The TL;DR:
When you fundamentally manipulate a report to generate any result that is different to before because of any change in the backend… well, it’s never going to end well. Not everyone using the software is an accountant, has a degree in accounting, etc and my whole point is simply based around the fact that manager works one way and when everyone has adapted it to work with and present their data in a required or usable way (and is subsequently used for submitting documentation to the tax authorities), that then when you “fix broken behaviour” you “break” those documents. They are our legal documents.
For example, and I suspect this will come into its own in the near future, this whole debacle about “receipts vs payments” dual tax codes and tax reporting etc:
How many things are you going to break when you finally decide on how you are going to implement that? And is it going to be our fault because we relied on broken behaviour?
rhetorically:
- The old general ledger engine was a bug?
- The old engine (that we relied upon) was providing broken behaviour?
We rely on manager to provide us with consistent reports, sheets, exports and views etc that we use in our business scenarios.
You need to look at how manager is used by the community.
We shouldn’t be blaming users because they entered the data the “wrong way”, the tool shouldn’t be making use case decisions the user has already made.
We create work arounds for managers deficiencies and you can’t consistently blame users for those work arounds because you now have a better idea on how to implement or “fix” something.
You are constantly tweaking reports, modifying queries, upgrading and experimenting with users data, and the presentation of that data, and we are being told consistently to stop relying on managers flaws, but we don’t see them as flaws, we see them as features. And you break them. It’s quite disappointing.
You need to stop “tweaking” and breaking the users experience because you are messing with our legal documents. You are causing frustration and anxiety in dozens of users. Every week there are dozens of threads about database corruption, data loss, reporting errors and deficiencies, debates over best practices and how one person sees it differently to everyone else.
You can’t keep saying we are relying on broken functionality. We are working with the tool you have provided us and you break functionality and it’s becoming a burden on users.
I know it’s not a democracy, it is not open source, it’s not up to a vote, and it is your software to do as you please, but now you are alienating users, breaking databases, breaking reports, user generated custom reports, exports, inventory and stock management, tax reporting and all manner of “bugs”… All these things create frustration, anxiety and despair. Last tax time my mental health deteriorated so much so that I was hospitalised, partly due to managers changes, updates, bug fixes, improvements and updated reports at the time. I screamed out for help in these forums but kept getting shut down and deleted. Mods said one thing, and you said the opposite.
The reports I gave my tax accountant two or three years ago do not marry up with the reports that manager creates today. Yes, they are mostly bug fixes or improvements (or broken behaviours, whatever), the point is, manager will generate a different output today to what it generated a couple of years ago. I have re-submitted multiple BAS entries over the years because the GST Worksheets were wrong, in the end, I threw my hands up and walked away. And yet, I can’t even generate those same reports anymore to satisfy an auditor because “you fixed it”.
From what I read elsewhere you have the intention to change the exporting capability again, so what users have put in place now probably won’t work in the future.
As mentioned above, you are going to implement a payments and receipts tax reporting change that will most likely break what users have been doing for years.
Just like reports, just like custom reports… The general ledger engine, balanced invoices, inventory control, tax reporting, GST worksheet calculations, etc etc. It is not all our fault and you need to provide a methodology to provide integrity of reporting (I have submitted a feature request for explicitly that).
I feel sorry for the cloud users who never know what to expect when they wake up tomorrow, and whilst you might argue “if you don’t like it, don’t update” but users are quickly told “you are dozens or hundreds of versions behind” as if it is our fault.
I could not agree with this more.
regardless of the shortcomings of manager, when a user uses a tool to achieve an end, the tool shouldn’t change anything that was previously put in/reported out because those previous reports generated original documentation that is now different.
I said this above, but manager shouldn’t be making and overriding use case decisions that users have already made.
/rant
