Bilingual Invoice

Can we prepare a bilingual invoice. In gulf after the implementation of VAT the invoices need to be in English and Arabic.

please search the forum. this has been already discussed few times on the forum.

Hi,
yes i see there were discussion long back on the bilingual. whoever knew HTML managed it. But now the current rules demand the billing document in English as well the local language.
Currently Manager option is to choose language in the administration level.
Practically in server edition there are more users. few users want in english and few users should be in the second language as they deal with the local government departments. So, i suggest give “choose language” option to the user instead of having it in the administrator level affecting everybody.
2nd requirement to have the english and the 2nd language both displayed in the labels and buttons. The local language user can type and save the required data in local language.

May be the first one can be done quickly and the second one involve more work for the developers.

as far as i understood, the legal requirement is to print documents in the local language. the document should be bilingual only when the documents are not in the local language.

Manager already provides the documents in local language which meets the legal requirements.

not using Manager in the local language is a personal choice of the user. and asking to make changes to the program just for the personal preference do not seem to be a good idea.
users who do not use the local language can develop a custom theme which translates the final documents to Arabic.

this is a good idea. but this will only change the language of the program. i guess that would be sufficient for many users. also i think this has been discussed previously on the forum.

you are right the legal requirement is to print in local language, But the People who create it, access soft data, or process the document are not always the people of same language. the working environment is mix…

the expatriates working in gulf countries knows this problems well.
Can some one please add this to the “idea” for bringing the “choose language” option from the administration preference to the individual user menu. Much will be appreciated if this done on priority.

Depending on the change involved, it is lesser priority but required also is the printing of labels/heads in both the languages.

Implemented in the latest version.

@lubos that’s great , many thanks
one more comment the title should be bilingual as well
as per attached photo every thing is file except the title its should be ( invoice -فاتورة )

Regards,

With document title such as Invoice, set Custom Title to whatever you want it to say.

@lubos Many thanks for your support

how to activate it ??

Update Manager for Version (22.1.1)

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Thanks for this feature
If the system language is English Check box for bilingual is not appearing. In our case we have the system language in English which is used by none Arabic user we would like to have this feature which should show the invoice in other language

May I suggest to add some setup in the setting for any other way to have this feature if the user set English as default language

Maybe a drop-down menu could be appended to the checkbox?

could be yes

This checkboxes lists are getting too long. @lubos , how about putting them in, at least, two columns?

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@abdulbari I will eventually improve this. For now, this function is available only when using Manager in foreign language and will append English labels only. So for example Arabic / French invoice is not yet possible.

@Davide I agree. But some checkboxes can be eliminated. For example, Total amount in words and Total amount in base currency is not really business preference. It could be re-written as a country-specific extension which would also allow this feature work across all languages. So yes - the list of checkboxes is long but this is not a final form. More to be added but some to be removed too in the future.

Or business preference as they could be used in any jurisdiction.

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I would bet these are among the top 5 checkboxes used.

I’m just wondering, instead of going the full manual root with extensions to discard some checkboxes and keep others like hide qty and hide description – which I don’t really understand why we have them in the first place.

Instead of that, why not hide some checkboxes in entry forms and make them visible in Form defaults only? That’s at least 10× better than extensions.

If they were legal artifacts as you said or a business preference as @Patch said – and I fully agree here – either way, they are a “set-it-and-forget-it” type of deal. To me, it makes sense for them to show in form defaults.

Of these 3 options, localization, business preference and form defaults, I prefer the latter two as for example amount in words could still be a business preference even if not required for legal purposes. From the remaining two I would support @Patch with making lots of these choices part of business preferences but ideally in such a way that some propagate automatically to the related form default settings as by @Ealfardan , as such it blends these two options.

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On another thought, I find the current placement of column specific checkboxes to be weird. It’s been solved elsewhere like this:

A single button next to the column headers with a context menu attached to it. I think everyone is familiar with this layout.

Discount, Qty and Description checkboxes will fit nicely into this context menu which would free up real estate for other useful checkboxes.