Product Release: 1708

The latest “1708” Aqilla Cloud platform is now available featuring brand new enhancements such as, new workflow groups, improved email to avoid anti-spam filters and financial reports which you can download straight to PDFs.

Midway through the Summer period and unlike many, the team at Aqilla have been beavering away to deliver a whole new range of enhancements in a new “1708” release which was published over the last weekend. The principal enhancements in version 1708 are as follows:

New Workflow Groups

Workflow Groups are completely new, easy to use and incisive mechanism for defining who can view, modify, or promote (e.g. release, approve, post, etc.) individual documents (and document lines where applicable) within a specified group of Aqilla users. This is designed to make setting up workflows quicker and easier.

The permissions are defined for each type of workflow and therefore the individual types of document using the same workflow are controlled in the same way. However each document type can be further controlled or limited by which Views a user has permission to access. For example, a sales invoice and a purchase invoice will usually use the same workflow but an individual user may be limited to only working with purchase invoices, by granting permissions only to those Purchase Invoice views.

Workflow Groups is an optional replacement for the current Workflow Transition Groups, Workflow State Groups, Transition Permissions and Departmental Permissions. Workflow Groups also replace Change Data Permissions for workflow based documents but not Reference or Configuration data.

When Workflow Groups are enabled they are maintained using the Workflow Groups function found under the Configuration tab and is displayed in a separate dialog as a hierarchical display.

Workflow Groups has been designed to drastically simplify the setup and maintenance of permissions particularly where there are multiple teams of people involved. If you are considering using Workflow Groups, contact Aqilla support who will be able to discuss what is involved.

Transaction Matching – new Manual Splits

A new option has been added to Transaction Matching to allow manual splitting of transaction values.

In the example above, three transactions have been selected for matching but there is a difference of 4,615.49. When the cursor is moved over each line, a Manual Split button is displayed in the Select column. If the button is pressed a new Split Value dialog is displayed.

Entering the amount to split out and pressing the Split button, the transaction line is split out enabling the remaining lines to be allocated together.

Disabling Lookup Values

A new option has been added to Lookup Values to disable the value from being selected in a document or reference data. This may be useful for example where a piece of analysis is no longer relevant to day to day business activities going forward, e.g. a Division that no longer operates after a business reorganisation or rebranding exercise.

Disabling a Lookup Value will not affect existing documents or reference data. If the entry of the Lookup Value is by combo box, it will display “Incorrect value stored”. It also does not prevent a user from entering the full display value or prevent a document with the disabled value already entered from being posted.

Disabling Fixed Assets

In a similar way a new option has been added to Fixed Assets to disable an asset from being selected in a document. Again it will not affect existing documents and furthermore, it does not prevent a user from entering the full asset code or prevent a document with the disabled asset already entered from being posted.

The Attribute Configuration Wizard Gets Even Better!

Two enhancements have been added to the Attribute Wizard to help avoid errors when configuring new attributes.

  1. When mapping attributes from multiple documents to the ledger, the wizard shows a count of the number of usages and warns if the name of the attribute in the document differs from the name in the ledger. It is no longer possible to change the name in the ledger once it has been defined for another attribute. If the name in the ledger requires changing, contact Aqilla support.
  2. Users occasionally find it difficult to determine the correct setting of the Group By flag. The wizard now defaults the setting according to the configuration of the journal as a whole. It is unlikely that default value would need to be changed.

FX Rates when copying Multi-Currency Documents

When copying a multi-currency document, (such as a sales invoice, purchase invoice, or purchase order), the document looks up the default rate from the currency rate table associated with the document’s transaction date, this rate may now be overridden before completing the copy process.

Financial Reports straight to PDF

The output format has been improved when producing a PDF document directly from Financial Reports, the output is now paged with column headings displayed on every page.

(Note that because the output does not break the report width across multiple pages it is not recommended that the PDF option is used for reports with more than about 8 columns)

Projects now with Attachments

It is now possible to save an attachment to a project. This is available in Project Edit under the Reference tab.

In addition we now have the capability for Projects to be linked not only to Customers but also Suppliers. The actual change to configure this involves a script being run by one of our support team. If you are interested in using this feature contact your Account Manager or support in the normal way.

Improved Email to avoid anti-spam filters & new Standard Reply-To feature

The composition of emails that are generated by Aqilla, such as sales invoices and creditor remittances, has been improved to reduce the chance that the receiving email server will treat the email as spam.

There is also a new “Reply To” option in Configuration-Company Information-Contacts. If checked, all reply emails created when the client who received an email with a document generated by Aqilla hits “Reply” will be sent to the email address specified.

Further changes to Payment Processing

The Payments File download now uses the Payment Account recorded as Contra Account on the Creditor record, instead of trying to work out what the Payment Account could have been at the time the Payment was made. This resolves an occasional problem when a Payment is made, then another account was designated as a Payment account, preventing export of the payment data.

Today’s Date Shortcut Quick Tip

If a date field is empty, such as in Expense Entry, using the mouse right-click will automatically set it to today’s date. Genius!

E-book: Dispelling the (five) myths of accounting in the Cloud

Month or year end doesn’t have to be slow or difficult. Here is a best practice guide to the busiest times of the accounting and finance year with 5 tips to facilitate a quicker and more efficient period end.

READ THIS EBOOK TO FIND OUT MORE