Idea: Custom lists used in Custom fields

#1

@lubos I was trying to implement cost centers for profit and loss items in order to be able to analyze performance by project, it kind of worked, BUT, I cannot enforce validations on data entry and ended up having 10s of error entries, be it for typos or employees inventing their own cost centers.

So, I tried setting up the custom field differently by making it a drop-down list, where I found out it was way more work than it initially seemed as I needed to maintain separately the same set of items for custom fields in: sales quotes, orders and sales invoices; purchase order, and supplier invoices; debit notes, credit notes, payslips, receipts and payments, journal entries … basically, the same list separately for each transaction type. And the result was … more often than not, the drop down lists had differences which had to be corrected manually and some guess work was required for entries where the correct cost center was not in the list.

My point is, I was wondering if we can maintain custom lists which we can use as drop down lists in custom fields. Also, it would be extremely nice if the system can carry the values from quotes and order to invoices if the validation criteria for the fields refer to the same list, that would be a huge bonus.

Thanks in advance

#2

You should be using tracking codes for this. Tracking codes cannot be misspelled once they are created, so typos should not be an issue. And employees cannot invent their own unless they have permission as users to do so. See https://www.manager.io/guides/8956.

The Tracking Exception Report will help you monitor for missing tracking codes.

#3

This is exactly what I wanted but I still have a few points.

  1. I tried searching “cost center” in Manager.io guides and it only led me to special accounts which do not work for profit and loss items. Could the guides be revised to include “cost centers” in “tracking codes” because I automatically dismissed tracking codes because I didn’t figure out what they mean.

  2. Can I have multiple dimensions of tracking codes? If not, why not implement custom lists as it would be a large leap in configurability. I assume that at least some users would appreciate multi-dimensional analysis.

Thanks for the super quick response

#4

Probably not, because project accounting has been mentioned as a future development. As I said recently to another user, remember Manager is currently translated into 65 languages, so you should not pay too much attention to word choice in one of them.

No. But there is already a suggestion in Ideas that encompasses this: Grouping of Tracking Codes.