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.

manufacture

SQLWorks includes a manufacture and kitting tool able to budget for and build manufactured products using a selection of saved kits.

Manufacturing is accessible to users of the SQLWorks Advanced Stock, and can be found within the Stock Ledger screen under the ‘Products’ module in the main Navbar (1).

Clicking the ‘Kit Details’ Tab opens the kitting information for the selected stock item (2), and users should click the ‘Setup’ button if using these tools for a given stock item for the first time. By default, SQLWorks saves up to 3 alternate builds for each manufactured item (although more are available) with saved descriptions for each build (3).

Each stock item in your SQLWorks stock ledger can be both a ‘parent’ (made from its stock item ‘children’ – its components) or a ‘child’ of another stock item ‘parent’. Right-clicking opens options to ‘add child’ (component part) including values for both the components and associated labour costs.

Saved builds can include many components, sub components, and more levels as needed.

On the right hand side of the panel (4) are fields displaying the ‘Base Component Cost’ (the total value of the component parts as worked out by your saved SQLWorks stock valuation model) the ‘Marked Up Component Cost’ (the total markup value once percentage markups such as labour or assembly costs have been applied to each component for this build) and the ‘Current Kit Cost’ with your assigned sale cost for the finished product.

The kit price will be re-calculated automatically as component parts change, or if you have disabled this feature, by pressing the ‘Re-calculate’ button. Users can update the cost details for a build, allowing for any recent changes to stock ledger components, their value or assembly markup costs. You can also use saved shortcuts in the quick select menu of the Stock Ledger to view ‘Parent Items’ and ‘Child Items’ for easy searching.

SQLWorks manufacturing gives you a toolkit to organize the manufacture of kits from countless components, and to keep track of costs at every stage of the production line.

 

For specialist manufacture and kitting tools – speak to us about SQLWorks Stock Control today.

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.

For the most professional warehousing operations, SQLWorks includes a powerful automated order allocation system.

‘Order Allocation’ can be accessed by users who have the SQLWorks Advanced Stock module under ‘Products’ in the main Navbar .

The top of this window gives you a series of filters for every stock order recorded in SQLWorks , with a series of configurable order allocation stages that your warehouse stock must move through to be dispatched in the panel below.

Typically stock will be progressing through one of six stages:

• ‘Unallocated’ – Stock that has not yet been processed.

• ‘Allocated’ – Stock from a specific warehouse reserved for a specific order.

• ‘Released’ – Stock in a specific bin location or locations, approved for picking.

• ‘In Pick’ –  Stock that has been picked and due to be dispatched to the customer.

• ‘In Transit’ – Stock that is part of internal stock movements between warehouses

By default all lines that meet your search criteria are displayed on the relevant tabs on the bottom of the window. These display is automatically ‘locked’ to editing, however using the radio buttons users can make the list ‘Selectable’ to turn on or off individual (or groups of) order lines, or ‘Editable’ to change individual allocation qty within a line. Right clicking a selectable or editable line opens helpful options for highlighting mass, order group or inverse line selections.

In the unallocated tab clicking the ‘Auto Set Values’ button on the right will allocate anything SQLWorks can, when you save it will move order lines to the ‘Allocated’ Tab. Since not every allocated stock item within an order is always available for dispatch, SQLWorks releases the order allocation based on the dispatch rules set in the order:

• ‘Allow Back Orders’ – When picked, any outstanding stock is cancelled unless SQLWorks is told to hold as outstanding items for back ordering.

• ‘Allow Part Order’ – SQLWorks will allocate order lines as they become available, unless told to wait until the full order can be fulfilled.

• ‘Allow Split Line’ – Send partial quantities from lines whenever they are available.

You can specify saved defaults for your company’s SQLWorks order allocation, which can be overridden with a rule for specific customer’s sales account, and are then applied to each specific order for the account.

Once released, SQLWorks can auto-generate intelligent picking notes – itemising stock to be picked using optimal warehouse walking route based on the known locations of your warehouse bins. When a pick is complete, warehouse operatives can re-enter stock ‘Fail Quantity’ figures into your order allocation history, along with reporting reasons for why the stock in question could not be picked. The remaining quantity is then automatically moved to invoice, allowing you to dispatch large numbers of orders with ease and efficiency.

An inventory Audit Log also allows you to look back through a complete history of every order line, or you can refer to the ‘Order Processing’ Tab within the Stock Ledger for a graphical summary and past failed order data.

For a more professional stock control solution – contact us about SQLWorks today: 01271 375999

Although SQLWorks is designed to avoid the need for multiple windows, sometimes this trick to open additional windows can be very useful.

To open an extra SQLWorks window, simply ‘Shift-click’ by holding shift at the same time as clicking on a chosen SQLWorks menu item.

This works with every Navbar section, tab and subsection of SQLWorks – and is useful for when you need to be able to refer to two (or more) unconnected sections of SQLWorks at once. 

For example, whilst you’re busy working on a customer’s quote, the phone rings with a call from a different customer who wishes to book a meeting. Simply ‘shift-click’ the SQLWorks Calendar to open a separate diary window for you to work with.

Each of the windows behaves independently, and can be used, moved, resized or closed as normal. The only exception to this rule is that multiple copies of the same window will not synchronise any edits you make between copies.

This handy trick guarantees that you can work in different parts of SQLWorks simultaneously however you need.

Need some helpful advice? Contact our SQLWorks team today: 01271 375999

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

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

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.

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.