This may be a dumb question, but I am not sure how to do this.
On one of my sales quotes, I have two or three sales of inventory items. So I am seeing the projector make and model in the Item field and a description of the projector in the Description field.
But when I add another line and select sales as the account to use, the only place that I can put the text is in Description. The text is stuff like “Installation of 13X cat 5e outlets, Relocating …” which takes up a lot of space. The two issues I am seeing is that the quote when printed out has nothing in the item colum where I selected Sales and put my text in the Description Box. The second issue is the item takes up 2/3s of the page, whereas the description box where most of my text is about 40mm wide! I don’t think that I should be creating a sales invoice item for this text as I will never use this text again, but I cannot see any other way to get this text into the Item field?
Ok, I will create a sales invoice item for the Installation of 13 X cat5e points and add it to the quote that way, then disable the sales invoice item as the text is specific to each project install.
Am I using the description field correctly, because the description field is very narrow and I have quite a bit of text in some of the description fields with the result that all my quotes and invoices will be running to several pages. This quote for example when printed was four pages long!
I think your display problem stems from the fact that the sales invoice item is meant to be a short text string and probably has a no-wrap attribute. So the column expands to accommodate the longest entry. That in turn squeezes the description column, which is allowed to wrap. Overall, the printout is limited to a fixed width. I think you’d have a much better result if you kept the names of the sales invoice items short. I don’t think it was envisioned that anyone would put so much info into them, but rather would use the description for substantive amounts of text.
If the items are unique for each quote, why go through the bother of creating a sales invoice item anyway? Why not just enter the description and be done with it. It sounds like you have to create something unique most of the time anyway.
Yes the Item column appears to have a no wrap attribute whereas the description column is allowed to wrap. So this distorts the layout. This is the sales quote not the sales invoice, although the sales invoice probably does the same thing.
I will try and shorten the names of the items.
Some items sucahs as the install of 13x are unique. other items like Projector Espon EB-X20 are not unique - they are inventory items.
Thank you for your feedback. Although I am now familiar with Manager, I am really starting to create quotes and invoices now, so discovering what issues are cropping up.
I created a sales invoice item and tried to put the text in the Item field (name), but it does not wrap in the item field and I can’t get the text to display this text on first line, this text on second line etc. So I have gone back to putting it in the description field for the moment.
I will shorten the item names of the other items so I can increase the column size of Description. This will help.
I think that I have realised what I need to do. I need to create a field below the quote where I can write a detailed description of the project so that I can use the entire page width.
I use the summery section to enter information as to what the customer wants carried out.
I use the notes section to enter what work i actually did.
The SKU and item columns are for relitively short item codes, the description field is for item description.
Use the summery field for customer instructions and the notes field for work carried out.
Yes I see that there is a notes section. I will use that thank you. I use the summary section as a sort of a header such laptops for staff or wireless network install project or a title similar to that.
I assume that you do something similar as the summary section is by definition a summary!
Thanks - I will use the notes and I will edit the SKU and item columns so that they contain less text so that the description column is wider.
I have tweaked my SKU and items data and I am using the Notes section for large amounts of text.
This is working nicely. However, @lubos I would like to request that the Items column in quotes is wrappable similar to the invoices. I noticed that for the same quote and invoice the invoice wraps the items text if longer than a certain length. Could the same be done for the quotes template as its not always possible to reduce the text in items column.
Secondly, for both the invoice and quotes (and presumably orders templates), there is a lot of space on the left hand side of the amounts column. Could the space be reduced to be equal to the space on the right. It would free up another two characters on one line! Thank you.