Accounts Archives - Page 2 of 2 - SQLWorks

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.

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

 

Fact Sheet: Purchase Ledger

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 launches new SQLWorks website

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

Fact Sheet: Sales Ledger

fact sheet sales ledger

SQLWorks Sales Ledger is your main accounting ledger for your quotes, orders, refunds and sales transactions with other companies.

Sales Ledger can be opened under the ‘Accounts’ heading in the main NavBar (1) and includes a full suite of accounting tools. Any company from your Companies List can be given a Sales Ledger account – appearing in the Sales Ledger List (2) for further use.

From here you can prepare quotes, log orders and more, before sending out any invoices and receiving payments from a given company. As you complete sales, your sales move from left to right – starting as disbursements, leads or quotes, becoming orders, and then transactions. The Sales Ledger information for a company is displayed in the Main Window, with ‘Quotes’, ‘Orders’, ‘Transactions’ and more available by clicking the Tabs on the lower right panel (3).

SQLWorks allows you to keep a close track of money owed, customer debts and credit: you can set a Credit Limit for each business along with precise payment terms, deadlines, known company directors, and instruct SQLWorks to email or print invoices as needed. Any custom settings for a given company also allows you to customise SQLWorks reports to reflect this.

Track aged debt with payment terms, turnover, profit, balance history, debt days, stock items bought and other enquiries, all from the account activity section of any given company in your Sales Ledger. If you need to transfer data, electronic data interchange (EDI), allows a user to export orders, or import invoices from other digital sources.

The SQLWorks team can also configure your Sales Ledger to more closely match your sales – adding automatic adjustments for discovered stock, setting up cash account sales or more uncommon types of invoices if needed.

Every financial entry (invoice, receipt or credit note) is linked directly by a nominal code category to your nominal code category, so SQLWorks always gives an accurate, real-time reflection of your current sales finances in your Nominal Ledger.

 

Contact us today about accounting with SQLWorks: 01271 375999 or www.sqlworks.co.uk/contact-us