I am wondering if there are any other people who think this suggestion may be an improvement or not. When you have a Sales Order and convert it (Copy) to a Sales Invoice I would like the Sales Order to be removed / Deleted by the copy / convert process. My reasoning for this is that once the Sales Order has been converted to a Sales Invoice it is no longer needed in the Sales Orders tab … as it has now been processed. Also when I return to the Sales Orders I view the entries there as requests that have not yet been finalized into an Invoice which leads me to checking to see if I have already created the Invoice or not.
I suppose if we have the Sales Orders removed automatically once processed to a Sales Invoice it will allow one to quickly see what jobs / Sales / items are still to be invoiced.
I largely agree, but with a modification. This should be the same for quotes. When you copy a quote to a sales order or sales invoice, you no longer need the original quote. I only want to see open quotes and open sales orders and open purchase orders. At the moment I am using custom columns with statuses in it to show as open, closed or pending or whatever, but I am not happy with that, because one should by deault only see open and current quotes or sales orders etc.
However I don’t agree with your suggestion of deleting anything. Close it off and hide the closed Sales Order, but giving you the option to view past Sales Orders. The default view should only show open Sales Orders but the accounting must allow you to view past closed Sales orders. I would not go down the route of deleting things.
But I agree with your main premise. When you go into Sales Quotes, Sales Orders and Purchase Orders you only want to see open requests as it were. I am hoping that when Lubos has finished his warehousing module and some other work that he will finally address this issue as custom columns showing statuses is a work around at best.
I endorse @dalacor’s point. You never want to delete anything from your accounting system, because if you have any sort of dispute, you want to be able to recreate a record of what was known and when, as well as to show the complete trail of documentation (even if it remains electronic). Such prior records could also be useful during a tax or financial audit, especially if an expense is questioned as possibly being fraudulent.
Yes I can see the concern about deleting important records. However we are not really deleting but changing the sales order status to sales invoice so to speak. I would prefer the process to hide / shift the record out of the sales order group and into the sales invoice group / tab. I believe it will make the account management easy. There will be other areas where something similar could be done as pointed out but I think now this impacts workflow where hopefully most our activity is… SALES.
On the dispute side of things the customer may disagree with the invoice which was / is the equivalent of the Sales Order in most cases. If only part of the sales orders are invoiced then a new invoice is to be generated. I am not sure then how to invoice part of the Sale Order other than manually adjusting the Sales Invoice after the copy process.
Essentially everything is working OK just the flow of the process maybe improved… Thanks for any consideration on this.
The way it could be implemented is that new checkbox called Archived could be added. Copying to new document could archive the original one. This way you could easily see which documents are still on-going concern and which are archived.
For me this would be workable particularly if the default is to archive when copying. I am not sure how the databases are arranged for Customer Quotes, Orders and Invoices but is there a potential of the three databases growing equally depending on the work flow you may adopt?
While copying to new document and archiving the original one would allow one to see only open quotes or orders, it does not allow for successful quote and lost business statuses.
I would design the archive option so that if you copy a quote or order to invoice then it archives the original as you suggested but also marks that quote as successful. However, an option to archive a quote where you have lost the business (in other words, the client did not accept your quote) is also necessary so that businesses can see what quotes are not being accepted and more importantly address the reason why the quote was not successful.
When you pay an invoice to a supplier or receive money from a client the purchase invoices and sales invoices show a nice paid in full green button in the status column. Likewise an unpaid invoice shows as red button in the status column. I think that successful quotes and unsuccessful quotes and open quotes could have a similar concept - red button for unsuccessful, green button for successful and orange or something else for open quotes/orders and have a status column as well like the sales and purchase invoice view. That way the sales and orders tabs would actually be pretty consistent with the invoice tabs having that status column and it makes it easy to see unsuccessful quotes etc, providing there is an option to view archived quotes obviously.
So I would have default view as open quotes picture in status column. When you click on archive button (or action button), you get two choices - copy to order/invoice and mark quote as successful and archive or second option to archive quote and mark as unsuccessful or lost business. So in a sense its a modification of the existing coding for copying to invoice - but you are just adding coding to archive and set a status. But the program does this anyway when you pay an invoice or receive money (in setting status by changing from red button picture to green button picture).
I think that would work the best as it would make the look of quotes and orders consistent with what you already have in invoice tab and it will address nearly if not all of the issues that most users have requested with regards to pending statuses. I don’t think that its going to be possible to have undending variations of statues on quotes as many people want different things. I would just focus on the most important point which is people only want to see open requests by default. Thats the key issue.
Nice, agree in principle. Could give some thought to the traffic light status indicators / stamps however the key thing is when you get to the point of managing many records you only want the relevant information, no clutter as far as possible, no performance impact with browser pulling up images etc. Images / Traffic Light status indicators great for inventory and reporting. Another way of looking at this is from a job management point of view where… when a new Sales record is created for say a Quote, Order or Invoice the record ID is generated and maintained throughout the flow and the steps from expression of interest to Quote, Orders, Invoice and finally Archive. The status field / stamp / highlight colour may determine what and where the record shows up.
In a nutshell, relevant information, accurate, easy to use, with performance while still beautiful.
I don’t really follow what you mean here. If its an order, it will be in sales orders and if its an invoice it will be in sales invoices. What would be the value of a specific colour for orders or invoices in the status column? I am sure that I am simply misunderstanding what you are saying.
