Aqilla utilises many pre-defined entity types such as Accounts, Customers, Projects, Assets, and Items. Each entry under the Reference section is a separate entity or data type. These entities not only identify what they are by means of a code and description but also contain additional information relevant to that entity.
In most cases, it is also possible to configure additional information specific to your use of the system using the Attribute Wizard. Such extra attributes can be text (up to 10 different labels), integer (whole numbers of up to 4 different categories), value (decimals across 6 independent fields), dates (x 4), and/or a single block of longer text up to 255 alphanumeric characters.
This enhancement provides for three additional, user-definable, Super Entity types with the ability to configure additional information specific to that type of entity.
For example, if you require Contract information to be captured, you can have one of the Custom Analysis Entity types enabled and named “Contract”. Additional information can then be configured with the Attribute Wizard such as Contract Owner (text), Start Date (date), End Date (date), and Contract Value (value).
You can then choose which document types you would want to capture such customised Contract information. Note that Custom Super Entities can be captured in a document header or on each document line. When a document is posted to the ledger the Contract information will be automatically linked to the ledger transactions.
The Contract and its associated information will then be available to subsequent enquiry and reporting. For instance, a report could be created analysing contract spend by say the responsible Contract Owner.
The process of enabling a Custom Super Entity is straightforward but must be done by Aqilla support or one of our consultants. The amount of work will depend on the number of documents that will need configuring and whether you need help configuring additional attributes or additional reporting.
Contact support@aqilla.com or your Aqilla account manager if you would like to discuss this feature further.
To give better feedback to users working with sales or purchase invoices and who may not have full access to financial transactions within the Aqilla ledger itself, when an invoice has been fully paid, the Paid Date is now displayed as part of the original invoice document header view.
It is now possible to apply a digital certificate to any PDF document created by Aqilla. This can be of particular benefit when sending invoices or statements as a recipient of the document can check that the document has not been tampered with. The standard browser PDF viewers will not show the presence of a certificate, but these can be examined with products such as Adobe “Acrobat Reader DC”. To make the presence of a certificate more obvious it is also possible to modify templates to display a visual representation of a certificate or signature.
To implement a certificate, you have the options:
The Aqilla Microsoft Excel Add-In now provides enhanced handling of uploaded documents. Additionally, if you’re a user of 64 bit Microsoft Excel on 64 bit Microsoft Windows 10, this is definitely an upgrade you should take advantage of.
Previous versions of the Aqilla add-in uploaded all the selected documents as a single batch. If the batch contained a large number of documents, the processing time could be reasonably extensive and if errors were encountered in terms of the source data, the whole process would be invalidated.
The new enhanced version of the Aqilla Microsoft Excel Add-In now fully processes each document in the selected selection one by one. So if one document is invalidated the remainder will process as anticipated.
One consequence of processing each document individually is that errors might not be quite as obvious as the previous method of processing. To overcome this, some additional User Settings have been included to control how errors are handled.
Stop upload on first error – if this option is checked the upload process will stop when the first error is encountered. All documents before this error will have been fully processed and the error will be highlighted. The user may then correct the error and restart the upload process from the point where the error occurred by selecting the rows and columns from the point it stopped.
If the option is not checked, the upload process will continue through all the selected documents, only highlighting any documents in error. Once the upload process has been completed, all the documents that had no errors will have been fully processed and the user should correct any documents in error.
In this case, it may be simplest to correct each line in error and upload each corrected document one by one.
Highlight Colours – When an error is identified, the row and cell are highlighted and as normal a comment in the first column identifies the cause of the error. The default colours are different shades of red, but these may be changed in the User Settings dialogue.
This is not a mandatory update to the Aqilla Microsoft Excel Add-In but we do recommend users download the latest version of the Aqilla add-in to take advantage of this new functionality designed for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Excel on 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 10 introduced in 2020 which introduced several significant performance improvements.
Details of how to install the Aqilla add-in can be found in the Aqilla Help.
