I would vote for at least a mobile friendly version similar to most websites. Responsive if you will.
We have a team of sales people and a team of techs that service customers and add items to their sales orders before our office person converts them to invoices and emails them out.
Currently we handle it but it would be so much easier for folks with on-site service businesses or traveling sales people to enter orders on the fly from a mobile phone.
The CRM tool ESPO has an interesting approach that I have never seen before: when you add the bookmark to your Home Screen, it opens safari full screen with no address bar or bottom toolbar and functions just like an app, but itâs simply a bookmark from safari. Just an idea.
That doesnât require a copy of the whole app as a mobile app. That is just a client that speaks to the main application over an API either synchronously such as via direct connection or asynchronously via something as simple as email.
If Managers api and integration tools are robust enough, this would be trivial to setup. There are apps out there that can be modified to create these sales orders, format them correctly and if you want to be clever about it have them email each sales order to an email account.
Then, on the receiving end, you have a simple intermediate application that lets you review and âapproveâ the sales orders and pushes them to the accounting system.
Note: Iâm not a big fan of exposing mission critical stuff like accounting systems to the internet.
You could do this for anything that Manager can consume via rest and wouldnât be too hard to build and it would extend the capabilities of Manager in a sensible way.
Building all of Manager or even a part of it as an app is not a good idea though.
I do a lot of work from my phone: access and managed shared file system, use microsoft word, excel and outlook and to record some entries and attach documents.
You may not do it, but many others do. Donât believe it? Just take a look at how many people downloaded mobile Excel from Android Play Store.
Think even simpler than this, think setting up mobile css classes and create a pseudo app that uses native mobile browser to request the mobile webpage with specific parameters.
Just the ability to view everything on top of each other without having to scroll sideways in my mobile screen would be enough, even done in the crudest of ways.
Manager already allows for web based access therefore the problem is solved.
⌠however âŚ
I have not had a chance to test the web interface so I donât know if the web interface is responsive. Reading your post suggests that it isnât.
The biggest bang for the buck might be for the devs to include bootstrap or other css / js frameworks to render pages in which case there really wonât be any point in creating an app because everything will wrap nicely whether you have a regular phone, dual screen phone like mine, a tripple screen phone like the one my friend is building or a tablet.
My concern is wasted resources. I think it would serve all of us best to NOT demand that devs waste resources on recoding the whole app for mobile and have to maintain two entire code bases but instead for us to help them grow to a point where they are making so much money that coding up an app wouldnât be a huge drain.
Lastly, instead of coding the whole app for mobile where you have all kinds of problems above just managing dual code basis, it would be better if we help the company grow to a point where they can write specialized clients for interfacing with the accounting app in ways that provide the most value. No one is doing bank reconcilliations on their phone while flying to Spain, but, they might meet someone on the flight and sell them on a product and be able to draw up a sales order right there.
I think you can get what you want if we skin the cat carefully.
I think that this request could be solved by making Manager responsive using CSS coding and just have Manager running in browser on all platforms with just the bootstrap to launch the browser on desktop and mobile.
Please this would not work well at all as screen form factors are very different. Most accounting apps mainly have additional mobile apps (Android and IOS) for entering receipts and payments and/or snapping receipts, Some others provide interfaces to apps like Expensify that do this. Wave accounting includes snapping receipts functionality for free, etc. Point is that for main book-keeping and accounting work (importing bank statements, etc) a mobile phone will not work. So if anything please let @lubos focus on ensuring better stability and robustness of Manager main application rather than being distracted by mobile apps or as @dalacolor an unnecessary changeover from the current approach of 3 desktop versions, 1 server and 1 cloud version. In essence they are mostly the same. I do not see a benefit to make it a webinterface only for reasons mentioned in similar forum posts on this.
we can use android app for offline viewing and drill down of our business transactions and sales invoices on the go, especially at places where there is no net connectivity like basement of our building or at client location.
It is not necessary for manager mobile app to sync with cloud all the time, it can just take backup file whenever there is connectivity.
For Starter We can have Manager android app only for viewing purpose, edit functionality can come later in few years all iâm saying is that Manager team could increase their portfolio on android also.
Server and Cloud editions are already usable through phone. Since Manager is basically a web app I would rather work a more responsive site theme. All that said is not a priority at all under my point of view.
As a web developer myself, I can reinforce that this would not be trivial to set up.
Excel was mentioned:
Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees. Building and maintaining a separate mobile app requires dedicated developer resources (more employees).
Other accounting software would be a much better comparison to make. But also keep in mind, those companies likely also have hundreds or thousands of employees.
Creating a PWA (Progressive Web App) was mentioned:
This is less effort, but there are still significant development hurdles to create and maintain this. One of my apps is also a PWA, but there is a very good reason for that.
The benefits of a PWA mostly come in where an app can be run partially offline. Manager, being accounting software, needs to always show accurate, up-to-date information. Offline, cached numbers would be deceiving and therefore itâs likely to be not a good fit.
Any PWA also effectively requires a responsive theme to be developed, making the next option (responsive theme without PWA) much easier.
Responsive theming was mentioned:
This would generally be a benefit, and out of all options mentioned above is the lowest development cost to implement.
However, Manager displays a large amount of information on the screen at any one time. Most pages have large grids of descriptions, numbers and buttons. This cannot be effectively reduced to a mobile screen size without major compromises.
And all of the above only work with the Cloud or Server edition of Manager. Both of these are technically already available using your mobile phone browser.
Sir, all i want to say is offline feature is most important one, as many time we go to places like basements of building where internet is not available ,all the more reason to have an basic app only for viewing.
A phone app does have some advantages. However it is a big task.
Maybe the focus on a phone app could be limited to entering attachments to journal entries and to creating invoices on the fly and not having a full recinsiliation in the phone app for a start.
Unless Manager was being reimplemented from scratch to run directly on the phone, you would still need to have either Cloud or Server edition of Manager to access your data. You can access those using your deviceâs web browser already
i have observed that the manager works on browser within the desktop. probably you could expose the same over intranet and internet in a very secured manner. there are open source tools are available for getting that feature. by merging those features on the existing executable, it could be made available on mobile on the browser
If you want to access your business data using yout mobile phone, you can the paid versions - either yhr cloud version or, if you have the technical expertise, the server version
My 2 cents is that Manager, runs already in phone, like a web app, as already mentioned.
The only thing that it needs to be a bit better there, is breakpoints tweaking so all forms look well on small screens. There are screens that would be enormus to scroll though if columns are retained.
This is only for server and cloud editions. To make a mobile version just like the desktop version would require too many resources, and would not add anything.
So maybe the only thing to be done is to tweak the styling (bootstrap) of all pages, for small factor screens. Some things like columns, maybe need to disapear etc.
To use Manager efficently on a small screen like a mobile phone would require a complete reengineering of the user interface.
Unless this was to be a paid version, there is absolutely no way to make this an economic project - it would cost too much and not bring in any income.
The current business model is to provide a free version (Desktop) and offer paid versions (Cloud, Server) to those who need more functionality - the paid versions obviously pay for all the developpement and support of the free version
