Hello, Forum. I’m a user new to Manager, and have so far found it to be fantastic.
I’ve an improvement idea for the recurring sales/invoice function. I work for a service industry that performs daily tasks for a wide range of customers, and each are billed different rates, but are billed based on the number of days in the month.
For Example: A customer is billed $5.00 a day for Services rendered in September, which has 30 days. January has 31 days. February has 28 or 29 days. It would be fantastic if Manager could account for the changes in days in the month and bill at the rate accordingly - perhaps a simple check box that tells Manager to take the calendar month into account when generating a recurring invoice.
The recurring invoices recur exactly. They do not involve variable or updatable pricing. This was the subject of another discussion topic in the past few days. If you are going to vary your prices month by month, it isn’t a recurring invoice.
Hello, Tut. Thank you for your reply. I skimmed the forums before posting, and I had read about the topic you mentioned- I believe the subject was to raise a common rate in inventory and have it populate to an existing recurring invoice. This was an idea / feature request divergent on that, based on a need I have.
My implementation idea is different from what was mentioned - I’m not looking to update a price on an existing recurring invoice. If I wanted to do that, I’d create a new non-inventory item and do a batch. This is great if you’re doing a standard “$30.00 a month subscription fee” but does not help if, for example, you run a business based on tasks.
In my suggested feature, the price of service never changes, but the intervals do. The customer still gets a bill every month - hence recurring. To clarify the usage, I could create a recurring invoice that generates a $5 invoice every day, but then I’d end up with 28-31 $5 invoices depending on the days in the month.
A further example: A Customer pays you $5.00 a day to clean a space. They want this service 7 days a week, and wants billed on the month. The Bill recurs to the customer. The rate does not change, but the interval days in the month do. This would be crazy helpful to folk in the service industry. :>
@rwillis, I understood your desire from the beginning. But what you ask, while sounding simple, would actually be very complex. Suppose you cleaned only on weekdays, or non-holiday weekdays when your customer’s business was open? Or suppose you cleaned every weekend, but had the freedom to choose Saturday or Sunday according to your own workload. Amounts invoiced would change as the progression of the calendar moved the same dates through different days of the week (year to year) as well as with length of the months. Your simple every day example quickly becomes a very complex set of options if the developer were to decide to implement it. I doubt you will see a feature that is easy for one user’s situation but hard to define and implement for others’. The general design philosophy has been to be flexible to accommodate various needs, but not to leave out large portions of the user base with new features.
Thank you for your reply. I understand that from a programming standpoint, items that a user perceives as ‘simple, let’s put in a check box’ aren’t really that simple.
I’m not sure how adding a feature would leave out large portions of users, but to each their own interpretation This just a proposed idea, and nothing more.
Even with the variables and potential problems that you astutely and accurately pointed out, it is not impossible to tackle, and may add functionality to other areas of Manager from which other users with different situations may benefit (for example, the ability to add an employee time clock module for clock in/clock out). One approach to the idea would be to base it off of the computer’s calendar as most spreadsheet or database application would do through native formulae and expressions. I’m not an application programmer by any means, but I can build a mean spreadsheet
Anyway, as I said. It’s just an idea :D. Manager is awesome as-is!
You’ve suggested a feature that moves the capability from recurrence of a fixed invoice to calculation of a variable invoice based on number of days in a month. But another user, with circumstances such as I described in my examples, is left out. Even if they want variable rather than recurring invoices, their situations are not accommodated. So they are made to feel like second-class users.
And you may be aware that the same application (such as Excel) does not always produce the same results when moving from one operating system to another. So you have four potentially different results for the desktop edition. Then throw in the server and cloud editions, which are web based. Whose system governs, the host’s or the client’s?
