A very minor (as in low importance, but a nice feature, none-the-less), I enter data after the fact. In fact very little of my data is entered in a timely manner, and it’s for all sorts of reasons.
When I enter an invoice, I often just clone the previous (sales or purchase) invoice and that way the date is relatively close to the new one. I tweak the date and finish the invoice.
What I would like is to immediately pay the invoice on the date OF the invoice (ie not the date it was entered) and I feel this could be achieved a number of ways (my favourite being the first):
When creating the invoice there are the options: Create and Create & add another. I would like to see, Create, Create & add another, Create & receive/pay now. Then when the receipt or payment window comes up, it can be populated with the date belonging to that invoice (ie, the date from the previous screen)
When making payment or receipt, have the date field not default to today’s date, or include some option to pay/receive: today, invoice date, or custom (whereby you could enter an arbitrary date. Ideally, a default value for this field could be set in the defaults area of settings.
In the sales/purchase invoice, the New Receipt or New Payment options could include a dropdown that has a backdated option, which would default to the original invoice date
No biggie, just me dealing with first world problems and having to open the calendar drop down, slide back a few months and select the date. TBH, I mostly enter the date directly into the text area without utilising the dropdown if I can avoid it
@d3mad the whole concept you have illustrated is similar to a cash sales even though you are not doing a cash sale (or are you?). usually a cash sale would involve both the invoice and receipt on the same date.
In Manager you enter the cash sales in the Receipts & Payments tab and not under Sales Invoice. so in my opinion the developer might think there is no strong reason to add the suggested button.
Also, i agree most business do enter the cash sale as a Sales Invoice and then record the receipt for the same because there is continuity in invoice numbering (i do it) and easier for accounting. but in this case the transaction happens as on date since the customer needs a receipt right away and there is never a backlog entry. again no strong reason for implementing your idea.
but i do agree that your suggestion would be helpful for purchases invoices in a similar scenario of my second explanation above, where we as a business would pay on the same day and there is usually no necessity to issue a payment voucher to the supplier.
No they’re not specifically cash sales, I could get into my use case of manager if you’d like.
After reading this last night and trying to justify other ideas (poorly), I thought I would yet again try receipts and payments (including from the bank reconciliation screen) and I was reminded very quickly why I cannot use the receipts and payments area and it will never be of any use to me. That is namely: You can not assign a customer or supplier to cash sales (well, not an entity in any associative way, that is a deal breaker for that cash area for me).
That’s the short version, but to expand:
Whilst I know it would be argued, “that is not the core functionality of manager,” I get that (so can I save anyone the hassle of reminding me). I know in as far as other people are concerned, for whatever reason (that I am not concerned about), people who use accounting packages don’t care about immediate sales and relating them to customers and suppliers that you track invoices for. I don’t know why people don’t care about that, but I do. So I need that linkability.
When you make purchases and sales through invoicing and make payments related to those invoices, your payments are tracked and can be referenced and correlated to the relevant customer/supplier. As soon as you try to make a payment or purchase directly (without using invoicing) you lose all trackability of receipts or payments to/from customers and suppliers because manager cannot link the two together (for various reasons, but including multiple currencies etc). That is why (for me at least) ALL IMMEDIATE/CASH/ACCOUNT SALES must be invoiced and paid in a two step process, otherwise I lose access to all that data. And that is unacceptable to me. Therefore, I accept I must do that extra legwork myself. It’s not that bad actually, and it does work out a bit neater and easier to find things later/generally.
I am starting to realise manager is purely an accounting tool and/or I am totally misusing it. lol
I’ve gone down that rabbit hole again. I can’t help but get hyped up about it, sorry guys.
@d3mad, I hope you realize that what concerns you so much is a matter of one mouse click. When you click Create for an invoice, the program displays the transaction you just created. Right there on the screen is a button to pay or receive funds for the invoice. If clicked, all the information is carried over to a receipt/payment form. All the other suggestions in your original post involve more options, more clicking, and potentially more confusion because of inconsistent behavior with how the program would normally function. They would also have to override previously set Form Defaults. That does not seem like a recipe for success.
Once again, you’ve totally missed my point @tut But it doesn’t matter, it’s all moot since I did work out a much better way. Thanks again for your insight.
No, @d3mad, I did not miss any of your points. I understood them completely. I had two goals:
To be sure you knew about paying or receiving against invoices. Some users don’t realize what that feature does, or first go to the Receipts & Payments tab and have trouble remembering invoice information.
To point out that more features, while perhaps fitting a particular user’s work habits, can raise unexpected complications for those who work in different ways.
