Accounts Archives - SQLWorks

Introduction to eSignature

 

eSignature functionality is here! We’re delighted to announce this much requested feature as an integrated part of our SQLWorks platform:

eSignature allows a SQLWorks user to generate a single-use URL for a PDF report format (such as a contract, letter or order template) to send to an external signatory. The signatory can access the PDF through their web browser – signing a (touchscreen compatible) signature field that is then merged onto their paperwork in the correct place.

Each signed document is then automatically saved back into your main SQLWorks database, allowing you to integrate this critical step into workflows, projects, and your other business operations.

 

esignature process

 

Signatures can be an essential CRM checkpoint, and can be used as evidence that a customer has approved a purchase, agreed to the next stage of a bigger project, or consented to important terms & conditions.

To confirm identity, signatories can be verified with pre-saved security questions, can be given time-limits to sign, and can be required to sign multiple times within the same document before submission is allowed.

Most importantly, SQLWorks eSignature functionality does not require expensive ‘per-signature’ costs as is the case for many well-known competitors – or any special prerequisite software for the signatory – and can be integrated with a wide range of SQLWorks other functions.

 

esignature

 

We expect this tool will evolve as SQLWorks companies find new and exciting uses for online signature technology – using the power of integrated software to make the approval process easier and more efficient.

For business software advice and expertise, please contact our team today.

Introduction to Audit & Real Time ‘Live’ Reporting

Using SQLWorks Audit, accounting managers can generate key financial reports either ‘Live’ using real-time data, or from an enforced point in time.

This feature is available using the ‘Audit’ tool. When this tool runs, SQLWorks collates the most up-to-date financial data available from the accounts, to use for financial reports. Auditing can be performed immediately before the creation of a new report, by ticking the ‘Audit Matrix’ checkbox in the report options, to ensure the report shows ‘live’ data.

If the checkbox is left unticked, SQLWorks will report using figures from the last time the accounts were audited.

audit matrix

 

Auditing can also be run independently from the ‘Audit By Year’ option in the main SQLWorks Navbar, by right clicking on the financial year in the main list and clicking ‘Audit Year’. The adjacent column displays the date of the last successful audit. This can be used to manually designate an official Audited point in time, from which reports are run, until you are ready to re-audit.

‘Live’ data reporting is normally the preferred option, as it permits accounting managers to get an instant snapshot of the exact state of the business accounts at that moment in time.

audit live reporting

Reporting from the last audited point in time may be more useful in certain situations however. On systems with large numbers of transactions being entered, some businesses prefer to draw a line in the sand, and report consistently from this point in time, until ready to perform the next official reporting audit.

audit reporting

To learn more about SQLWorks financial reporting, contact our team today.

Fact Sheet: Accounting Locks

SQLWorks includes a range of accounting locks which allow data entry for business accounting to be restricted to certain time periods.

SQLWorks operates date based-accounting rather than ‘Period-based accounting’ in the commonly understood sense – this gives companies greater granularity over how accounting is controlled.

Because of this, SQLWorks accounting can be locked down* based on a number of different periods and conditions, depending on your preference:

  • Financial Year Level Locking
  • Monthly Locking
  • VAT Period /  Quarterly Locking
  • Appropriation Locking

 

Financial Year Level Lock

Year Level Locking is available from Audit > Audit by Year in the main SQLWorks Navbar, by right-clicking on the financial year and selecting ‘Lock Year’.

year locking

Financial years that have been locked will display a ‘Yes’ in the ‘Lock’ column of the financial years list, and will prevent SQLWorks users from making any changes to financial transactions within that year. However, nominal journals may still be posted to a locked year.

This lock should only be used by your SQLWorks Accounting Admin, and acts independently of all other accounting conditions.

 

Monthly Lock (Current Financial Year Only)

This lock can be made available in your Accounts Prefs, where individual months, or months within specific ledgers, can be locked or unlocked for current financial year.

month locking

By default, users can only post in the designated active financial year – however transitionary options are available here to allow temporary posting into the final period of the previous financial year if this is still Year Level unlocked.

Because this lock can be turned on/off by a user with sufficient privileges and are always reversible, this forms a ’soft’ lock accounting managers can deploy as a highly flexible ‘Month-end’ control or similar.

 

VAT Locking (Quarterly Lock)

The SQLWorks VAT Ledger allows users to calculate the UK tax return due for each VAT Quarter.

vat locking

Once the VAT return has been complete, the date period covered by the specified VAT Quarter will be automatically locked against further accounting entries.

Reporting VAT accurately is a legal obligation, and additional transaction entries will not be permitted into the locked Quarter once VAT has been calculated for reporting to HMRC. Journaling between nominal codes is still permitted.

 

Appropriation Locking

Once you have set retained profit for a financial year (‘appropriated’ profit) the financial year will be locked, even if the financial year has not yet been Month, VAT or Year Level locked yet. No further transactions may be created in this year.

Because of this, Appropriation is usually only completed once year-end processing for that financial year has already been completed. For more information, please read: “1.1.2.4 – How to Set Retained Profit.

 

*Under certain circumstances some accounting locks can be reversed – please speak to your SQLWorks team about this in more detail.

Did you know? Importing Journals

SQLWorks Accounting includes the option to enter Journals both manually, but also offers the chance to save time by importing journals from a spreadsheet of data directly to your Nominal Ledger.

When in the Nominal Ledger click ‘Journal’ in the top toolbar, and the add Journals window opens. To begin importing your journals, click the ‘Import Journal Option, and browse for the file you wish to import.

Imports must be imported using a fixed format from a template file: a copy of which can be found within your SQLWorks installation ‘Misc’ Folder as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet – or downloaded here. You will need to enter your data and save the file as a tab-delimited text (.txt) file before importing.

SQLWorks will warn you if the data you are seeking to import is old, and may block you from entering nominal journals into locked accounting periods.

Once importing journals has run successfully, your nominal journal data will appear in the list of journals to be added, and users can commit them to the Nominal Ledger by clicking ‘Save and Close’.

 

For accounting advice and support, contact the SQLWorks team today.

Fact Sheet: Stock Quantities

SQLWorks calculates a number of different stock quantities for measuring how much stock you have.

These allow you to measure how much of each stock item are at different stages of your stock control process, and can be found displayed in the Stock Ledger for each stock item as follows. Scroll down for more information about each.

Stock Quantities


Actual

‘What I own now’

  • Actual Stock is the quantity of an item you currently own within your warehouse(s.)

 

Actual 


Pending

‘What I own which is temporarily unavailable’

  • Pending Stock is the quantity of an item you currently own which is not to hand – for example Stock you own which is in ‘Transit’ internally, or stock currently waiting in ‘Make’ Bins for manufacturing.*

*The exact nature of Pending stock may vary between individual SQLWorks companies, and may represent stock dispatched but not processed, if this setting is applied – please contact your account manager to clarify.

Pending


Allocated

‘What’s been sold to a specific customer’

  • Allocated Stock is the quantity of an item you currently own which has been reserved to fulfil a specific customer’s order.

Allocated


Free

‘What’s really in hand’

  • Free Stock is your Actual Stock minus any stock currently Pending or Allocated. This count typically represents the amount of stock you own that’s on hand, and does not include anything currently in transit, or already allocated to fulfil specific sales orders.

Available


SOP

‘What’s been ordered’

  • SOP stock is the quantity of a stock item which is wanted by your customers (currently outstanding on your sales orders.) This includes any Allocated stock already reserved to fulfil specific sales orders.

SQLWorks can be configured to exclude Forward Orders from this number.

SOP


Available

‘What would I have left’

Available stock is your Actual Stock minus your SOP. This count represents the maximum quantity of a stock item you own which could still be sold if all your sales orders were fulfilled.

Free


WoP

‘What’s needed for parts / to be made from parts’

  • WoP Stock is the quantity of an item currently listed on outstanding works orders – to be made from other stock items, or used to make other stock items.

WOP


POP

‘What’s on order’

  • POP stock is the quantity of an item currently listed on outstanding purchase orders. This is stock you are expecting to be delivered by suppliers.

SQLWorks can be configured to exclude Forward Orders from this number.

POP 


Potential

‘What I could have’

  • Potential Stock is all your potential stock added together. This count represents the maximum amount of stock you would have if you fulfilled all outstanding customer orders, received all outstanding purchase orders and build all outstanding works orders.
  • If you are using SQLWorks MRP, the Potential stock is the quantity that will be compared to your re-order level for each stock item (within your chosen time horizon) to inform whether additional stock needs to be purchased or manufactured.

Potential


Stock Quantities Overall:

 

Stock Quantities

 

For help and advice on SQLWorks’ Stock Control capabilities, please contact our team today.

 

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!

Did you know? Consolidated Invoicing

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.

Fact Sheet: Banking

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.

Did you know? Bulk Invoicing

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.

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