I am still thrilled by your wonderful piece of software which is minimal in design and matured in functionality, however I’ve seen a few shortcomings, and i have posted them on my earlier posts and i believe they are in your development road-map.
Today I crossed into another major flaw the system ignores to look at!
“Duplicate Invoices” in other words Invoices raised with the same Invoice Number more than once. it was a small blunder but we had to spend almost two hours to track the fault.
It would be wonderful if the development team could look into this matter as well.
Hi @sharpdrivetek
You are absolutely correct, its a human error indeed, but the problem in our case is that we have a separate billing system which generates the invoices,
At the end of the day, we export the sales invoices in the form of excel and then transfer each and every invoices from the generated excel file to the “Manager” App.
The mediation is done through a dedicated person who is prone to make mistakes such as the one mentioned in this topic. What i feel is generally its best practice if the system is able to track duplicate invoices numbers and fire an error.
The perspective i’ve experienced is maybe just one of many views, there maybe more cases that’d relate to my request.
Thankyou for the prompt feedback.
the system we use apart from “Manager” app is a system provided by the manufacturer which is linked with their mainframe, the customer and other details relating to the invoicing is completely handled by their system.
we on the other hand use manager to track the accounts along with customer outstanding etc
Methods that minimize human error are always good suggestion. Error control does come at a cost of less flexibility of the program, so the developer has to balance the two.
I can only suggest a way speed up your search for duplicates. In the Sales Invoices tab click on the # sign to sort the invoices by number. Then it should not take too long to scan the list for duplicates.
Not every organisation will utilize the automatic numbering feature.
The user has to ensure duplicate invoices are not entered in the system. But it would be a plus if Manager.io could also detect and report duplicate references
Currently this is the approach i take, trust me it is a very cumbersome task because i’d have to look at every invoice i’ve created to come across a duplicate, imagine a scenario where there are over 8000 invoices. it becomes really frustrating.
I believe my request is reasonable and valid. all what the system has to do is check if the invoice number is a duplicate or not when adding a new invoice.
Suggestion until it is not available in Manager:
you are exporting from MS Excel to Manager, you can use conditional formatting in Excel to find duplicate invoices and when everything is clear then export it to Manager.
@Premm, you are facing problems caused by use of multiple, unintegrated accounting systems. You are evidently relying on sales invoices generated by another company and attempting to introduce them to Manager. To me, it seems unrealistic to expect Manager to account for this practice. Certainly, safeguards against your particular problem could be coded into the program. But where would such accommodations stop? Should the program also accommodate situations where a large customer has the economic power to force you to submit invoices online through their e-commerce system? How can the program know all such possible situations?
Manager already has an automatic invoice sequencing capability. It works flawlessly. Yet users sometime complain because it is not the system they would have concocted. You may believe it to be advantageous for Manager to prevent duplicate invoice numbers. But I can think of scenarios–which might seem unusual to you–where they would be useful. And Manager’s flexibility would let you use them.
In the end, your request originates with the fact that you do not wish to use Manager as it was designed. You definitely have that freedom. But I agree with @Abeiku that it is your responsibility to ensure proper transaction entry through training and supervision.
We are a consignment based company and the billing system we run at our premise is the client and the server is located at the HQ which is geographically located elsewhere, the billing system apart from the billing function, generates a lot of complicated reports such as based on the invoice raised there will be another package created for the good purchased with additional discounts and free products for the bulk purchased (which the manager is incapable as the function of the manager app is mainly focused on accounting)
Since we are the consignment agents we are allowed to raise invoices ONLY! once the invoices are printed the clerk transfers the invoices to the ledger, this has been the case until we met Manager.
which took a lot of burden from us when it comes to generating outstanding / collection reports etc.
The only closest relationship Manager and the Billing System has is Excel. At the end of the day we export the excel from the billing system and re enter them to the Manager app. during this process we’ve had a few mistakes such as making the blunder of entering the same invoice number accidentally. but when we try to track back where it happened it takes a considerable amount of time & frustration (4000+ invoices).
What i suggested was it would be great if the system had the ability to find duplicates.
my suggestion would be to use master sheets in excel.
you can export the data from your billing software which will act as a master data.
Then export the Manager format and map the cells accordingly with the master data which can be imported back to Manager. This way you can avoid manually copying and entering the data which would cause errors.
