Feedback on your program

1

I have been trialling Manager for about 24 hours and I wanted to provide feedback on this software.

Firstly, thank you so much for developing a book-keeping software that business owners like myself can actually use without having to spend time learning how the program works!

The biggest win for this software is that it is so simple to use, has a nice clean modern gui interface and clearly a very active forum. In addition, it actually does everything that I require it to do which is provide quotes, sales orders, sales invoices and receipts of sales invoices and same procedure for suppliers.

The inventory feature seems to be exactly what I am looking for in conjunction with the tracking code as one of the main goals I am aiming to achieve is to determine how much money I make on sales of computers, broadband services, backup services etc. I think your inventory, manufacturing orders as well as code tracking will accomplish this task!

So thank you for developing a product that appears to be exactly what small business owners like myself require!

I would like to make some suggestions or raise questions about certain aspects of the program.

Firstly, I would be more than willing to pay for the desktop version of the program as this is the product that I will be using. I want this product to be continually developed so I have no objection to paying for upgrades etc.

Secondly, from what I can see, no-one in the forum has asked this question or at least my search is not showing up this answer. Will my accountant need to use this program or can I print the end of year reports for him to do whatever he does to the end of year returns?

Third, I will add my request to the other people who have requested a feature where quotes, sales orders, purchase orders etc have a status column indicating that quote has been completed and converted to sales order etc. This is quite a necessary feature as business owners like myself need to know what quotes and purchase orders etc are open.

Fourth, I would be interested in having a popup window or “email” to remind me that I need to pay this invoice as due date is approaching? I don’t see any reminder options.

Fifth, an explanation bubble when you hover over items in the program would be useful to new and old users to explain what a feature does. For example, what is bank deposits used for? Would that be for salary payments if one is using the program for personal finance? an html definition bubble could be useful.

Six I don’t see any difference between manufacturing orders and inventory kits as they seem to do the same thing as you could use either one for the purchases or sales!

Seven. Most businesses that are VAT registered and sell goods to client will want to charge VAT on the sales invoice. I cannot work out how to make the program default to using VAT on the invoices. I always have to select VAT option as the default is no tax. Would it be possible to set program to default to the default VAT rate?

Eight. A feature suggestion (very low on the list). I wonder if you would find it an improvement to have submenus, so that your main menus are Customers, Banks, Suppliers and Summary or something. Then you could click on Customers and see details for Quotes, Sales Orders and Invoices etc.

Thank you again for designing a superb program. I am hoping that this product will save me hours of time doing paperwork in the future and I hope that my feedback is useful. I am a new customer so still learning all the features of the program.

2

That is a pretty comprehensive list for 24 hours of experience. :grinning:

@lubos will have to answer some of your questions. I can give you my thoughts on a couple:

1.) Please don’t upset the apple cart by offering to pay for something some of us like because it is free. :wink:

2.) Only your accountant can say for sure what s/he will want to work from. Personally, all information I need for tax filing is available from the Profit & Loss statement (after setting up my chart of accounts to match tax form reporting categories) and the fixed asset summary report. But I don’t pay an accountant to do audits, just make sure I’m optimizing my taxes.

7.) If you create sales invoice items, the corresponding tax code to be applied (or not) can be selected. If you didn’t do that initially, you can edit the items. The list of items appears under Settings.

3

Thank you for your response.

Yes, I expected that some would not be keen on me suggesting point 1. But I do think the program is good. :smile:

I will speak to my accountant about it as what you do is precisely what I want my accountant to do. Optimise my taxes.

I will have to see how sales of invoice items will work for me as I was intending to use inventory items to create my stock list. I don’t see how the two would work together. What I want to do is get a price from the suppliers for a laptop, add that laptop to my inventory with my cost price and selling price, then quote the client the selling price. Once quote is accepted, I would then purchase the inventory item at my cost price in a purchase order, and create a sales order at selling price, all using that one inventory item.

The sales of invoice item does not have my purchase price and does not seem to link to the inventory item so I am not sure how that would work and it would essentially duplicate my inventory item?

4

If you are not holding inventory in stock, but only passing the costs through to your customer, you might want to consider using the Disbursements tab. The Guides haven’t caught up with what’s in the application yet, and the capability is still in development. But what is there works correctly. When you enable it, accounts are created for profit made on disbursements and write-off expenses, in case the customer does not pay.

Disbursements is meant for things like reimbursable travel expenses, purchases on behalf of your customer rather than your own company, and so forth. Several of us early adopters think of this module as “Billable Expenses.” Just a caution: the organization and workflow of this capability may change in the near future, as may the naming of the accounts and the tab. But the capability will remain.

5

I will have a look at disbursements on Friday. I will try each method and see what the results are for reporting. I may open a new topic detailing exactly what I want to accomplish with inventory and tracking as I need to do more than just record the purchase and sale of equipment. As I am starting the books fresh it makes sense for me to get the books set up correctly from day one as it were.

Thank you for your help.

6

Seven - Go to chart of accounts, Edit the accounts that you want tax defaulting to your tax code, and save.

Hope this helps.

7

Great tip, @Rob_Darling. I don’t think that feature was there when I first set up my chart of accounts. It only applies to the income and expense accounts, and I have had no reason to edit those. Makes it easy!

8

Thank you. I will have a look at that option as well when I get back into the program on Friday.

I still think it would be nice to have an option to set the default VAT tax for all invoices without having to specify a tax rate for each expense/income. In my years of running a business, I have never needed to charge a different rate of VAT for my sales invoices. Most companies will charge the default VAT rate for their country I would imagine.

Cheers.

9

You still need to select an account or item on invoice level. Manager does allow you to set default tax code per account or per item so you really don’t have to select tax code as it is now.

10

Overall, thanks for your feedback. Most of the suggestions you have mentioned are already on my mind.

Regarding inventory kits and manufacturing orders. The difference is that setting up inventory kit will “manufacture” the inventory kit on demand when item is sold. Manufacturing orders allow to manufacture new items without being sold.

Some businesses never manufacture anything. They might assemble something new on demand. In that case, it’s easier to just set up that item as inventory kit rather than always remember to “manufacture” it prior selling.

11

I have spent more time on the program and basically learning the correct way to use the program. I have decided that I will get my accountant to advise me on correctly setting up certain accounts such as the petrol allowance accounts etc, but in general I think that I am getting there with understanding how each feature works. I want to understand each feature in full first, before I start using the program for my accounting.

Just a couple of bug reports (minor ones). Under Email settings, if you select use Custom SMTP Server, you will see the line SMTP Server requires authentication. The word authentication has a typo in it and is missing the letter “h”

Second issue. Initially I set up base currency for UK, then realised that the base currency only needed to be set if I was multiple currencies, so I removed base currencies. However, invoices were not showing the ÂŁ sign. I thought that maybe this was related to an earlier bug that was reported on the forum where when you add base currency, then remove it, the invoices do not show the currency sign. So I deleted the company (as I am still in test/learning mode), and created a new company. I created an invoice, but the invoice was still missing the currency symbol, so I added the base currency and was able to get the ÂŁ sign showing. Is this a bug or do we need to set base currency regardless of whether we are using single currency or not?

Thank you

12

@lubos is removing some features for new businesses, but leaving them functional for existing businesses. The last I knew, one of the Settings was Currency Prefix/Suffix. If that shows under your Settings, use it to specify use of the pound symbol.

13

I addressed this by creating an expense account for consignment and and consignment reimbursement item with no cost. It seems to be working well for me. As an added bonus I am able to ensure the amounts balance monthly.

14

I don’t have the currency/prefix in my program. I assume that option has been removed. I do realise that the program is being constantly updated, so issues like this are bound to crop. My only option is to set the base currency to get the £ symbol to show. The currency/prefix option is not available for my version which was installed about a week ago! I am not worried about, I just thought that I would mention it as someone else raised it as a bug a while back.

15

Yes I have come to see how your method actually works better as bank charges are non VAT and one of my suppliers do not charge VAT, so actually setting VAT per account works out better otherwise I would have to set VAT to none for certain purchase orders. Thanks

16

Currency prefix option was introduced when Manager didn’t have multi-currency. It was a quick fix for many users. Now that Manager includes full multi-currency support, it’s no longer required to set currency prefix. Simply set the base currency and that’s it.

The only issue is that if you set base currency, Manager will give you option to set accounts in any currency even if you don’t need multi-currency. But this is just temporary behavior. There will be new option after you set base currency, you will then choice to select whether you want multi-currency accounting or single-currency accounting.

17

Ok, I see what direction you are going in. I think one of the help guides states that base currency was meant to be selected only if you wanted multiple currencies which is why I thought it was still a bug! Thank you for clearing that up.

18

Yeah, guides are about to be updated. Sorry about that.

19

I’m happy with my invoices and reports as they are. (I know, a rare comment.) But I have not set a base currency and do not have multi-currency enabled. I just have a simple $ set as the currency prefix. I still have that setting available to me because I started before that setting disappeared.

When I experimented with setting a base currency, I did not like the USD$ symbology on everything. It was unnecessary clutter. Is there any way to avoid that if base currency is specified?

20

That’s a good point. I guess this is easily to be addressed by Manager simply being a bit smarter. For example, if you are using only single currency with $ sign, then Manager can simply present $ sign instead of explicit prefix like US$