Suggestions for making expense claims simpler

I really appreciate the Expense Claims module, and am relying on it a lot as a sole trader, making payments from my personal credit card. I do have a couple of suggestions for making it a little more user friendly though…

(1) I like that if I select ‘Accounts payable’ as the account, a new ‘Purchase Invoice’ field appears. It’s a rather hidden feature though, and I wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for another forum thread, so perhaps this would be more intuitive if there were a drop down menu above the Account field where you could choose between options, perhaps:

  • Pay money (gives you a full list of accounts)
  • Pay supplier (selects ‘Supplier credits’)
  • Pay invoice (selects ‘Accounts payable’)

Or something like that.

(2) When you have selected ‘Accounts payable’, the ‘Purchase Invoice’ field shows you a list of every purchase invoice ever created. I appreciate that you can start typing the name of the supplier to narrow it down, and that the most recent invoice tends to appear at the top. In most cases this means you can just select the top-most invoice. However, one of my suppliers has recently changed their whole billing system, including the way invoices are numbered, and I see that Manager isn’t actually showing me the most recent invoices at the top—it’s showing me invoices with the highest invoice numbers, which in this case are all the old invoices, before their system changed. Sure, I could enter the invoice number instead, but I can’t help but think, wouldn’t it make more sense if this menu only showed a list of unpaid invoices? That would greatly minimise the chance of user error, of entering payment for the same invoice twice.

(3) It would also be a nice bonus if the amount of the expense claim defaulted to the amount owing on the selected invoice. (Or the total amount owing to the supplier if you chose the ‘Supplier credits’ account and selected a supplier.) You could always edit this if only paying part of the invoice, but surely 9 times out of 10 you want to pay the whole amount, and this would save having to type it in manually.