Mid-market cloud accounting specialist Aqilla has released a September upgrade that caters in particular for those finance managers who come back from holiday with 2014 plans and budgets on their minds.
- Included among the enhancements in the Aqilla 1308 release are:
- Export Excel outputs for financial reporting
- An Attrribute wizard that can set critera against different dimensions in Aqilla’s interactive budget documents
- Purchase order imports via an enhancement to Aqilla’s Excel Add-in
- Improved password and account control security features.
“From the level of activity we’ve seen since the beginning of September, everyone’s come back from holiday and is wondering what to do for next year. People are turning their attention to better reporting and planning,” said Aqilla director Hugh Scantlebury.
Being a cloud system makes it easy to implement regular upgrades in 6-8 week cycles, he explained, “so we can be very responsive to customer demands”. Where the previous upgrade introduced new bank reconciliation features, September’s enhancements focused on financial reporting and analysis.
The Aqilla report designer makes it possible to summarise information on thousands of transactions, without having to output a 10,000-line report to get to the bit you want, Scantlebury explained.
“You can filter down to the areas you want on screen in the application, rather than dumping it to Excel and using a pivot table to get to the data. If you want to take the data out to an external analysis cube, there’s a single-button download for the expanded data set.”
For budgeting, Aqilla now offers multiple dimensions to budget against. The Aqilla budget document offers a section of accounts to choose from by category. Picking marketing, for example, will automatically generate the sub-accounts you might want to analyse, with budget boxes to be filled in. These documents can be customised as the finance team sees fit, and exported to Excel. Once they’ve been kicked around a bit, the spreadsheet can be published back into Aqilla.
The application’s financial report designer can look at any of the ledger dimensions, Scantlebury said, “So you can compare actuals to budget, to revised budget, or to forecasts and do variance analysis,” he said.
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