected time of arrival (ETA), and even batch multiple orders as a single ‘delivery.’ ‘Pending Stock’ under your ownership can be allocated, but other SQLWorks functions are restricted to prevent the mis-selling of items not yet physically available for onward dispatch.

Once you have been invoiced, SQLWorks Purchase Ledger allows your business to reconcile multiple orders against a single invoice, flexibly matching your suppliers’ invoicing format. Saved default settings allow SQLWorks to remember other payment conditions for each supplier, such as price rounding and VAT rules, and (with CRM document storage) archive files such as digital copies of supplier invoices.

Payments can be grouped together or processed via BACS, an authorisation system allows larger organisations to set customised purchasing limits for staff, and force users to clear orders past an administrator before being placed. Spending limits can be set by order, outstanding amount, over a chosen time period, or a combination of these for maximum security.

Every reconciled invoice is linked directly by a nominal code to your nominal code category, so SQLWorks always gives an accurate, real-time reflection of your current purchasing finances in your Nominal Ledger.

 

Lineal Software Solutions have launched of our new sqlworks website for our SQLWorks Business Management Software (www.sqlworks.co.uk).

Managing Director of Lineal, Mike Matthews, explained: “This is a big year for SQLWorks, as we’re due to release Version 8 in conjunction with the release of Omnis 8, and we wanted to overhaul our SQLWorks website too.”

“We always aim for our software to work how you work: we’ll now be offering 3 different delivery models to suit different businesses’ needs, with SQLWorks available in on-premise, hosted and cloud versions.”

SQLWorks, Lineal’s leading software for Accounting, CRM & Stock Control was first developed for manufacturing in 1983, and has evolved substantially over 33 years.

Keeping up with the times, the new website has been designed to be fully responsive, for use on mobile and tablet devices. More and more people will use SQLWorks on the move in the future, from a variety of devices, so the SQLWorks website should mirror this.

Existing SQLWorks users will also receive additional support, accessing learning materials via the SQLWorks News page. Extra features, including a live SQLWorks demo and our SQLWorks help guide, will be available soon – watch this space!

 

Discover SQLWorks today: visit www.sqlworks.co.uk or call 01271 375999