Is there any way that we can get non-printing descriptions for each option in a dropdown custom field?
We are now required by our tax authority to show HS codes for all line items on our invoices. We have more than 3,000 inventory items and get a few more with each stock order we place. There will be some common codes repeated across many items, and I’ll be able to do some batch updating, but there will still be many that I’ll have to do individually, and when creating new inventory items it’s probably easiest to enter the HS code at the time of creating the item definition. The process of selecting the code from the dropdown menu would be made much easier by having the description alongside the code, but we don’t want the description appearing in the invoice.
I’ve thought of a few ways this could work:
- The options for the dropdown menu could have some kind of break character, so that anything following this character acts as a description and does not show on printed documents. In the following example, everything following // would be the description and would appear as grey text to the right of the code before it when making a selection from the dropdown, but would not appear in the printed documents.
- I could create two custom fields, one set to not show on printed documents with the code and description, and another set to show on printed documents with just the code. We could then use the one with the description to identify the correct code, and match the dropdown without the code to this one. This obviously involves entering the same data twice, but might still be easier than having to refer to an external document to look up the code.
- Perhaps HS code could be a built-in field in Manager. I’m sure they are used widely enough that many others would find it useful. It looks like there is some latitude within the specification for countries to customise their codes to a degree, so even if the codes and their descriptions are not built in, having the ability to load them from an external source or enter them in the same way we would with custom fields would be useful.
- I could use a custom theme to remove the description from the form output. This is probably what I’ll do if there are no changes or better suggestions. I’m aware that custom themes are considered obsolete and no longer supported, but we’re already using them for our local fiscalisation requirements and a few other reasons, so it wouldn’t be hard to add this functionality to it.
