These are not different names. They are entirely different things.
I rest my case! When I read the words account receivables I think of receipts! You have just proved my point. Account receivables does not translate well for non accounting people as in the meaning is not simple enough.
I am sorry but there is a clear difference. A receipt and payment are issued when an actual transaction is completed and ths funds received or paid. Accounts receivable and Accounts payable related to expected transactions some time in future. This can be explained to non-accounting people as it is part of accounting jargon that needs to be understood if a non accountant is to understand some of the financial statements.
Yes I just realised now what accounts receivables and payables because I look at them on my BS to see what is incoming and outgoing. But my point is that if even I having used Manager for years misunderstood what was being referred to initially means its not a good name for a tab.
Secondly I cannot see any reason why to have a tab for something like that. We donât currently have a tab for that.
Last you will notice that Lubos has deliberately tried to create simple easy to understand names for all the tabs.
Anyway I have made my pitch to have this idea put forward. It will be his decision whether to go ahead or not and if so what names to use.
Sorry, I realize that you may refer to the proposed grouping of @AJD which I think was already disregarded. If anything I do not think that lots need to change or names. As mentioned some better ordering. Why is settings a tab, it is a business setup aid and should probably get a button next to backup and history. Same for Customize. The order of importance or frequency of use of each tab should be considered. Anyway I think that there is plenty of agreement and disagreement on this and I think we all made our points.
I was referring to @AJD options. I am not aware that his proposal has been discarded.
I agree, I donât think a lot of names need to change, in fact very little needs to change. You are absolutely right - why is settings a tab and even worse why is non inventory items in settings when it works identically to inventory items. Why is history and backup situated somewhere else away from settings? I have moved all these into my Admin Tab as per my examples above. The only factor is that backup and history and customise are business specific, but I am sure that can be worked around.
The order of importance or frequency of the tab will be impossible to determine as every business will be different. Again I feel that changing the order is fixing the symptom of the problem. Too many tabs. Reducing tabs will solve nearly all issues - scrolling, hard to find etc.
I would prefer if the grouping were modular like so:
Cash and Bank which contains all bank and cash masters like bank and cash accounts and transactions like receipts, payments and transfers as well as other features like reconciliations.
Alternative names could be âBanking and Treasuryâ or even âMoneyâ. But I donât prefer money because everything else is measured in money
Sales which contains all Customer masters as well as transactions with customers such as Quotes, Orders, Invoices, Credit Notes, Billable Time and Billable Expenses.
Purchases which contains all Supplier masters as well as transactions such as Quotes, Orders, Invoices, Debit Notes.
Employees should contain all Employee master as well as their transactions like Payslips, Expense Claims and possibly Leaves in the future.
Inventory and Operations which contains Inventory Item masters as well as transactions like Receipts, Deliveries, Write-offs, Transfers and Production Orders.
The idea here is that delivery and goods receipt are rarely â if ever â issues by sales or purchasing staff. In fact itâs whoever in charge of the stores.
Capital Assets which includes Fixed Asset, Intangibles and Natural Resource masters as well as their transactions like Depreciation, Amortization and Depletion.
This can also be called âAssetsâ and can include investments in the futures.
Accounting and Finance is for accounting masters like Special Accounts, Capital Accounts and possibly Loans in the future as well as accounting transactions like Journal Entries as well as the Summary Tab.
Can also be simply called âAccountingâ or âFinanceâ.
Utilities or Administration is for Settings, Emails, Folders and Attachments.
Reports shouldnât be grouped with anything because itâs already a collection of collections of reports from all other modules.
My preferred order is very similar to @AJDâs order.
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@Ealfardan I see what you have done. You have put Sales and Purchases whereas @AJD had Accounts Receivables (presumably for Sales) and Accounts Payables (presumably for purchases)
The problem with ajdâs list was the terminology. You have made it more intuitive. But I can see that you have both suggested the same thing effectively.
What I like about your approach is that it also is 8/9 tabs in total and secondly you have managed to modularise the tabs by division - sales dept, purchases dept. So actually, I think that your suggestions are better than mine with a couple of provisoâs
I like the name Money! I am going to get that one! 
But I will concede Cash and Bank is accurate.
Secondly, the reason why I linked contacts to employees, suppliers and customers is because quite a lot of businesses have the same person as a supplier and customer. I agree with other posters that there needs to be one name and that name can have supplier, customer and employee ticked instead of duplicating names. So my expectation is that we wonât have employees, customers and suppliers, but just contacts that can be ticked for the above three categories. Having said that, I donât want this implemented unless there is an easy way to filter this merged contacts list to see say just customers. This may never be implemented, but I know it was discussed. So how would you address this issue in your tab preference?
I agree that debit notes, credit notes, delivery notes, goods receipts - your allocation is more logical than mine was and again you have done it by department.
I concede your point about Reports - itâs already a collection of stuff.
I would name Capital Assets as just Assets. What is Natural resource masters??
I donât think that Accounting and Finance is intuitive and I personally think that Capital accounts and Loans could go under Assets - maybe call it Assets and Liabilities. I would move Special Accounts into your utilities module which I have done in my Admin module. Once you have set it you, never need to go into it again. Again I would put Journals into your Utilities module.
I largely like and agree with your suggestion. It is better than mine as it breaks it down into company departments and allows more logical placement for things like late payment fees (which will go under Sales). But I would abandon the Accounting and Finance tab and move everything in there to Assets or Utilities.
I would call Utilities Admin or Administration as they are not really utilities.
Inventory and operations must have non-inventory items in it!
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@lubos Three of us (myself, @AJD and @Ealfardan) have now come up with a format that we largely agree on.
I think that Money, Sales, Purchases, Employees, Inventory and Operations, Assets - we are all in firm agreement with the items that go in as listed in @Ealfardan post. I think what he proposed is far better than my suggestion as itâs modular by company position eg sales dept. I had the right idea, but not sufficient understanding of accounting. He has also dumbed the names down for me ! AJD had the same approach but using terminology like accounts receivables is not user friendly.
The areas of disagreement are actually very trivial:
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about the need for the accounting and finance tab that @Ealfardan suggested. I think that everything in that tab should be moved to Assets and Administration. I think this tab is not intuitive and all the stuff can be moved to the other two tabs thus reducing one further tab.
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What to call Money/Cash and Bank as well as Admin/Administration/Utilities. I like money because itâs a fun name and will cover petty cash, bank accounts, cash accounts, bitcoin, reconciliations etc. I think Administration is the best name for the Admin/Utilities Tab.
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Whether suppliers, customers and employees will be merged into one contact list so as not to duplicate names when a company is both customer and supplier? The problems are obviously that one would see all contacts. So if contacts are merged, how would this work for the sales, purchases and employees tabs?
I know that you are not sold on the idea yet, but I am hoping that this will strengthen my case for this change given that three separate people agree on the first six tabs without argument. It is really the accounting and finance tab and Administration tab that needs more debate and consideration.
The areas of disagreement are actually small and I am really encouraged that this would solve the problems I have raised in this topic. Let us know what you think?
Congratulations to the three of you. Lots make sense but I also think that @Lubos has his say and although I understand what you want to do here I am not convinced about it. It is âvisiblyâ too complicated. I for one tried to at least appeal to the logic. The current proposal seems to want to shape it in a particular way that I find disruptive and do no support. Sorry as I understand the aim which we share in that the user interface could be improved and that @Lubos should take note. I used to Chair a large ICT team but always kept the user experience in mind. I worked with teams of programmers and unfortunately, they are more focused on code and making things robust and work and often take the user experience for granted as they already achieved something fantastic. So to me the way forward is for @Lubos to recognize some needs to improve the user-interface without making it too specific to some of us who are more vocal here.
I just separated accounting stuff because nothing in there would make sense to most people who arenât accountants.
But sure, accounting is part of administration so that should be completely fine, but I am not so sure about having assets in the title if it contains journal entries inside of it.
So I think what is being suggested is:
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put the tabs in groups. The groups should reflect things related on accounting principles. Such as shown with the new purchase / sales progress feature.
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retain a fully expanded display which would be almost identical to the current except boarders showing grouping. The only loss of screen space being a clickable header boarder for each group.
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for businesses customised such that a group has more than one entry, allow collapse of that group. Collapse would replace the individual tabs with a tab group name / icon.
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stop the tabs from scrolling with the window content so the tab location is always displayed to the user and accessible for navigation elsewhere. For businesses with lots of tabs enabled and viewed in a small window, that will result in the bottom tabs falling off the bottom of the window. From a tab grouping perspective it means the bottom tabs should not be too long. To access all tabs a window would need to be able to display all tab headings plus the content of one tab group.
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minimise white and grey boarder space.
@Ealfardan You must have misread my post. Journal entries and special accounts would be in Administration tab not Assets. I was proposing that Loans be moved from your finance tab to assets. Then suggested that the assets tab be renamed assets and liabilities.
Essentially yes
No I am suggesting that instead of 25 Tabs, you have 8 or 9 Tabs with the group names. You would click on say Money and that would open a screen similar to how clicking on Bank Accounts opens a new view now. Then on that screen you would have all the bank and cash options and you would click say bank account. There is no expanding or collapsing going on here. Click on the tab, then click on a menu option within that tab and it takes you to the view of the current tabs.
By getting rid of 25 or more tabs and replacing it with up to 9 tabs, you address the issue of tabs falling off the screen. My recommendation is that the tabs be moved to the top of Manager as a fixed header, not on the LHS. This would give more screen space to forms from left to right, replace wasted and unused space at the top etc and always remain in position at the top regardless of scrolling down in journal entries etc.
I donât understand why you think it is difficult.To me it seems really straightforward.
It is organising Sales Quotes, Sales Orders, Sales Invoices, Credit Notes, Billable Time and Billable Expenses into the sales department and same for the purchasing department. All the bank stuff like bank accounts, cash accounts, payments, receipts etc get moved and categorised in one banking tab as well.
The same with Inventory and Operations - it brings together everything to do with inventory management.
I think the problem is that you may not have understood how it would work as patch was talking about expanding tabs etc, which is not what I am proposing. The tabs wonât expand.
Your suggestions donât really work because they do nothing to address the underlying problem which is too many tabs. Your suggestions are treating the symptom of the problem.
Actually we are not focusing on this from an IT point of view! @Ealfardan is an accountant so he is more than qualified to advise on the group categorisation which he has done. All I have done is asked for Manager to adhere to website best practices of max 7 menu items, up to 3 clicks to get to your destination and a static menu so that you donât have to scroll up and down. This is not IT - a lot of studies have confirmed this actually works and many websites use these design concepts to improve user interaction.
The solution is very simple - reduce the number of tabs, make the tabs static so you donât have to scroll up and have related items grouped within a tab which you click on and then click on the end destination resulting in your max 3 click requirement.
What is difficult about the solution I am proposing?
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Why not let people make their own custom Tabs like custom fields they can call it what they like and know and let people put the set tabs in their custom group tabs. a bit like we make custom fields
None of my business have 25 tabs. They all fit on one screen. The number is not that far from the optimal 7 already. There is nothing to fix for many Manager user.
I donât want buried menu options with 1 or two items in each group.
I donât want to waste a heap of screen space with useless headings that add nothing to normal program function/
I think that the appeal of Manager is that it often doesnât follow some of the common database conventions used by other accounting programs and this is what sets it apart from the other accounting programs.
The groupings that I suggested were not meant to be definitive titles as there are alternative titles that can be used, as shown by other contributors to this thread.
I think that the program should use naming and design structures that will serve to strengthen the users accounting knowledge and it is incumbent on users to always seek to improve their accounting knowledge as, like it or not, they have to operate within that framework. .
This endless back and forth over what tab belongs in what group shows that even a small handful of users cannot agree. And you are all debating in an optimal space where you have time to consider logical (in your own minds) organizational relationships. All that would fall apart, no matter who made the choices, within days of implementation. You wonât remember whether Receipts falls under Sales or Money or Customers. Or whether Suppliers comes under Accounts Payable or Purchases or Bank Accounts. When you have made three or four guesses before figuring out where to enter a recurring payslip, simple scrolling through one navigation list will be a fond memory.
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Yes Tut I agree. They are talking like they are the only users
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@Tut and @Wornout you make valid points.and you have now verbalised your opinion on the ideas.
Also, I would welcome input from other users as to their opinion to gauge the feeling among the wider community of users. This forum gives users the opportunity to do this.
Unfortunately the development model for this software doesnât allow beta testing of some of these ideas which would allow hands on experience resulting in more informed feedback from a wider range of users.
I think that the contributors to this thread have expressed their ideas with a genuine interest in improving the functionality of the program for all users, and I think that it is now up to the developer, with intricate knowledge of the workings of the program, to decide if these ideas have merit.