Five Solutions to Streamline your Accounting Process

Five Solutions to Streamline your Accounting Process

February 12th, 2021

Even with the power of Unit4 Financials at your fingertips, there are still several ancillary processes that exist within the finance ecosystem that can benefit from greater automation and streamlining.

From invoice matching to document scanning, discover the modules and add-ons that can drive efficiency and reduce operational risk in your finance function.

1. Purchase Order Processing (POP) / Purchase Invoice Matching (PIM)

Unit4 Financials Purchase Order Processing (POP) and Purchase Invoice Matching (PIM) enable you to better understand, control and manage costs.

The modules provide improved invoice matching, budgetary control and cash flow forecasting to help you:

  • Approve costs before incurring them
  • Enhance internal controls
  • Take committed costs into account
  • Consolidate your costs
  • Improve your reporting output

POP and PIM enable you to make better decisions and increase project profitability across your finance function.

2. Billing

Fully integrated with the core Unit4 Financials framework, the Billing module simplifies your invoicing process – removing the need for integrations with third- party billing systems.

The user-defined product catalogue, with individual item characteristics and rules, ensures accurate, complete and up-to- date data in your invoices and general ledger.

You can also easily design invoice templates, define invoice layouts and statements.

The module provides you with:

  • Item Catalogue for Purchasing & Selling
  • Drag and drop functionality to design and customise the layout of screens
  • Configurable data entry screen

3. MBilling Icorp

For firms that require complex functionality (or need to send out high volumes of sales invoices), a comprehensive sales invoicing/ billing solution is essential.

Seamlessly integrated into Unit4 Financials, MBilling powered by Icorp supports high-data volumes and contains powerful billing / sales invoicing functionality – including a comprehensive rules engine, smart algorithms and data bridging.

Transform your accounting processes with intelligent software that can extract information from any source system, reducing operational risk and improving efficiency.

4. Invoice4 Document Scanning & OCR

Transform your approach to the Accounts Payable process with Invoice4, enabling you to receive 100% of your invoices electronically from day one.

By directly receiving purchase invoices (whether paper, PDF, email, XML or EDI), Invoice4 introduces a new starting point. It allows you to view accurate, cleansed electronic invoices from your existing Unit4 Financials system without the need for extensive data entry and associated errors.

Fully integrated and certified, the solution provides the lowest risk and most cost-effective means of capturing purchase invoices, giving you a great head start in processing invoices with the highest levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Digital Invoicing

Digital Invoicing gives you an efficient method for transmitting and storing invoices – streamlining your Sales & Purchasing processes.

It also helps you to reduce the use of paper and the associated costs of printing, shipping and storage.

The module allows you to produce, transmit and store electronic invoices in XML format – giving you greater control over the elements contained in each document.

It provides you with the ability to map and post incoming invoices into Unit4 Financials, while producing XML files from outgoing invoices.


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Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V2020

Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V2020

This post shares all the functionality available on Unit4 Financials V2020. If you are upgrading from an older version of Financials, you will get all of the below features plus all the very latest features from V13, V14 and Continuous Release.

The naming convention may have changed, but the latest version of Unit4 Financials offers all the new features you would expect. Unit4 Financials V2020 (rather than V15) is available now.

If you are on V14 remember that at end of 2022 it will fall outside the Unit4 supported software window. If you don’t upgrade before that date, you may incur extended support charges from Unit4.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.


New features arriving in V2020 include:

  • Element Authorisation
  • Change Log Anonymisation
  • Provisional Year End

Plus a wide range of technical improvements…

Along with the additional functionality, V2020 brings a new approach to regular updates – adding a version number to the end, based on the quarter it is released in. For example, the current release is V2020 Q3.

It is also important to note that V13 and all previous versions of Unit4 Financials will no longer receive full support.

What's new in V2020?
Full Year End

  1. Sum all the profit and loss accounts, posting the NET figure to retained earnings in the balance sheet
  2. Post the closing balance sheet figures to the period 0 of the following year
  3. Close the year of the Year End being processed, preventing any further postings

Provisional Year End will perform all the processing of a full Year End, but will not close the year being ended, allowing you to continue posting to that year.

Any subsequent Year End processing will perform incremental postings for those applicable to the year being ended. These postings will have an input date greater than the one specified for the last provisional Year End.

Example: If your Year End is 31st December, you can run the process before 31st January in provisional mode, so that your balance type reports will capture carried forward balances in period 0 when you run period end reports for period 1.

Undo Year End

You can now undo both provisional and full Year Ends. This will cancel all Year End journals posted to the final (9999) period for the latest year in which a Year End has been run, and to the opening (0) period of the next year.

If a full Year End is undone, the minimum year will be reset to the previous year. The Undo Year End process undoes all the Year Ends that have been run in the selected year, not just the last Year End process itself.

Example: If you undo the year 2019 in 2020 (having also run 2017 and 2018 Year Ends in 2020), it will undo all three years.

Browse Transaction Enhancements

Browse Transaction gives you a more powerful way to interrogate the database, using the metadata in a way that provides the same functionality as Browse Details.

Company Master

You can now specify an address category on the Procurement tab to automate the selection of the ordering address in Procurement.

This overcomes a previous issue that meant it was only possible to set one default address for a supplier record, which had to be set correctly for remittances. This new feature allows multiple default addresses based on the function module.

It also allows you to change the Actuals and Turnovers balance codes on the company master after documents have been posted in the company.

Intercompany Control Account 

In the intercompany module, you can now add a customer or supplier to the control account specified in the destination and receiver masters – as well as to elements inserted when those accounts contain wildcards.

This means that one company can now send a sales invoice document to another company, and it will be received as a purchase invoice document.

Pay

The payment period and/or date can now be changed on a payment proposal after it has been generated via a new ‘Change payment period’ option on the Pay/Collect actions menu.

This feature is controlled by functional security on the Capability Master and allows you to amend the payment period without aborting the proposal.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation will now record the date of reconciliation. This will default to today’s date unless a date is set via the Reconciliation Master, or at run time.

The Finance user that ran the reconciliation process will be recorded as the Reconciliation user.

The Reconciliation date and user are also available as vocabularies for use in Selector and Presenter masters for use in reconciliation reports.

Fixed Assets

You can now set up scheduled tasks to depreciate assets.

Invoice Matching

It is now possible to input a non-matchable invoice or credit note where the invoice total is a different sign than the tax total.

LRN Housekeeping can also now be run without posting a journal to Finance.This resolves two previous issues:
• When running housekeeping, a journal was posted to Finance which meant that you had to cancel the document
• If the Right Left lists had been changed in Financials since the receipt of the goods, this meant that housekeeping would fail

Procurement

Orders that are automatically created by conversion from a requisition can now be automatically submitted to workflow, removing the manual steps for browsing and submitting to workflow.

Billing

It is now possible to copy a document in Browse.

Unit4 XL (CodaXL)

XL is now fully compatible with 64-bit Excel, in addition to the 32-bit variant.

Public Bulk Data Web Services

V2020 now provides:

• Generic Browse/Select Chunked
• Generic Browse/Fetch

This gives you the ability to query exceptionally large datasets with an interface spread over multiple requests.

Customiser

You can now generate and customise forms created at runtime – as well as import and export customisations.

Browser Warning

A warning is now displayed if the results of a browse have been limited by the security settings.

If the user is restricted to certain accounts in their capability settings, the user will be warned that not all the data has been returned.

Copy Company with Finance

You can now copy element flexi-field data when using ‘copy company’ to copy elements.

You can also copy element template customisations when using ‘copy company’ to copy element template masters.

OpenID Connect Authentication

User claims for OpenID Connect can now be configured from the Security section of the Administration Console.

A painless Unit4 Financials upgrade starts here

If you are on V14 remember that at end of 2022 it will fall outside the Unit4 supported software window. If you don’t upgrade before that date, you may incur extended support charges from Unit4.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.

To explore your upgrade options, contact us today

Does your Chart of Accounts still fit your Organisations Reporting Requirements?

Does your Chart of Accounts still fit your Organisations Reporting Requirements?


Are you able to generate the reports that your business requires straight from Unit4 Financials, without resorting to an end-user computing solution such as Excel? If not, then your current chart of accounts may no longer be fit for purpose.

The element structure within Financials allows for huge flexibility giving users the capability to produce any number of customised reports. However, to make the most of this level of flexibility it is vital that your element structure is optimised to allow the correct information with minimal manual intervention.

As your business grows, the nature of the reporting requirements changes, and so your original chart of accounts may no longer be suitable to support this. Whilst most small businesses initially set up their accounting to meet GAAP and FRS requirements, they can often overlook the importance of having a robust management accounting structure.

Management accounting allows you to create financial reporting that provides you with the information to manage your business. With a suitably designed chart of accounts, you can fulfill both your internal management accounting and statutory reporting.

Remodeling your chart of accounts can allow you to produce both your management and statutory reporting using standard Unit4 Financials functionality, such as generic browse. It will also allow you to use more powerful analytical tools like metadata queries to produce more value-added reporting.

A appropriately designed chart of accounts will enable you to meet the reporting needs of both Managerial and Financial Accounting.

Here at Millennium Consulting we can help you design a new chart of accounts and element structure within Unit4 Financials to reflect your current business needs. Our skilled staff can undertake workshops to understand your organisational reporting needs and create an element structure and chart of accounts that will drive your business.

Published October 23rd, 2020


Contact us for further details

If you would like any further information on this subject, please submit your details and one of our experts will be in touch.

Contact us

Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V14

February 2020

Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V14

This post shares all the functionality available on Unit4 Financials V14. If you are upgrading from an older version of Financials, you will get all of the below features plus all the very latest features from V13, V2020 and Continuous Release.

If you are on V14 remember that at end of 2022 it will fall outside the Unit4 supported software window. If you don’t upgrade before that date, you may incur extended support charges from Unit4.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.


Element Workflow

To ensure the accuracy of master data and minimise the risk of fraudulent creation or modification of key master data, capabilities have been added for creating and approving master data.


Flexi-Fields

The Flexi-field capability at element level has been extended to transaction level, which allows you to capture unlimited amounts of business-specific dimensions, perform more detailed analyses and calculate more detailed KPIs and intelligence, in order to support both strategic and operational decision making.


Billing

Replacing the legacy e-billing module, the new billing module is fully integrated with the core of the financials framework.


Financials new features:

  • Element Authorisation
    • Element authorisation rule master
    • Element authorisation workflow process
    •  Import/export of element authorisation rules
  • Flexi-fields for finance transactions
    • Transaction Flexi-fields in table link
    • Browse ledger and aged analysis
  • Multiple attachments for finance documents
  • Assisted element template.
  • Identification of cancelled transactions
  • Input–derived fields
  • Revaluation chain – dates
  • Intercompany – copy attachments
  • Reconciliation – scroll folders independently
  • Currency write-offs
  • Element finder – IBAN code now added
  • Pay proposal codes – now display the full proposal code
  • Payment reference number
    • Unique payment reference generation
  • Matching – write-off tolerances now defined in home, dual and matching currency

Administration New Features:

  • Capability by company
  • Inactivating users - active until date specified on master
  • Change password and locked users
  • Password parameters – specify number of uppercase and lowercase
  • Diary notifications and scheduled task
  • Scheduled Tasks: Allocation, allocation chain, balance audit, currency revaluation chain, currency revaluation rule, diary notifications, document audit, generate pay/collect proposal, generate reminder letters, intercompany processing, table link document load, table link element load and tax transfer
  • E-mails subject and sender configuration in workflow
  • Menu content provider - enables you to store defaults for selectors and presenters
  • Downloads – downloads section on administration console, print formatter and workflow designer
  • Application header text - define application header text in application parameters

A painless Unit4 Financials upgrade starts here

If you are on V14 remember that at end of 2022 it will fall outside the Unit4 supported software window. If you don’t upgrade before that date, you may incur extended support charges from Unit4.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.

To explore your upgrade options, contact us today

Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V13

Discover the latest Unit4 Financials features in V13

This post shares all the functionality available on Unit4 Financials V13. If you are upgrading from an older version of Financials, you will get all of the below features plus all the very latest features from V14, V2020 and Continuous Release.

If you are on an older version of Financials (lower than V14) you have may have already fallen outside the Unit4 supported software window and maybe incurring extended support charges.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.


Element Workflow

To ensure the accuracy of master data and minimise the risk of fraudulent creation or modification of key master data, capabilities have been added for creating and approving master data.


Flexi-Fields

The Flexi-field capability at element level has been extended to transaction level, which allows you to capture unlimited amounts of business-specific dimensions, perform more detailed analyses and calculate more detailed KPIs and intelligence, in order to support both strategic and operational decision making.


General:

  • New framework for user
  • All applications accessed from one menu
  • Save activities to a favourites list
  • Retains history of recent activities
  • Receive workflow messages as alerts

Financials:

  •  Enquiries
    • New aged analysis
    • Reference date on browse ledger
    • Browse transactions (new) uses metadata
  • Credit Management
    • Diary uses metadata selectors & presenters
    • Diary manager linked to user master
    • Credit Manager maintenance
    • Print statements – similar to sales invoicing
    • New aged table object on Print Formatter to include ageing on customer statements
  • Add elements directly to group masters
  • Add attachments to elements

Administration Console:

  •  Workflow
    • Housekeeping
    • Financial attachments
    • Tasklist
    • Completion workflows
  • New scheduled tasks
    • Print invoices
    • Print statements
    • Ledger maintenance
    • Populate link tables
  • Customizer integrated into the application
  • Metadata – add new joins and vocabulary to existing views
  • Create and maintain repository folders
  • Printing & emailing
    • Email template master – subject body and signature for use in invoices etc.
    • Print options master – links print formats, output device, and email templates
    • Print format watermarks
    • Export/import print format masters
  • Filter element selection within generic browse by filter on user’s role
  • Link table import routine from source files

A painless Unit4 Financials upgrade starts here

If you are on V14 remember that at end of 2022 it will fall outside the Unit4 supported software window. If you don’t upgrade before that date, you may incur extended support charges from Unit4.

Now may be an ideal time to look at the options that are available to you and the benefits you will gain from an upgrade.

To explore your upgrade options, contact us today

Implementation methodology for new business requirement

Implementation methodology for new business requirement

Millennium Consulting follows the Unit4 Implementation Methodology (U4IM), which is used globally for all Unit4 software implementations.

The methodology encompasses all the activities that can take place throughout the implementation process and is supported by strong project management controls to ensure successful delivery.

The phases of U4IM are:

• Plan/Design
We agree on the contract with a client, then hand the project to our implementation team who set up the project organization. We perform a business requirement and process review, running workshops with the client to create the solution design.

• Test
We help you to perform Integrated System Testing and User Acceptance Testing on the elements built in the Build phase.

• Deploy
We deploy the different solution elements, taking care to advise you on and help coordinate every aspect from Data Migration to End User Testing.

• Close
Around three weeks after the solution goes live, we evaluate the project – assessing deliverables and future plans for development.

Note: Integration with third-party reporting software such as Cognos, Business Objects and Microsoft SSRS (as well as procurement, billing and payroll systems) is a key consideration of the upgrade process.

Is it time to upgrade?

Upgrading your finance software can provide new functionality, increased automation and more efficient processes.

Find out more

About Millennium and Unit4

About Millennium Consulting

At Millennium Consulting we are experts in business transformation, accounting, software development, regulatory compliance, and the impact of business and technology change.

For 27 years, Millennium have provided global solutions and services across the world’s most demanding industries, with customers in finance, retail, logistics, construction, and manufacturing.

Millennium first partnered with Unit4 back in 2014 and have since become one of the leading global Unit4 partners for Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials) sales, services, and support.

Group Website: www.millenniumconsulting.com

Employees: 40 +

History: Established in 1995 Millennium was originally a specialist consultancy for organisations who used the Infor SunSystems or Coda Financials Finance Systems. Over time Millennium has become a system agnostic finance transformation consultancy and in 2010 launched a software development arm. In 2016 Millennium opened offices in the US and in 2018 in Milan, Italy, and 2020 Budapest Hungary. In 2020 Millennium achieved Elite Partner status from Unit4, one of only two Unit4 Financials Elite Partners globally. Millennium’s Elite Partner status has been reaffirmed by Unit4 in 2021 and 2022.


About Unit4

Unit4 is a leading provider of enterprise applications empowering people in service organisations including: financial services, professional services, retail, manufacturing, logistics, education, public services and not-for-profit.

Unit4 has operations, distributors and partners around the world for easy, local access to sales, service and support.

Unit4 Financials product suite: Unit4 Financials, Purchase Order Processing, Purchase Invoice Matching, Billing, Assets, FP&A, Analyser, Travel & Expenses and Unit4XL.

Group Website: www.unit4.com

Employees: 4,000+

History: Coda Plc was established in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1979 by Rodney Potts & Christopher Lennox. In 2008 following periods of ownership by Baan and Science Systems, it was acquired by the Dutch registered software vendor Unit4. In March 2014 Unit4 was acquired by international venture capital firm Advent International. In March 2021 Unit4 received a majority investment from TA Associates, a leading global private equity firm.