Divisions of Inventory Items not auto filling in Invoices

The Division dropdown menu appears for each line only after you have chosen an inventory item or an account for which a division makes sense in the context. The form is dynamic.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Deleting divisions from historical transactions

The question is why the division that one sets in Inventory item is not automatically selected in the sales invoice. I think this is a reasonable request otherwise why have the option in inventory item in the first instance when one still needs to select it when creating invoices.

1 Like

I think I have a partial answer to that. The inventory item “Asset” part is always charged to the selected Division in the balance sheet, that’s for sure.

As for invoice lines, an inventory item kept in one Division could be sold or consumed in another division. This is why the user is allowed the flexibility to manually enter them in invoice lines.

I still think this is quite clumsy and at least should default to the one set in the Inventory Item. You can then if needed change the location but it seems unnecessary to every time have to select them. If anything one can make more mistakes that way if many items and not sure which division they belong to.

1 Like

Auto filling might make a lot of sense in many situations but in other situations this may not be a good match.

For example, you have this idea

Auto filling wouldn’t be suitable in this particular situation.

Agree but in the case of inventory items it does make perfect sense as it will avoid mistakes when optional in sales invoices. I understand that in essence it may not be needed at all in a sales invoice and that it is presented as an option that actually is more confusing then helpful because inventory item itself is already in a divison.

As such the optionality to override inventory item division may cause much more trouble than resolve.

1 Like

I don’t agree. In fact I think it’s a necessity because otherwise you would need to duplicate inventory items if you want to use them in other divisions, which at least for me, is a worse outcome than a couple of benign mis-categorizations every once in a while.

I’m going to go on a slight tangent but please indulge me since it’s related.

Take the example of allowing free selection of Divisions in the lines of Payslips. Employees are assigned to divisions but they can be lent to other divisions for extended periods. Restricting the Payslip lines to the Employee’s division will cause the user to have multiple accounts per employee which does more harm than good. In case of Inventory Items, duplicate items would pose more of a problem just by virtue of the sheer number of items involved.

Back to the specific case of inventory, I don’t think that Divisions is the right way to control inventory items anyway. Locations will be better suited for that purpose and can easily be controlled by restricting user access.

If this idea gets implemented, there will be little – if any – need for divisions for lines that contain inventory items.

Sorry but divisions are more than locations, they are in essence sub-businesses and therefore also have assets in balance sheet such as inventory.

True, but then the idea is that locations can be assigned to divisions and this way we get the best of both worlds: the possibilities for alternative workflows and controls are virtually endless that way.

Sorry @Ealfardan but also location is not added as default in sales invoice and you still need to select it as it otherwise gets into suspense. The core issue remains the same, no information be it division or location that are set in inventory item become default selections when creating a sales invoice for such item.

I agree with this. We have 2 Divisions in our company and most inventory items are sold only in one or the other. On rare occasions an inventory item is sold outside it’s normal Division. when the program allowed setting the Division within the inventory item, my invoicing got much easier. Instead of having to go through potentially 20 or 30 items on an invoice and mark each choice one by one, they were already there are ready to go. If I needed to change the Division for an item it wasn’t a problem to do so. Seemed the best of both worlds since being able to do my work as quickly as possible and have it be accurate is high on my list!

Going back to having to set each one again is absolutely a step backwards for me and another reason to not upgrade the program.

On a second thought, from the additional posts by @eko and @KrisK, it seems like the issue isn’t about the field Division not appearing but rather the value for Division preset in Inventory Items isn’t auto filling.

And this seems to have been a previously working feature as confirmed by other users.

I’m putting this in bugs.

1 Like

@Ealfardan there was no mention of Division not appearing and am glad you concluded the same with the earliest posts and put this into bugs.

“Appear” is a vague word and it’s unclear what’s not appearing? A default selection, the entire field?

And @tj072 never provided screenshot or replies after the OP, ideally we need to know the full picture from the OP to judge replies. This is why I didn’t even know that @eko’s original reply was related to the OP.

I had to use your posts @eko as well as @KrisK and assemble the jigsaw to get the full picture.

There is new field in the latest version (22.8.28) on inventory and non-inventory items now.

image

There is more work to do to make divisional accounting a bit easier to work with. Because divisions can produce both divisional balance sheet and divisional profit & loss statement, it can be confusing why there are so many division fields everywhere.

Especially when most users do not care about divisional balance sheet, the program should be able to figure it out and simplify the forms.

That depends to at what scale. You are right that for small businesses that are the focus for Manager this is not an issue, if anything it can be questioned why being small they need divisions (read sub-companies). Frankly if Manager focusses on small businesses you should consider eliminating divisions altogether.

Alternatively if it is to be used by larger businesses then as you rightly say improvements are further needed,

Dear Lubos,
I noticed one of my cloud versions have not been updated with this new change (autofill-sales-division).
The version is stuck on 22.8.28.333

I quickly went to check my other cloud versions and they have been updated with the new change (autofill-sales-division) on 22.8.28.333.

What could be wrong?

You can go to https://cloud.manager.io then click Restart Cloud Server to force the upgrade.

@lubos

Thanks. It has been updated