In our October newsletter, we introduced Qlikview as a means of being able to graphically represent your General Ledger reports. Well Qlikview can do (much, much) more than just report on GL. It can also be used to chart your sales, purchases or stock levels in any way that you want: as a data grid to the screen, as a bar chart, pie chart, report, Excel spreadsheet or many other graphical outputs.

A number of our sites are now using Qlikview to overlay their WinMAGI data to help them with various management decisions and track their performance. Users are able to amend how their data is represented and what data is loaded. Please contact us if you would like to see some examples of Qlikview in action.

Many users already know about the facility to export the details of the WinMAGI screen grids directly to Excel. However, did you also know that you can control where that spreadsheet will go to, whether it will automatically load upon creation and whether the spreadsheet will have column totals? The User Preferences settings (see User Preferences->Maintenance->WinMAGI properties) allow each user to control where and how the Excel spreadsheet will be created. For example, if you want the numeric columns in the Excel spreadsheet to automatically total, simply tick the ‘Automatic totals on numeric columns’ field on the ‘Grid Export’ tab. When you next export one of the WinMAGI grids to Excel, all of the numeric columns in the grid will have a ‘Total’ cell for all of the numeric columns in the spreadsheet. Try out the other options, such as ‘Automatic Freeze Heading Line’, to see how these options can work for you.

Note that we also recommend that you specify a local ‘Export File Directory’ that specifies a local directory on your PC. This ensures that you do not have update conflicts with other users who may be exporting the same data at the same time.

Sometimes, you can have the same item supplied by different suppliers and it is in your interests to see what the best price is for your required items. The Supplier Request for Quote (RFQ) process allows requests for supplier quotes to be automatically generated for all planned purchase orders lines for each of the suppliers that can supply the selected items. The RFQ process will allow you to create RFQ documents that can be sent to the supplier who can return the document quoting their best price. Once you have received back the RFQ’s, you can then determine which vendor is offering the best price and select that vendor to be the preferred supplier of the selected item. For more detailed information, please contact us.

The Sales Order and Purchase Order Kitting process allows the automated entry of sales order lines for items that are defined as kits and the automated processing of purchase order receipts for items defined as kits.

Sales Order Kitting allows you to enter in a finished item (the kit item) as a sales order line and the system will automatically create the lines for all of the kit components. You don’t need to enter in a line for each component; the system will do it for you.  Also, if you are receipting a kit item, rather than updating the stock on hand of the finished item, the purchase receipt process will update the stock of the components that make up the kit. Kitting is a simple, easy way of being able to enter orders, control stock, and ensures that you are not sending out kits with missing components. For those that are interested, we have a more detailed user document that we can arrange to send to you.

We’ve all done it. (Well I know that I certainly have). Simply, just wanting to amend an existing WinMAGI report by calling up the report in System Development Facility and instead of answering ‘No’ to the prompt asking if you want to delete the existing version of the report you accidentally answer ‘Yes’ and now find that the report has been deleted. Well, to save some embarrassment, and scrambling through backups, the later builds of WinMAGI now check that you really do want to delete the report before it is actually deleted. As well as having to answer ‘Yes’ to the initial prompt asking if you want to delete the report, WinMAGI now asks if you ‘really’ want to delete it before doing so.

Also, for those clients trading with customers who are invoiced in a foreign currency, but the customer pays in your base currency, there is now the ability to apply the payment received in your base currency to the foreign currency invoices. This means that you do not require a separate bank account to handle these transactions. Your existing AUD bank account can be used to receipt in the payment even when transacting with a foreign currency customer.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Our QlikView offering now includes being able to graphically represent your existing General Ledger Financial reports. With a “one off” initial minor setup change, all of your existing locally developed GL reports can be charted, graphed, reviewed and exported. If you make a further change to your local reports, when you rerun the QlikView process, those changes will be reflected.