When the Category field in Billable Time was recently deprecated in favour of a Custom Field, a crucial piece of functionality was lost.
I need to be able to segregate my billable-time invoices by project (what used to be called Category and is now recorded under a Custom Field I call Project). Previously, I could see the Category for each item in the Uninvoiced-Time table (Customers > Uninvoiced hyperlink) and then manually select only the ones I wanted to bill for, based on the Category column, before clicking the New Sales Invoice button.
Now that Category is gone, the Custom Field that replaces it no longer appears as a column in the Uninvoiced-Time table, so I can’t tell which items to select when I want to create an invoice for a particular project. Since all of the entries’ Descriptions sound alike (“telephone consultation,” “documents review,” “face-to-face meeting”), the only way to tell which items belong to a particular project is to look in the Billable Time table, write down the dates (Heaven forbid there are two projects with similar descriptions on the same date!), then go back to the Uninvoiced-Time table, and select the ones I’ve written down.
This is an enormous, unintentional side effect of the otherwise welcome move from Category to Custom Field. The Uninvoiced time table should follow the "Show as a column" preference set in the Billable Time Custom Field configuration, and ideally there should be a Search box in the Uninvoiced-Time table, just as there is one in the Billable Time table.
I realised just now that the Uninvoiced table may contain items other than Billable Time entries. I’m not immediately sure how best to handle that, then, since the Custom Fields of Billable Time would not be applicable to non-time entries. Maybe separate the tables, or maybe include the Custom Fields only for the appropriate entries. Please give this some thought, because without being able to see the Project custom field, I really have a hard time preparing the proper invoices for my multi-project customers.
Those non-time entries should only include billable expenses, for which all the same ideas should apply. If you could use the same Project custom field for billable expenses, all would be perfect.
As you know, @Tut, there are no Custom Fields for Billable Expenses directly. The Custom Field would need to go under Payment. But yes, the Uninvoiced table could show the custom fields from both Billable Time and Payment, but since they’re technically separate fields even if they happen to have the same name, they would have to go into separate columns. That could get messy. Of course, both columns would show only if there were both types of items. Still…
(And I just noticed that for a Payment Custom Field, there is no “Show as a column” option, just a "Show on printed documents option. All of this would need to be reconciled, unless @Lubos just wants to add the Custom Field for Billable Time entries and ignore the issue for Billable Expenses. I’d be okay with that because I always invoice my expenses separately from my time, but others might want to do it on a project-by-project basis. Eventually, Job Costing will take care of all of this, I assume, but in the meantime, there’s an urgent need to replace the crucial functionality that was inadvertently lost when Category was deprecated last month.)
It would be nice to have a Search box on that screen, too, so we can filter against the custom field to display all uninvoiced items on a particular project, then click the Select All box to cause all the filtered items (only) to be added to a new invoice.
