@lubos I work in IT and I deal with customers on a daily basis. The one thing that I have learnt over the years is the single biggest frustration end users have with IT Technicians and developers is lack of communication. You cannot simply make big changes and expect the end users to “just do this and this” to fix their issue which was caused by the IT guy’s update. For example, its the end of tax year for a lot people right now. The last thing that they need is unexpected work dropping in at this critical time.
I have no doubt that you needed to make the change (and reading this post I now understand far better the work process as you intended it to work, which is why its not been working for me), but you either need to update the update routine to inform end users that this update will do xyz and require users to do abc. That way it doesn’t come as a shock surprise when people update and find half their data missing. Or you need to communicate with your customers that update version 16 will make these changes.
As another user suggested you need to have an update schedule of minor updates and major updates. Minor updates being bug fixes and small feature improvements that basically change nothing else in the program. A major update would be a massive change in the summary screen and this particular update for example. Having a minor and major update system will enable your customers to be aware that a major update will change things quite a bit and it is up to the customer to decide when to proceed with that update.
Another suggestion that I can recommend is to take a select number of users from the Manager forum and use them as a sounding board for program features and improvements. This particular issue and the new summary page look - the updates would work better if you ask your customers for feedback on what you propose to do and they can tell you whether this would work for them or not. Using a broad range of forum users would ensure that you get all aspects of the program covered as some people use billable expenses (I never use that), but I use inventory items a lot, whereas other people don’t.
Otherwise you will continue to have customers updating their software and coming back and complaining.
On a second note, reading this particular post it is very clear that the way that I use the name and code columns in inventory and as a result sales quotes, delivery notes etc is very different from the way that you appear to recommend using them and this explains why I am having problems with the work flow from inventory items - sales quote - sales invoice - to delivery notes.
What I have been doing is using Item Name in Sales Invoice Items for the name of the product for example Backup 100GB Annual Online Storage and the description “Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Annual Snapshots” As you can see from my picture, its more readable to separate the name from the description in both edit and form view.
See picture below
The same concept in Inventory Items. I have been using Code for the product name and name for the product code and description for the product details. See attached picture.
The reason that I put the code in the name field in inventory items was because if I used code in the code field, when I was creating a sales quote for example all I got was the code in the inventory on hand lookup which is not very helpful to me if I don’t know what the code for the Ipad Air 2 is! Dietmar demonstrated this with his picture above, although my problem stems from inventory items not from sales invoice items. The reason I want to split the product name Ipad Air 2 and the description (which contains the specifications of the Ipad) is so that its easier to find the product Ipad Air 2 and the customer is interested in the name Ipad Air 2, not all the technical specs. I don’t see that it makes sense to have say Fujitsu Lifebook S751 (which is Manufacturer, Model range and Model number) listed in description. The description should be CPU specs, memory specs, hard drive specs etc. I don’t want the product name and the description all together!
I am now finally understanding why you only have description in the delivery notes as your design is to have the product name and product description in the same field. However I feel that its better to have two default fields for sales quotes/orders/invoices and delivery notes on the end form. That of product name and product description and one can optionally include part code if so desired. And three fields for purchase orders/invoices - That of product name, part code and product description. I agree with @Dietmar. He obviously works like me in that he likes to have a product name, product code and product description. All he had done with sales invoice items is put the code and name together because we did not have the product code field before this update.
May I suggest that if some users don’t want to show product name (why do they want to put the product name in the description field anyway as its always better to separate product name say Castrol Oil Magma from description - 2Litre 50% synthetic etc - why would anyone want the name and description all in one field as it makes it less readable if you have a lot of items on the invoice.), they could opt to hide that column in their sales invoice etc.
May I also suggest you do a survey and ask how people want the inventory items and purchase invoice items and sales invoice items to work and make a plan based on what most people want. The reason being as Dietmar pointed out - updating inventory and sales invoice items etc is extremely time consuming - he has over 300 entries and I myself have over 100 inventory items. So I actually think asking the people who use inventory items and sales/purchase invoice items how they actually use the software and make changes based on that. I would recommend that you release a new update reversing 16.3.19’s update changes and then do a new update once everyone is clear how they want to use the columns in inventory items and purchase/sales invoice items and we can get this workflow issue fixed properly for once and for all so that it works for all users.
I would be interested in hearing from other users who use inventory, purchase/sales invoice items and have a round the table discussion about what fields we want visible in the edit area and in the finished form area. I personally would like to have a product name field and a product description field rather than combining the two. Also I would the same discussion to be had for Statuses of quotes and orders so that we convert to orders/invoices and by default only see quotes/orders that are open and get that show on the road! This is something that really needs to be sorted out.
In short - communication with issues like this would make the world of difference!
