“One of the biggest benefits in working with Aqilla is the fact that you get a real person at the end of the line who can talk you through your problem. Secondly, it’s about how easy Aqilla is to use.”
One particular business in the group, Trelonk, is emerging as the growth leader. Utilising agri-tech, precision methods and university collaborations, Trelonk produces a range of health and wellbeing products from a sustainable agricultural enterprise. It was Finance Manager Jonathon Powell’s job to ensure the accounting system could accommodate the needs of both the consolidated group and the fast-emerging enterprise.
“Dead easy to use” for multicompany accounting
Aqilla was implemented in early 2020 to replace Sage 50 as the expanding group’s needs changed, allowing the accounts team a better user experience when managing entries across multiple accounts on a daily basis. Finance manager Jonathon Powell explains, “As a group, Aqilla’s interface makes it dead easy for us to use. Once you are logged in, you can go from one company to another using a simple drop down menu. With other packages we would have had to keep logging in and out.”
“We started off with everything going in at General Ledger level, now we use Cost Centre Accounting to report by hospitality, farm, estates, and so on. It allows us to treat each particular section as a business in its own right.”
Standardised reporting for each entity has been set up using Sharperlight – a low maintenance and highly-flexible BI platform, fully-integrated with Aqilla – to streamline the management reporting process. The groups accounts are then easily consolidated in Excel. “We created the reporting very easily with the help of Aqilla’s support team which makes the consolidation process very simple,” Jonathon adds.
Advanced reporting for a growing enterprise
Jonathon and his team use Aqilla for all the usual transactional processes such as invoices, journals and bank transactions. In line with the business’s growth trajectory, the accounting needs are gradually becoming more complex. Describing how Aqilla will help the business through growth, Jonathon explains, “We started off with just straight Nominal Ledger codes, then we brought in Cost Centres. Now we need to look at the project side and at using Aqilla’s foreign currency capability. We are finding out that Aqilla is way more capable than you’d think at first.”
So far, Jonathon has implemented Cost Centre accounting for Trelonk, utilising the sophisticated reporting within Aqilla to produce Profit and Loss reporting for each revenue line. Jonathon explains, “We started off with everything going in at General Ledger level, now we use Cost Centre Accounting to report by hospitality, farm, estates, and so on. It allows us to treat each particular section as a business in its own right.”
“Aqilla is a different-looking package to something like Sage, QuickBooks or even SAP but once you get used to it, it is so easy to use. The more I use it, the more I like it.”
When implementing Aqilla, Custom Attributes can be created as fields in documents such as sales and purchase orders. Multiple fields can be created to enable reporting on things like inventory, batches, serial numbers or indeed whole cost centres. For more complex reporting, a whole new database table can be configured in Aqilla for full Project Accounting, allowing users to include timesheets, expenses and purchases which relate to specific projects.
The Trelonk arm of the business will benefit from Aqilla’s full Project Accounting functionality as it continues to invest for growth. Aqilla’s multicurrency accounting will be required too, as the sales of essential oils and other wellbeing products produced from the farm are sold into new markets.
A personal approach to customer support and a product that’s easy to use
Summing up on his overall experience of working with Aqilla, Jonathon emphasizes two things, “One of the biggest benefits in working with Aqilla is the fact that you get a real person at the end of the line who can talk you through your problem. Secondly, it’s about how easy Aqilla is to use.”
He adds, “Aqilla is a different-looking package to something like Sage, QuickBooks or even SAP but once you get used to it, it is so easy to use. The more I use it, the more I like it.”
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