After several months of use I think that custom fields could be a very useful to completely customize Manager to many vertical solution. But in order to make them useful I think that this “module” should be implemented in order to be able to store:
dates (with a calendar).
numbers
boolean (y/n)
dropdown from external .csv lists stored in a defined directory.
dropdown from other internal modules (for sure clients, suppliers, both invoices, capital accounts, fixed and intangible assets and folders) with some possibility to filter the lists.
Another useful thing, as i anticipated, is to extend them on “Folders” module which could become an extra module for everybody.
That’s my two cents opinion. What do the other guys in the forum think?
Several of your suggested options are impractical because their use would involve coding that interacted with other portions of the program, something Manager could not foresee. For example, customers are actually subaccounts of Accounts receivable, not independent variables. Likewise, assets are subaccounts of Fixed assets and Intangible assets ledgers.
You can already enter dates and numbers as text, and Boolean outcomes as dropdown lists. While it might be convenient to have entry aids, don’t make the mistake of thinking these fields would then be linked to other functionalities. The problems would be the same as above–no code linking to other functions in the application.
many so called BPM (Business Process Management) software do this without any code linking issues with a sort of trick… once you select the data from a dropdown list (that they can get from many different sources, even from an SQL query from an external DB!) the data is stored as static sting. It’s like having a suggestion from a list of “precompiled” fields. BTW the same is done by Manager since, if I change one value in the dropdown list in the settings, the value in all the lines doesn’t change.
No interaction is asked in any of my suggestions. Just a more efficient and error free way, to have really useful dropdown menus.
About numbers or dates it’s true that can be entered as text but it’s a wrong way to behave because there’s no way to check that the user puts the right data in the field. Also a link can be put inside the text field with the HTML code. But again you are leaving space to errors.
I suggest you to look how custom fields are managed for example in SugarCRM.