I have reflected on the issue over the Easter weekend and think that perhaps I am looking in the wrong direction.
First @Brucanna I never use the scroll down option in the drop down anymore. I simply type the name of the account - in this case installations and selected installations expenses by mistake instead of installations income. So having the accounts listed in income-expenses-BS order is of no benefit to me anyway. It makes far more sense to type the name and the auto-fill filters the list to just what you type. Far more efficient.
Secondly, to everyone in general, I almost never use the accounts drop down because virtually all my transactions in quotes and invoices are either inventory or non-inventory. So selecting the inventory or non inventory item always auto-fills the account anyway. I can’t comment on other people’s working practice as I know that many businesses don’t use the inventory, but I presume that they do use the non-inventory items so in their case - the issue posted becomes irrelevant as the COA is always autofilled when you enter the non-inventory item.
The key issue is how best to address user cases where one is not entering an inventory or non-inventory item into the transaction list. For payments and receipts on the payments/receipts forms for example, this is now entirely automated for me through the use of bank imports and bank rules so I never have to select suppliers, customers, other, accounts receivable or accounts payable - other than those very few transactions where I need to split an amount on the bank statement into two or more transactions.
Assuming that most people work similar to myself and use bank imports, bank rules, recurring purchase invoices, recurring sales invoices, non-inventory items and (possibly) inventory items - the question that is really relevant, is how often does one need to manually enter a COA in the dropdown of a transaction list on any given form. Other than year end journal entries, the only time I personally actually have a problem is with my installations (income and expense) COA’s. The reason being that the installation is not a set item with a set price.
However, what I have now done is created a non-inventory item for installation services and left the description blank, but select the boxes can be bought and sold and Vat at 20%. This also solves a secondary problem in that I kept forgetting to add the VAT as this is not auto-filled.
So for me, my problem is now permanently solved. I just need to autofill the description. Question remains whether other people find themselves having to use the accounts dropdown a lot to manually select the COA. Some of you accountants doing very complex things so possibly this issue is still a problem for me. I will mark it closed for me.