We are pleased to announce that version 1105 of Aqilla has been released this morning (Thursday 12th May). The principal enhancements included in this release includes multiple email addresses, financial reports, expense documents, payments and debits, company logos and excel add in. Principal enhancements include:
When setting up email addresses for recipients of Sales Invoices (in Customers), Purchase Orders (in Suppliers), Debtor Statements (in Debtor accounts) and Creditor Remittances (Creditor accounts), it is now possible to specify multiple recipients by separating the email addresses by semicolons. For example: jimbrowne@abc.com;millamoyes@abc.com.
The layout of the Excel reports exported from the Financial Reports have been improved to set the column widths more accurately, thus making the reports more readable without having to reformat the columns within Excel.
Within the Configuration of Financial Reports it is now possible to copy a whole report definition. This is particularly useful if you wish to create similar reports. Once the copy has been made, you may edit the details of the new report as required.
The definition of Column Types in Report Profiles has been simplified but made more flexible. The main Column Types have been rationalised into three basic types: Balance, Period Movement, and Year to Date. Additional parameters may be defined to modify the use of the Column Type.
A new Column Type has been added (Period Spread Forward) to complement the existing Period Spread column type (now called Period Spread Backward). In combination these two columns can typically be used to report on the Main ledger for all periods up to the period being reported and for the remaining periods, to the end of year, to report on budgets.
Departments are used by Aqilla to control the workflow permission for documents. These normally apply to Expense and Timesheet documents but may also be applied to other document types.
It is now possible to define Departments in a hierarchy so that, for authorisation purposes, permissions can be granted for people in a higher level department to be able to approve documents owned by people in lower level departments. For instance a “Managers” department could be defined as a higher level to the operational departments. This is implemented by a new dropdown list of Departments called “Higher Department”. Multiple levels of Departments is possible and each Department refers to the next level above.
The Department maintenance function now allows the user to add people into a Department. When adding a person you can additionally define a Seniority (between 0 and 10). This seniority is used by Aqilla’s workflow to determine who may approve documents owned by people within a Department (or in a lower Department). Generally speaking a person with a higher Seniority can approve a document owned by a person with a lower seniority. Permissions can also be set so that people with the same seniority can approve each other’s documents (but usually not their own).
The entry of expense types requiring VAT has been simplified. The user now enters the Net amount and the system will calculate the VAT amount. The VAT amount may be overwritten, if necessary, with a new value. If the user wishes to change the line and have the VAT amount recalculated, the current VAT amount should be deleted. The Claim amount is always calculated as the sum of the Net and VAT amounts.
VAT entered through an Expense document can now be automatically included in the VAT reports. The accounts linked to the Person (maintained in Person Edit) must be defined as Creditor accounts.
Accounts are now displayed in Account Name sequence.
A new option has been added “Zero Amount Only”. If Yes is selected, only the accounts that have a zero amount due will be displayed. This happens when there have been manual payments or credit notes made to the account but have not yet been matched. The option will offer to automatically match these transactions.
In this release the mechanism has been improved for displaying your company logo on the formatted documents such as Sales Invoices, Debtor Statements and Creditor Remittances. This can make the rendering of the images much sharper. If you have supplied us with a new image file, it is recommended that you check the new images. For those who have not changed their images but may wish to consider changing the image do get in touch.
Project maintenance has now been added. Previously, text fields that contained just numbers would be interpreted as numbers by Excel and any leading zeroes would be removed. In particular, bank sort codes and account codes could be unintentionally modified by Excel.
The add-in now forces Excel to treat these fields as text. The add-in now supports posting documents to secondary ledgers / value dimensions, such as budget and forecast ledgers using the Miscellaneous type document. Note that Budget documents are handled in a different way and are unaffected by this change.
The add-in software now checks that the version you have installed on your computer is the latest available. In future, when the add-in connects to the Aqilla server it will perform a version check and a message will be displayed if the add-in is not the latest version. Depending on the compatibility of the versions the user will either be allowed to continue with the current version or will be required to upgrade before continuing.
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