I’m very new to using Manager, and I’m enjoying it so far. The design is great!
However, I’ve encountered several issues that I think should be addressed:
More-urgent issues:
When adding a new Production Order, it should be possible to select an existing Inventory Kit instead of only being able to manually enter a new BOM from scratch. This is nearly a deal-breaker for me, since I regularly have BOMs with dozens of items that are assembled in-house.
When using the Batch Create or Batch Update features, it should be possible to reference other objects by their names instead of only by their long (and awkward) alphanumeric keys. I think it would be acceptable to only support exact name matches in this case, and not worry about matching partial or similar names.
Similarly, when using the Batch Create or Batch Update features, column headers that contain Custom Fields should be labeled using the exact display name of the field, instead of the field’s (indecipherable) alphanumeric key.
Less-urgent issues:
When creating an Inventory Kit or Production Order, it should be possible to add more than one new line at a time (5x, 10x, 20x) like it is when creating a new Purchase Invoice or in various other creation forms.
When creating any new item that can have multiple lines (eg. a Receipt, Sales Invoice, Production Order, or many others) it should be possible to Batch Create lines using an interface that’s similar to the existing batch tools. This would make it much easier to create new multi-line items using an external spreadsheet, without the need to awkwardly deal with multiple values within cells separated by newlines, as is the case now.
Allow the creation of Custom Fields for line items on Receipts and Payments, much like they can already be created for line items on Sales Invoices (among others).
Thanks very much for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing back.
I would say, since inventory kit is something linked only to sales, it would be better to have a new tool names for example production kit. Maybe with the possibility to create an inventory kit from a production kit and vice versa.
This have been promised by @lubos but it’s not an easy thing. If you know something about relational databases you know it’s almost impossible. I think that’s why it’s still in the ideas section
Easier but with the same issues of the above topic. Maybe with a two lines header or a XML notation inside the cell he can write both the key and the name. I support this idea.
Nice idea
I was thinking the same thing just a few days ago!
Also enable to have at least a few categories in the inline custom fields. Text, numeric and drop-down.
@Tut, I see that you’re a forum moderator with thousands of posts. Is your response here being made as an official Manager customer support representative, or as a fellow user?
How does customer support function for paid users of Manager? I don’t see any contact information on the Manager website, aside from the link to this forum.
I am a fellow user. There is no customer support organization. Almost all help is crowdsourced for users of all editions. Primary help is the Guides. Secondary is the forum, on which the developer sometimes weighs in. Using Manager is something of an experiment.
I will do so, as requested. I’m going to repost some of my original suggestions as new individual topics.
That’s good to hear. Perhaps an index of Planned Features would be worth the associated maintenance overhead?
Thanks for the clarification @Tut, I appreciate it. I’ll proceed with this mindset of experimentation going forward. However, the lack of formal customer support will necessarily impact my decision about whether to become a paying user or not. In some ways Manager has the feel of an open-source project, but without some of the benefits of actually being open-source.
I was suggesting the inclusion of Export, Batch Create, Batch Update, and Batch Delete buttons on creation forms that allow an arbitrary number of line items, such as the New Purchase Invoice or the New Sales Invoice forms (among many others).
These batch tools would allow for the copying and pasting of tabular data representing one line item per table row. The current method requires using the batch tools that are “one level up” (for example, at the bottom of the Purchase Invoices or Sales Invoices lists) which only allow for line items to be specified by newline-separated entries within individual table cells. This creates a formatting nightmare when trying to prepare typical CSV data (for example, from a single order with 50 separate line items) for import into Manager.
Please let me know if this explanation still isn’t clear enough.
Right, but then you can create only one invoice at the time. It’s no longer “batch create” situation. Or am I misunderstanding something? Can you show dummy spreadsheet screenshot how you imagine data should be presented on spreadsheet for batch operation?
My suggested functionality would allow for batch operations to be performed on multiple line items within a single invoice (or receipt, payment, production order, etc.) while it is being created or edited.
It would not affect the existing batch operations that can be already be performed on multiple invoices via the buttons at the bottom of the list view.
As things are now, it’s difficult to import/export line items for any one particular invoice because they’re all jammed into one table row per invoice:
My suggested functionality wouldn’t change this, it would simply also allow import/export of the line items for a single invoice in a more friendly format.
This would be a table consisting of only the Lines.* columns for the invoice that’s being edited:
So this is about exporting / importing single invoice. Correct? Your spreadsheet layout wouldn’t allow to import multiple invoices from single spreadsheet.
I’m sorry if my use of the word “batch” made things more confusing.
The current tools allow for “batch” editing of multiple invoices. My suggestion would facilitate much easier “batch” editing of multiple line items within one single invoice.
I thought the term “batch” was appropriate because the tools & interface could look very similar (if not virtually identical) in both situations, and one of these situations is already fully implemented, and it makes use of the word “batch.”
But in this case I don’t see how is this useful. What’s your use-case? In other words - how would this make things any better than just using user interface Manager provides for editing single transaction.
@lubos, thanks for your reply. Here’s my use case:
A reasonably typical purchase invoice for me from Digi-Key might have 50 or more line items which are all individual components that are going into inventory. In addition to an invoice, Digi-Key provides this purchase data as a conveniently downloadable CSV file. Other suppliers do this too. Their data looks something like this:
Being able to import this data into Manager (after just rearranging a few columns) would take a few minutes, at most. At present, the process of manually entering an invoice like this into Manager easily takes the better part of an hour, and is also much more prone to human error.
I see. There could be a generic way to import single entry too but not before I make batch operations more user friendly (most notably supporting text instead of hexadecimal keys)
Instead of trying to replace GUID hexadecimal keys would it be easier to make them more user friendly. A suggestion:
When parsing a GUID input during batch update, ignore everything after the leading fixed length hexadecimal key.
When outputting a GUID append a description. The description doesn’t need to be unique nor constant across languages so translations could be used.
Add a configuration setting to “Also display GUID key definitions with guides” so when a users doing coding selecting the display guides switch on each screen; hexadecimal keys relevant to that screen are also displayed with a description.
For user data items, a report showing the relationship between GUID and item could be added.
