Did you know? Stock Costs

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.
  1. 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.
  1. Standard Cost – Your custom valuation, not derived from any financial transactions in the system, and used to give a stock item an arbitrary value.
  1. 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/

Fact Sheet: Projects

Project management is a powerful function of SQLWorks CRM, which allows users to collaborate on bigger projects and coordinate work from different areas of your business.

With careful planning, you can use SQLWorks’ Projects tool to more easily collate your team’s efforts towards an overarching goal onto a single dashboard, saving time and money.

‘Projects’ can be accessed under the SQLWorks CRM dropdown in the main navbar (1) and displays your live projects within the list panel (2). Key information and editing buttons for the selected project is displayed at the top of the main window (3).

SQLWorks Projects acts as a collection point for entries from across SQLWorks (including financial elements, tasks, documents and much more) relating to a chosen project, in one place under the correct tab (4). You can create new linked items (of any type) direct from projects by right clicking the correct window from within the project screen, which will also added in the relevant section elsewhere in SQLWorks. For example, a new phone log created inside “projects” will also display in SQLWorks phone logs.

This becomes most powerful in reverse however – when creating new entries elsewhere in SQLWorks, users can tag this as part of a specific project. This is the case for almost any SQLWorks item (including individual lines from quotes, orders or invoices for project costings) which can all be linked to an open Project.

SQLWorks can have multiple project types for managing different sorts of projects at once, each with their own data capture or layout – for example, financial projects may require access to financial entries from SQLWorks Accounts. The SQLWorks team can add new project types for your business on request.

For staged projects, a SQLWorks project can be segmented into saved ‘Stages’ which prompt automatic action when reached, for example emailing a contact or completing a task.

Security groups prevent unauthorised users from accessing restricted projects, or sections within a certain project (for example: confidential data) and this can also be configured on request by the SQLWorks team.

SQLWorks Projects can help you easily gather information and organise stages of a more complex set of related jobs, or pool the work of a larger team in a coordinated way.

 

For more information on SQLWorks CRM tools, contact our team today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/contact-us/

 

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

SQLWorks Windows 10 and Mac OS X compliant

cross platform

SQLWorks version 6 has been confirmed as both Microsoft Windows 10 and Apple Mac OS X El Capitan compliant.

First developed in 1988, Lineal’s cross platform flagship business management software for Accounting, CRM, Stock Control (and more) has been updated many times over the last three decades to add a wealth of new features and stay at the cutting edge of business requirements.

In order to be declared compliant for both Microsoft and Apple’s rival operating systems, the software must match the functionality of both, and has undergone three months of live testing at Lineal on both systems.

“Here at Lineal we’re delighted that SQLWorks has been declared to be Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan compliant.” Software Development Manager, Will Adkin explained: “SQLWorks undergoes constant development to match our clients’ needs, and we will be expanding to new platforms in the near future.”

“We’re currently developing the free upgrade to the next version for all customers, which will now be 64-bit compliant for stronger performance, and introduce new features.”

 

Explore SQLWorks today: call 01271 375999 or send us a message for a free demonstration.

Fact Sheet: Calendar

SQLWorks Calendar is an essential part of the SQLWorks CRM module, with a collaborative diary so that your whole team can plan ahead, audit trail your every interaction with other companies, and track progress from other areas of SQLWorks.

Calendar can be found in the NavBar under the SQLWorks CRM module, and opens a configurable calendar display in the main window (2). From here you can book a range of appointments into the calendar, share with other users or among groups, and set reminders.

The preview in the top right hand corner (3) allows users to easily cycle through past, present or future months (which display in the main window), or refocus the calendar on today’s date by clicking the central down arrow.

Below the preview are checkbox lists (4) entitled ‘Show Users’, ‘Show Groups’ and ‘Show Layers’. Checking or unchecking items on these checklists filters the calendar in the main window; showing or hiding appointments for specific users, groups of users (for example: ‘accounts team’), or types of appointment (for example: holidays) respectively.

SQLWorks Calendar updates once a minute, and users can simply click and drag events between days in the main window. Along the base of the SQLWorks Calendar is your toolkit (5) where you can add or edit calendar appointments in more detail. Double clicking a day in the main diary window adds a new event, and the ‘Owner’ of the event can set the type of event, some notes, the start and end time/date of the event, and add known users to the event who can be notified automatically be email when the owner of the event clicks ‘Save’.

Existing events can also be edited here, with the toolkit allowing you to ‘Search’ the calendar, view ‘Limbo’ events with user changes pending approval, send email notifications, ‘Cancel’ incorrect entries or set ‘Options’ for the appearance of your calendar. Dragging the sliding scale can be used to change the timespan of the calendar in the main window, ‘View’ toggles your calendar into list view to reorder by a specific field, and clicking ‘Sync’ manually updates your SQLWorks Calendar across smartphones or other linked devices.

Clicking the ‘Notify Me’ checkbox allows users to set automated reminders for events – prompting future you (and other users) via SQLWorks popup notifications, private emails, or both, at a chosen time and date(s).

SQLWorks Calendar also remembers past users and archives deleted events, so that your calendar can always recover historic data, errors or edits from any point in time.

Our development team can set any bespoke extensions of SQLWorks your team uses to appear automatically if they have date fields (e.g: Purchase Orders) so that your diary always shows exactly what you need.

SQLWorks Calendar coordinates your workflow – allowing your team to plan and track shared projects, log sales or orders, control billing or more – and integrates your CRM with SQLWorks Accounting and Stock modules to make the best use of your time.

For more information, contact our team today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/contact/

Fact Sheet: Stock Ledger

SQLWorks Stock Ledger tools have been designed to give you complete control over your warehouse(s) and the constant movement of goods necessary for your business to profit.

Stock Ledger can be entered from the Navigation Bar on the left of SQLWorks, under ‘Products’ (1), in one of two versions: ‘Simple’ or ‘Complex’. These different levels of functionality fit your needs and complexity of your business, with complex stock including advanced features such as internal movements, stock locations and batch control.

Opening the Stock Ledger displays a list of every stock item known to your business (2) and allows you to search or filter the list to find the stock item you need. Selecting an item from the list loads its information in the main window for viewing or editing, with movements, orders and other stock functions all found in the lower half of the Main Window.

Keeping count your stock can depend on workflow, so separate figures for ‘Actual’ (available for sale), ‘Pending’ (not yet for sale), ‘Allocated’ (reserved for order), ‘Free’ (warehoused) and ‘Available’ Stock are all recorded (3), to ensure maximum accuracy.

At the top half of the Stock Ledger are tabs governing the attributes of the selected stock item (4) – including a summary of activity, purchase and sale pricing, ordering defaults, analysis categories and other notes.

In the lower half of the Stock Ledger are tabs governing activity on the selected stock item (5) – including a summary dashboard, full stock movement history, linked transactions, deliveries, stock status, any manufacturing/bills of material data, works orders, stock history & linked CRM entries.

‘Stock Audit’ allows SQLWorks to take a snapshot of your stock, producing printed figures for stock checking, calculating a variance factor based on counts from your warehouse team, and permits you to correct your SQLWorks’ Stock Ledger based on this data.

Storing your stock in each warehouse, and its stock bins, can be mapped in any way that you choose: SQLWorks understands where stock is being kept, and keeps track of crates, packs and individual units to ensure that exact quantities are never confused. Buy in crates of a thousand, store as individual units and sell in packs of five – safe in the knowledge that SQLWorks understands the difference. From the ‘Info’ Tab on the toolbar a set of ‘Allowed’ permissions even blocks items from being sold in the Sales ledger in error, and a monthly ‘lock down’ feature can be used to ensure historic data remains an accurate record.

Materials or component parts can be logged as such to avoid miss-selling, and product ‘bills of material’ from those parts saved for accounting of finished products. Any product in SQLWorks can become a kit, built from an unlimited number of sub components in a known construction time, costed as you see fit.

Valuation can vary widely across companies: that’s why SQLWorks understands different types of stock prices: including setting a ‘Default Cost’ for basic use, ‘Average Cost’ across units or materials or ‘Batch Cost’ for varying costs between batches, or a ‘Standard Cost’ for your own asset valuation as needed, and recording sale prices in up to 3 sales currencies (set by the user) to allow for international stock movements.

Batch management gives you the ability to record the item price differently between batches, track shifting margins and buy, store or re-sell the same item deploying different quantities and valuations depending on the batch. All pricing data links directly to your SQLWorks Accounting tools, to ensure that each area of your business software operates as one.

Adjustments to your stock are easily made from the ‘Movements’ button on the toolbar: for example stock movements can be entered in bulk for rapid updating of stock figures, or imported/exported from an external file. For those that need it, Stock Ledger includes an optional serial number system – using unique item numbers SQLWorks can be set to prompt, or even block, users against moving stock without evidencing its serial number. Speak to our team about how the Stock Ledger can best be configured for your businesses workflow.

SQLWorks logs not just your current stock, but your stock history – allowing you to trace movements or individual items long after the event, or monitor stock levels and finances over time. This information is then relayed using graphs for ease of use, and ensures that you always have accurate stock data at your fingertips.

 

For more information, contact our team today: http://www.sqlworks.co.uk/contact/

Did You Know? Custom Search

Lineal SQLWorks Custom Search is designed to help you manage even the largest of business databases quickly and efficiently, so being able to find what you need easily is vital.

When a simple search isn’t quite cutting it, trying using SQLWorks’ ‘Custom Search’ tool for a more targeted search. This can be found by clicking the small dropdown arrows beside the ‘Search’ Field on the Search Bar, and selecting ‘Custom Search’ at the bottom of the list. This opens the ‘Custom Search’ window (pictured below.)

Custom Search

From here users can search different attributes of list entries in the left hand field, using a search criteria in the middle column (such as ‘contains’, ‘begins with’ etc.) relating to the text typed in the right hand field.

By pressing the (-) or (+) buttons on the right, users can also add or subtract extra conditions to build a more complex and specific custom search query, helping to find the needed entries.

‘Search for all records matching’ chooses the criteria searching, such as ‘Any’ or ‘All’ of the chosen terms, and by using the ‘Saved Searches’ dropdown menu users can set Custom Search to the ‘Last Search’ or save a custom search for next time.

Press ‘Search’ and SQLWorks will narrow down your list to the chosen custom search terms. Happy hunting!

 

For more information, contact our team today: 01271 375999