Removing Companies

Keeping on top of your data means cleaning old entries and removing companies you don’t need every now and then – but what’s the best way to do this?

Your SQLWorks includes an ‘inactive’ status for removing companies, which allows you to effectively tidy your database whilst avoiding deleting data you might need later. – SQLW

We recommend using this feature because outright ‘deletion’ of a company is normally not the best option. Most companies have linked information connected to other parts of SQLWorks: including phone logs, tasks and more, which makes deletion impractical.

To make a company inactive, right click its name in the main Companies List and click the ‘Toggle Active’ button to move a company to inactive status.

Inactive companies can be recovered later if users need to access older data, whilst keeping their main working list up to date for other time-sensitive tasks, e.g.: when generating mailshots, and ensuring your company files always remain accurate.

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.

 

 

If your company email password has changed, SQLWorks won’t be able to integrate with your email – here’s how to fix that.

You can update your SQLWorks integrated email password via ‘Preferences’ in the main Nav Bar (1). Clicking ‘User Prefs’ will open your company’s SQLWorks users, giving you access to some of your own accounts settings by clicking your own name on the user list.

This opens the Employee Info window shown above. In the bottom right panel your email settings are saved (2) – here you can update your User ID and Password, along with other integrated email settings such as your email signature.

Higher security user settings can only be changed by a designated system administrator, or the SQLWorks team by formal request.

 

Contact us for more information: 01272 375999

Stock comes in many different forms, so SQLWorks stock ledger can be set to value stock, per item, in four different ways – known as stock costs:

1. Default Purchase Cost – specify a purchase cost against any stock item in any currency, and when you buy in that currency, SQLWorks will match the costs using the appropriate exchange rate.

2. Average Cost – this is an average taken across all purchase invoices over the total quantity of stock. Accurate to up to 4 decimal places, this can be recalculated with a right click or set to automatically update via Preferences > Accounts Prefs > Stock. If no stock is available average cost will estimate an average from recent sold stock using your invoices.

3. Standard Cost – Your custom valuation, not derived from any financial transactions in the system, and used to give a stock item an arbitrary value.

4. Batch Cost – Used for advanced warehousing, batch cost records the cost of each item from a specific purchased batch, and can vary between batches, allowing for more accurate manufacturing, re-sale and accounting.

On costs/landed costs, accounting for extra stock costs obtained with freight charges, duties and import taxes, can also be recorded specifically or as averages, and users can specify whether to include or exclude on-costs from their stock valuations.

When generating reports in SQLWorks, users can specify the default valuation for your stock from among the stock cost methods, choosing the one most appropriate for your business. By setting a default cost type, this also affects your Sales Ledger, directly affecting profit and associate reports.

 

Learn more about SQLWorks stock today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/stock/