Our Development Team has been busy adding some exciting new productivity and reporting features into accountsIQ.

The following summarises some of the latest product enhancements for January 2009.

Bulk Emailing

We've created a powerful new function to enable you to email some of your regular documents (sales invoices, customer statements and supplier remittances) out to your suppliers and customers in batches. The Bulk Emailing function is located under the ''General'' menu.

You simply pick the type of report that you want to email out, the system will pick up your email address from your user profile in the admin layer, and you can then enter a subject and message to accompany the email.

Next you need to specify the selection criteria for the bulk email. This is the same as running a report, for example you could select a range of invoices by internal reference.

You can then generate the emails. The system will tell you if there are any email addresses missing from your supplier and customer accounts. You can add these to an outgoing message by clicking ''edit'' and updating the message. Alternatively, you can update your supplier/customer master records with the relevant addresses and they will be picked up here any time you create a bulk email.

Next select the emails you wish to send and then click ''Email''. The system will tell you when they have sent.

For more information on how to use this function please review the help documentation on the topic.

General Ledger Explorer

We have significantly redesigned the Budget Screen and created some new reporting and analysis features.  We now call this function The General Ledger Explorer.

It enables you to view actual GL Account values, enter budgets and revised budgets as well as analyse and compare figures between periods and financial years.  

It's accessible from the General Ledger Listing Screen by clicking on the icon beside each account or by taking the option from the ''General'' drop down menu.

The GL Explorer has the following features:

• Download an Excel-based budget template and upload the completed file into AccountsIQ
• Create columnar comparisons between actual and budget or revised budgets. You can also view year on year comparisons e.g 2008 actuals vs 2007 etc. Depending on the options selected, the variances will display as positive or negative values
• Analyse groups of accounts by Category, Sub Category and Department.  For example, you could choose to select all Revenue and Expenditure categories of accounts and the system will summarise the values into an overall figure that can be compared to budget
• Drilldown from a period value to the underlying transactions in the Audi Trail
• You can use the functions at the bottom of the page to adjust budgets by a certain percentage, copy last year's actuals into this year's budget, update your revised budgets and so on
• You can then chart your query results and determine how the results should be displayed using the Graph options
• You can then export the results of your analysis (data and chart) to a variety of export formats including Excel, PDF and HTML 

For more information on how to use this function please review the help documentation on the topic.

New Sales and Purchase Invoices Due Reports

To help with credit control and cash collection processes we've added 2 new reports:

• Sales Invoices Due: A listing of sales invoices ordered by due date, allowing for customer credit days. Customer contact details are also provided
• Purchase Invoices Due: A listing of purchase invoices due for payment ordered by due date. This also allows for supplier credit terms agreed

Our Implementation Team will be organising some online webinars to introduce these new features over the coming weeks. Check out our website to view the schedule.

If you or your users require additional information on these enhancements, please do not hesitate to contact your Implementation Consultant or email support@accountsiq.com.