software Archives - Page 4 of 4 - SQLWorks

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: Consignments & Consignment Stock

Consignments –

If you sell consignment stock through the premises of another company, SQLWorks can help you keep track of your consignments.

Stock locations can be managed in a number of ways, but the easiest way to hold your stock at another location is to create a new warehouse to represent this, named after the customer who holds this stock as a consignment.

To add a consignments warehouse, open ‘Products’ from the main nabvbar (1), open your Warehouse Map (2) and click the ‘New’ button on the top left to add a new warehouse to your list of warehouses. Name this warehouse after the consignment location, or the name of the consignment customer.

When creating the new warehouse, remember to check the correct radio button on the right hand side before saving, tagging the new consignment warehouse as ‘consignment wh’ or ‘retail store.’

You can treat this warehouse like any other – moving stock to or from the premises of your seller, raising customer orders and invoices against that company, and performing stock valuations.

If your consignment is large, you can also divide it into multiple ‘Bin’ locations, as you might for one of your own warehouses, and assign stock to the correct bins accordingly.

consignments

You can choose to change a customers’ default order type to ‘IWT’ (Inter-warehouse transfer) or CONS (Consignment) under the ‘Print and Orders’ Tab in a customers’ Sales Ledger account.

This function allows you to specify your (actually their) new consignment stock warehouse under “Warehouse to” for stock, to be moved into by default. In the case of IWT and Consignment stock, this order will then be removed to prevent invoicing a consignment stock re-seller or similar for the consignment before sale.

At all times SQLWorks treats consignment stock exactly as what it is: your stock, temporarily stored with someone else.

 

For help with stock control and warehousing: contact the SQLWorks team today.

Fact Sheet: Email Marketing & Mailshots

email marketing

If you have SQLWorks linked to your email account, SQLWorks can be used for email marketing and mailshots, bulk sending emails with custom designs.

Accessed within SQLWorks CRM, users can create a new email campaign by making a new mailshot project, and create multiple mass emails within a campaign.

Right clicking in the main list and selecting ‘New Mailshot’ will open a new email creation window, where users can give the mailshot a unique name, choose an email from address, subject line, and ‘drag-and-drop’ in attachments.

The list of intended recipients can be chosen from the ‘Client Lists’ dropdown, selecting from one of your custom client lists, which you can build from your saved SQLWorks CRM contacts.

For the design of an email, you can choose from a wide range of tools from within the formatting pallet on the right of the main email editing window – get creative with different fonts and text sizes, colours, bulletpoints and alignment, insert images, tables and more!

You can format elements by highlighting them and clicking the format buttons, and confine the margins of your email by setting these measurements in the ‘Document’ tab.

For tidy formatting, we recommend creating a borderless table in which to align all the elements of your email marketing email – to ensure any custom designs are displayed consistently in the inboxes of recipients.

SQLWorks database tags can be input into the main email body so that each email contains mail merged custom data from elsewhere in your contact directory. This can be used for targeting with ‘informal’ detail (e.g.: a first name – ‘Dear John’) and a “fall-through” function which pulls in substitute data as a ‘formal’ backup (e.g.: surnames – ‘Dear Mr Smith’) where the main data is unavailable. These functions can be customised by our SQLWorks team, to email your contacts using any piece of data from your SQLWorks CRM, Accounts or Stock Control data.

SQLWorks allows you to preview each version of a mailmerged email to check for errors by clicking the ‘Prev’ / ‘Next’ buttons, and ensure each email is correctly personalised. Using the spellcheck function, and undo/redo buttons, email marketeers can also avoid any errors being broadcast to a wide audience.

If you wish to remove all formatting, and send your email as a ‘plain text’ email to improve chances of deliverability, simply tick the ‘Send as Plain Text’ checkbox at the top of the Mailshot window. Using the ‘Show Plain Text’ checkbox, you can also check how this email is likely to be seen by email inbox previews.

Deploying these tools, you can field imaginative, targeted and ongoing email campaigns, linking all the intelligence of your SQLWorks data together with your marketing.

 

For expert CRM tools, contact us about SQLWorks today:

Did you know? Task Prioritisation

task prioritisation

SQLWorks’ task list can prioritise your tasks in order of important with a simple colour-coding system: here’s how to use this.

When creating or editing a task, you can choose a priority level from the ‘Priority’ dropdown menu, which by default contains 3 levels. After saving the task with a task prioritisation:

All ‘Normal’ Tasks go in the main (grey) default task window. You can use the main task list as a to-do list for today’s tasks, filtering the list, sending reminders and closing jobs as they are completed. Your SQLWorks admin can also be given control over closing tasks, and recording the time taken to finish each job.

All ‘Low’ priority Tasks go to the green task panel on the left hand side – you can use this to hold tasks that are not important, or have no imminent deadlines.

All ‘High’ priority tasks go to the red task panel on the left hand side – you should reserve this list for only the most urgent tasks. When a new task enters this list, SQLWorks will also email the person who this task is assigned to, letting them know they have a very urgent task to complete.

The yellow task panel is an especially useful area, reserved for ‘Future tasks that are dated ahead of time. You can do this by post-dating the ‘Open Date’ on a task before saving it. Your future tasks will remain in the yellow list until the ‘Open Date’ (and time) passes – at which point your task will be moved by SQLWorks to your main grey list to be worked on.

This is a handy tool for keeping tomorrow’s work clear from today’s to-do list, and populating tomorrow’s to-do list automatically when tomorrow arrives.

For a professional CRM solution on either Windows or Mac, contact us 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.