Hi, would it be possible to introduce a kit for non-inventory items like the inventory kit? The reason for this in our case would be to create accurate P&L reports for Projects without having to display for example: accommodation, fuel etc in the quote and invoice. If you could create a non-inventory kit with the ability to fix the price for each item in the kit, then when creating the quote selecting the kit - the customer sees the price for the kit, but when invoice gets paid the money gets allocated to the, for example accommodation account, fuel account; that would be very, very helpful.
As usual, thanks to everyone for all your hard work and support
I think that is an unworkable suggestion, because it becomes terribly complex. Consider all the information that might be required to define a single non-inventory item:
Now imagine trying to create a kit in which different tax codes applied to various physical items in the kit, and services are furnished by personnel from different divisions of the company. Then add the intracacy of including images for some or all of the constituent elements. How would the program determine which tax codes and images to display?
Presumably, you would need to create an Edit screen for non-inventory kits much like the one for inventory kits:
Note that additional inventory line items can be added, but all the ancillary data applies to the entire kit, not one line item at a time.
Remember that any such feature must be workable for all situations, not just yours. You might think you have simple conditions to satisfy. But as soon as a feature is added, someone with more elaborate needs will try to apply it. Fold together the definition of non-inventory items with kits, and one could easily be overwhelmed. The consequences could be dire and difficult to troubleshoot.
Hi Tut, thanks for taking the time to explain how difficult this would be. I feared as much. But we face a real dilemma. At the moment we operate 2x our business in manager: one “external” for the official things like customers and end of year reports etc. And one “internal” for keeping track of the projects. This setup is highly volatile to mistakes as we have to batch update/create everything back and forth.
Another way to achieve our goal and run only 1x version of our business I could think of is if it would be possible to tick every row on quotes/invoices to “hide on printed document”, like you can already copy or delete the row. This would allocate every single item/row to the right account without showing on the quote/invoice which will still calculate/display the total amount. What do you think? Thinking about it, this might actually be a much neater way to do it than my first proposal
Btw, I’m not demanding any changes and am aware of that even if something goes in the ideas category it will take most-likely ages to be implemented. I just need to find a way to go away from using 2x businesses to show a detailed P&L report for a project without bombarding our customers with rows of everything which goes into our end price. We did this now for a year and it’s very prone to mistakes, hence my search for a solution.
First, my advice is to stop doing this. All of Manager’s features will function at the same time. Why would you possibly want to do your accounting twice?
Second, why would you want to charge customers for items without showing them on sales invoices in some way? I cannot imagine any customer who would pay against such an invoice.
Third, in the final analysis, your issue is not an accounting issue. You have preferences about costing/pricing transparency. It is quite common for businesses to want to hide their costing methods—and hence their profit margins—from customers. There is nothing unethical or illegal about that in any jurisdiction I know about. But pricing is a management function, not an accounting function. Your particular costing/pricing complexity may dictate a need for a separate pricing system. All larger businesses have such systems. I have worked for businesses where a single-page quote required hundreds of pages worth of calculations produced by elaborate, dedicated software. But all that was separate from accounting.
Fourth, as I have written on this forum repeatedly, accounting is fundamentally a process of recording what has happened, not predicting what might happen or estimating what you hope will happen. Leave that for other systems. It is all too tempting to try to wrap everything into a single system. That has the potential to hold you hostage to the software.
Lastly, I am not sure why you have tangled all this complexity—both existing and potential—with projects. Your request for non-inventory kits seems entirely disconnected from any issue of accounting for or managing projects. I understood your desire, as described in your original post. On its surface, it seemed like a reasonable request, but became unwieldy because of the difficulty of implementation. You seem to recognize the problems created by your practice of separating project accounting from company accounting. But the pain it causes fooled you into believing something unrelated would resolve your real issue. It would not. Adding complexity to non-inventory items by creating kits would do nothing to fix the basic mistake of accounting for your business twice.
