The Custom Fields feature is very nice, particularly the ability to create a Drop-down list with pre-specified options.
It would be great to see this same functionality extended to some of the text fields of invoices and beyond: Allow the creation of pick-lists for more fields – most urgently the Invoice summary field of Sales invoices and also the Description field of Billable time – so boiler-plate text (like “Consulting Services” or “Professional Services” or “Teleconference with Client”) need not be retyped every time.
Billable time description could be autocomplete out of the box but that would encourage users to repeat the same descriptions all the time.
By not making description autocomplete, you are sort of meant to provide meaningful description what has been done for client for your records and also for your client’s invoice.
I understand the intention. In some use-cases, though, the consistency is more important than the level of detail. When I put Consulting Services several times on a single ticket, or on several invoices over the course of several months for the same customer, eventually I’m going to type it wrong and there’s going to be an invoice with a spelling mistake.
For my services business, time is my inventory. Having “time items” (i.e., stock billable-time services, with default names and rates) is as important to me as cataloging widgets is to someone who runs a retail shop.
Also, pending the implementation of Jobs/Sub-Customers, I use some of these text fields to tell customers what project each Billable Time entry or each sales invoice belongs to, so I want the rubric to be consistent across entries; if I bill for something called Consulting: Elm St optimization project on Monday, I don’t want Tuesday’s entry to be called Streamlining project for Elm Street office.
One small problem I can foresee with just using autocomplete the way it’s implemented in Manager is that it I type something wrong once, it becomes a permanent part of the autocomplete universe, and unless I can track down the invoice that I typed Comsulting Servives on, I can’t get rid of it as an autocomplete option. But, still, it would be a step in the right direction – and perhaps one that can be implemented without too much coding work.
Then let’s just wait for job costing. Job costing will allow you to select job from drop-down. And name of the job could be shown on invoice to customer. So consistency will be guaranteed.
If job-costing won’t solve the issue, then I’m happy to look into this suggestion again and see what else can be done. Perhaps I could extend custom fields in some way etc. There are many options.
@Lubos: Agreed, but is Job Costing still planned? I don’t see it on the official Roadmap. I hope it is, because what you’ve described above would be incredibly useful to me and to others engaged in services-only businesses.