That depends what you mean by “the old implementation.” If you mean the implementation we suffered under for years, no, it was not better. I was, after all, the one who initiated the idea that resulted in this change.
But if you are referring to the initial implementation of linking customers/suppliers to payers/payees, I definitely believe the latest iteration is better. It provides more options and reduces the need for some users to enable the Customers/Suppliers tabs and create customers and suppliers. I have a real business, as one example, in which about half my sales are via sales invoice and half via receipt. The receipt sales involve one-time customers I know I will positively never encounter again due to the nature of the service. For them, I will never need a statement or report. But I still need to document the sale with a form that has their name on it, and not just in a custom field. For that particular business, I have never needed a purchase invoice. Every expense is paid directly from a supplier’s bill. So the Purchase Invoices and Suppliers tabs are not enabled.
The initial implementation of customer/supplier linkage left me with 780 orphaned receipts and payments involving almost as many customers and suppliers and would have required me to enable two previously unnecessary tabs in the program, create all those subaccounts, and reassign hundreds of payers and payees in order to have the records legally necessary for the business.
The latest iteration restored everything. For remaining receipts associated with defined customers, 10 minutes of Batch Update brought everything into a better condition than before. I can now obtain full records and reports of the repeat customers I had defined. That is definitely welcome. And that is just for one relatively low volume business.
The final iteration is definitely better. It gives users who want to define all their customers/suppliers the ability to fully integrate. It also provides flexibility for those who don’t need or want that capability at no penalty for those who do. In this case the benefits of the way you wish to conduct your own business are now available at no consequence to data entry except that you need to select the payer/payee type. And you will also be able to upgrade your prior records quickly using Batch Update the same way I did for my repeat customers. So you can be better off, not just going forward, but historically, too.
I believe that in some circumstances it does, but in others it offers no benefit. Having the ability to link is a definite enhancement. I have waited years for it, from before the ideas category existed and I begged the developer privately.
I don’t think that is a question that needs to be asked or answered after the latest iteration. Users who prefer either approach have full flexibility available to them. Those who find a hybrid optimal, as I happen to in the particular business I described above, get to use both approaches. In my opinion, everybody wins.