5 top functionalities you might not be using in Unit4 Financials

New options in this area make it easier to communicate payment information to customers.

There is now an additional checkbox under the Print Invoices function. When you print or send an invoice via email to a customer account, this allows you to add the PDF invoice to the Financials document.

You now also have the ability to generate an XML format invoice, rather than having to send a PDF.
The Print Invoice function can be set up as either a standalone or scheduled task. These additional enhancements (XML formatting and PDF attachments) can also now be used with scheduled tasks rather than just with standalone tasks.

Previously, your intercompany control account held on your destination and receiver masters could be set up as a matchable account, but not as a customer supply account. This meant if you wanted to generate invoices and send them to that intercompany counter party, you would have to create a separate element (because of the inability to generate any tax or VAT against the counter party when generating the invoice).

This has now changed, so the intercompany control account can also be a customer supplier account. It means you can use the same element against your intercompany control account, as you can against a control account where you were creating invoices etc. for that intercompany counter party.

The benefit is that it reduces the number of elements you need to create as part of your intercompany process.

The last couple of years has seen the introduction of some useful new access control, audit and general security measures.

From Version 14 onwards, you can now allocate users with different capabilities for different companies (for instance, you can assign a user with read only access for company A, but full admin access for company B).

In earlier versions of the solution, you had to log in as a LEVEL8 user or a LEVEL8 sub-user to change passwords and unlock users. In reality, this made it difficult to audit who was making the change. Unit4 has now widened the options for assigning capabilities to users. It makes it possible, for instance, to assign ordinary users with the ability to unlock other users and change those other users’ passwords.

For audit purposes, many organisations require journals to be reviewed by someone other than the document creator before those journals are posted. To facilitate this, Unit4 has introduced an optional control whereby users who are posting documents to the in tray can be prevented from posting the same documents to the books.

This update was designed primarily for cloud, but can be used with on-premise deployments as well. On the output device master, you now have the ability to specify that you want the file or document you are transferring to be transferred via SFTP. This is useful for tasks such as transferring BACS payment files when transacting with suppliers.

This option has also been added into structured output. It means that generated files – whether they are Avalara, XML or any other format – can also be transferred in SFTP.