Mixed up order of Billable Time entries on same invoice

When I enter more than one Billable Time entry for the same customer and the same date, the order those entries appear on the invoice seems to be semi-random.

It would be better if the entries for the same date always appear in the same order that they were created (first created => first listed).

Use case: I created five Billable Time entries for a client in the following order, all under the same date:

  • Travel to meeting site
  • On-site team prep for presentation
  • Presentation
  • On-site debrief with team
  • Travel from meeting site

I purposely entered them in this order because it is chronological within the date, and it makes sense that way. However, when I added all of these items to the same invoice (with other Billable Time items, as well), they appeared in a different order, which makes no apparent sense:

  • On-site team prep for presentation
  • Travel to meeting site
  • On-site debrief with team
  • Travel from meeting site
  • Presentation

I can of course Edit the invoice and juggle the order around manually, but it would be better if invoice items were sorted automatically by creation time after they are sorted by date.

I’d rather implement Reference field which can generate new number when you create billable time (like on invoices). So each entry has reference by which it can be sorted.

This is similar issue some people have in Cash Accounts tab where transactions are not shown in order they’ve been entered (unless you manually fill in Reference)

Until such a change is made, remember that you can always adjust the order of line items by editing a sales invoice, grabbing a line and sliding it up or down.

I suppose that would do what is needed, but presumably every entry already has an internal “reference number” in the database (or a time stamp, or a serial number, or some indication of which was created first) that could be used as a sort key in the absence of a manual Reference field. Or it could have.

Either way, it would be nice if this would all happen automagically. Having a sequential Reference number created automatically for all transactions and documents, not just invoices, would accomplish this (and would allow for manual tweaking when necessary), but all of the numbers flying around might take away some of the front-end simplicity of Manager for users who don’t care about these things.

Actually no. It doesn’t have. And I really dislike the idea to have hidden attributes on data. What if (for some reason) you’ve entered entries in incorrect order and want to fix the order it appears in Manager. You can’t. That’s why I don’t like hidden attributes. They are not solving the problem completely.

Anyway, this is not related to billable time only. It pops up as an issue in other modules too from time to time. I’m not yet set on solution.