Invoices for Billable Expenses should show each item’s Payee, not just the Description.
Similarly, transactions shown on account reports (e.g. Cash) should show the Payer or the transferring account, not just the Description.
(Invoicing a customer for an expense with a description of “2 nights” is not meaningful unless the payee of “Marriott Hotel Chicago” is also listed. Seeing an item in my Cash account for “check 3486” doesn’t mean anything unless I also know who the payer was.)
You can easily handle this by simply entering into the Description field whatever you want to appear on your invoice. Cluttering up the sales invoice with additional information works against some workflows, such as entering a total from a separate travel expense report.
Remember, customizing the program for your preferences means making it less universal and possibly unusable by others.
You already have the answer, enter - Marriott Chicago x 2
@tut can’t you just click (or double click) on a cash account entry to display the transaction input/details
Yes, whether it is a cash/bank account payment or receipt, or an expense claim, you can click the View button and see the details. If you need to see account allocation information, click the Edit button instead.
But @Jon’s suggestion was about what appears on an invoice. And for that, I think the appropriate approach is to have total flexibility in what you enter, which Manager provides. (You can overwrite any default entry.)
He also wrote “Seeing an item in my Cash account for “check 3486” doesn’t mean anything unless I also know who the payer was” - hence the question
It there’s a field for Payee, then I should put the payee in that field, and the program should use that field accordingly. It makes no sense to have to type the payee in the Payee field and then to type it again in the Description field. It makes no sense either to have to ignore the Payee field and to put the payee as unstructured data in a different field.
The built-in invoices seem to be smart enough to know that if the Payee fields on an invoice are all empty, don’t print that column.
How about this: Instead of a separate Payee column, the invoice should print both fields concatenated together in the Description column, just as it already does with dates in most places.
So instead of this:
Do this, where Description column = Date & “-” & Payee & “,” & Description :
And:
My point here is that structured data should be entered into the proper structured field: Payee into Payee and description into Description. But to enhance information exchange with customers, the contents of the Payee field could be incorporated into what is printed under the Description column on invoices. This should meet @Tut’s objection while solving the issue I raised that some items are not meaningful if the contents of the Payee field are not made visible, and it is consistent with the handling of dates, for example, in other places in Manager.
I like this suggestion, @Jon. The information is there, if you want it, without extra work. You can overwrite it, if necessary for some reason. And it doesn’t take another column, still leaving space for quantities, unit prices, discounts, amounts, etc.
Added to the latest version (16.1.35)