I had a quick look at the demo and it looks great, however I don't think it's easier to use.

You claim that you grouped similiar functionalities together but I disagree.
For example, sales related maintenance are in current FA under "sales",whereas you moved them to "setup".
One can see that all the "maintenance" functionalities  are similar and now grouped together.
I see that the "sales" functionalities, are similar and should be grouped together (as it is in FA).
For example, I add a new customer when I need it : ie I'm trying to process an order and realize that the customer
doesn't exists. I'm already on the "sales" page and from there I just click on "customer" to create a new customer (1 click).
With the new GUI, I have to click "Sales" (to open the menu), click on "Customers" , wait for the page to load, then click on "new customer", that's 3 click + 1 page load vs 1 click (for the old version). I don't see that as an improvement.

In fact, the way functionalities are grouped at the moment in FA it precisely the reason why I chosed initially to use FA.
I could find things straight, without having ever used the software. The "new" design is more like FA's compitors design which I didn't like at all.

Also, I use the executive theme, which displays all the submenus of a page. I can reach everything in 2 click (select page if not the current one, click on functionality) and if I'm on the wrong page I can see. With the new theme, you are 3 click away of everything and you have to backtrack if the first 2 clicks where wrong. I don't think this correspond to the latest UI principles.

Finally, I'm still waiting for some way of hooking the GUI so textcart could work without having to patch FA.

To summarize, I agree that FA looks old and needs to be pimped up, the proposed UI looks great, but I don't see it as an improvement and hope it won't be merged in the core as it is.

/Elax

27

(44 replies, posted in Reporting)

The problem with 0 VAT is only a GUI problem. First you can't enter a 0 amount corresponding to the 0-VAT GL line.
Then you can't deduce the net amount corresponding to this 0 line.
The solution is to add a column in the Payment/Deposit UI corresponding to the net amount of the transaction.
This way, let's say you have a payment for £5 + 0 VAT, you'll enter two lines, one of £5 and the other of £0 with a net amount of £5.

With this, FA can save properly the information in the gl_trans table and everything works fine.

I made a patch with modify the GUI this way, with some javascript to automatically calcul the net amount on VAT account.
I submitted it and thought it has been merged but it hasn't. I'm not sure why.

/Elax

28

(31 replies, posted in Modules Add-on's)

I think the main reason is that nobody's done it (the patch). AFAIR Janusz and I couldn't agree on a design and we had both
other prioriry. However, He might have made some changes to hook the url to call the textcart pages instead of the current FA one but I don't know if it works and if it's been integrated to textcart.

Also, a patched version would be better as it will be easier to keep up to date with any incoming patch on the FA files.
At the moment, for example, any patch on let's say po_entry_items needs to be propagated to the textcart version.
I don't know who is doing it. I'm not sure anyway that it have ever been necessary so far.

/Elax

29

(31 replies, posted in Modules Add-on's)

Files have to be patched manually. FA module system doesn't allow module to overwrite FA files (which is good).
Textcart needs someway of "hooking" into FA, I proposed a patch to FA which will had necessary hooks but it has been
rejected. At the moment the only way to patch those files manually.

I don't know about the wiki, but the installation section of the first post  explain how to patch. However, the path
where patched files are might have been changed.

/Elax

30

(31 replies, posted in Modules Add-on's)

Have you patched FA with the files present in the textcart module ?

Every single table ;-) Don't do it if you don't know what you do.

/Elax

A (dirty solution) is to bookmark everything you need (in your browser) and organize it the way you want. That should take less than one hour.

/Elax

kidzstang wrote:

If I void a Direct Invoice, choosing > Setup > Maintenance > Void a Transaction. Will everything that was affected by the original invoice be reversed ie. inventory, cash on hand, taxes owed, etc.?

In theory. Voiding is the most source of bugs in FA. It's usually fine if you just void something you've done (and you haven't done ANYTHING else in between).
Things are getting more touchy, if you are voiding things in the past, with a different currency, involving negative stock etc ..

Do a credit note if you can ;-)

/Elax

In most country, it is not allowed , by law, to invoice before delivery.
If you really need to, (which happen sometime), do a "Delivery -> Invoice" even if you are actually not
doing the physical delivery. At least, technically speaking, the goods doesn't belong to you anymore (even though
they are still in the premises) and that stop you to sell to them to someone else.

/Elax

You can use the textcart module to enter the PO. First you need to save the item/s stock_check as an excel spreadsheet.
From it, you should be able to create a column of how much you need to reorder for each style.

filter the zero and the remove the unused column and you should be able to copy paste your spreadsheet in a Purchase order.

/Elax

apmuthu wrote:

Just don't look at inventory and let inventory go negative. Later in one shot adjust all the inventory after the manufacturing is done. Very unprofessional but certainly quick and dirty.... Need to do some manual re-conciliation of the quantities where some thumb rules based on experience may be needed.

It's a tempting solution indeed (and I had to do it by the past), however it suffers from 2 major drawbacks :

The first is FA use an average costing method and it doesn't really work well with negative stock. Things are ok if you do a
straight forward scenario : invoice negative quantities at a given price and then make the missing amount of quantity.
Things get quickly messy (and buggy) if you start mixing : voiding transaction, using the same FA item for different real item with different prices etc .

The second, is you'll have to allow negative stock for everything, even items which are not manufactured. In my experience, when FA complain I don't have an item in stock, 99% of the time :  FA is right, and I'm trying to invoice/deliver the wrong item.

If you really want to follow the "negative stock" route, it's somewhat safer to pre-create some items (let's ay 100) and never FA be in negative stock.

/Elax

DavidMaurice wrote:

Also, is there any other tables except from 0_stock_master and 0_stock_moves that are impacted from item adjustment ?

Yes, adjusting the stock also generates some GL entries which are probably tricky to generate manually. I wouldn't recommend
adjusting the stock directly in the DB.

You can use the text cart module to do "bulk" adjustment (from a spreadsheet for example), even though it's has to be manual.

/Elax

38

(31 replies, posted in Modules Add-on's)

apmuthu wrote:

Can TextCart Extension be used to import items into item table?

No. It only deals with "carts" like order, delivery, purchase order, item transfer, item adjustement etc ...
I use to use the `import items` modules, which once you understood what to put in which columns, work.

Now, I just generate insert SQL queries ...

Sorry for the delay. I don't check this forum very often. Are you a developper ? (that would help lots)

/Elax

I have a plugin for that.

Do you really need to use the cash account ? Cash payment in the front accounting world, means 'immediate' payment, ie you enter the invoice and the payment at the same time, but it's just a shortcut. You probaly can use a normal payment term even though it goes at the end in a cash account. Movereover, Paypal payment are probably not 'cash' or immediate.

/Elax

What's  the question ?

43

(3 replies, posted in Reporting)

Copy it and rename it 'header3.inc' for example then change which header to use in the report itself.
In the report you should have somewhere

$rep->SetHeaderType('Header2')

change it to 'Header3'

/Elax

What is exactly the question ?

My question was more about, how is that possible ? I mean I enter invoices, payments, allocate payments to invoice, how come is that possible that according to the transaction page everything has been paid exactly (which is true) but one payment stills needs 0.31 ?

Anyway, I found the problem one credit note was allocated itself 0.31 . That doesn't make sense and indeed mess everything up , but I think it's not allowed anymore and was a bug which has been fixed. I'm I right ?

/Elax

What I used to do to solve a similar problem is to use the delivery location as a 'status'. You can create for example a 'waiting' location (I use to have a 'back order' location) and assign it to the order when you create it. When it's ready you'll have to change manually the location to the correct one. It's a bit of faffing but better than nothing. The advantage of using a location is it appears in the 'oustanding order' page and you can also filter order by location (ie status).

/Elax

I'm not sure if it's a bug or I'm missing something, but basically one of a supplier invoice is not fully allocated (there is 0.31 left to pay), but when I go on the supplier transaction page , the total outstanding is 0.

Also, when I go to allocate payments, there is nothing left to allocate. How is that possible? How can I check the allocation are right ?

/Elax

I think the OP is talking about reference number not invoice number. See my answer to a similar thread
there

I agree with you that the current way FA is dealing with reference number is weird and doesn't work really well.
(my answer is a bit long, but there is a practical solution at the end ;-))

In most countries, invoice number have to be sequencial, so the tax man can spot "missing" invoices more easily.
FA used auto id from the database and that works fine. However, that doesn't give much freedom to the user which prefers a sexier invoice number.

This is why we have also a reference number, it's a free form field use to reference the invoice. The only constraint is it, has to be unique.
In theory you enter whatever you want, like using the current month and add the sequencial number within the month or anything else.
In practice, it doesn't work because you quickly endup with the problem you have, how do I know what is the reference number or if 2 peoples are entering an invoice at the same time what stop them to use the same ?
FA provides us with last reference number to solve this, however it only works if your reference number is a number but doesn't if you are trying to follow a pattern.
Morever, it even doesn't work with number, because we have the bug you just described. Trying to fix this bug will be equivalent to have an incremental number in the database, which already what the invoice number is.
The question is, if we are forced to use sequencial reference number (and there is no real choice in FA) what not then just using the invoice id ? That would will work, avoid the bug above and don't get people confused between invoice id and invoice ref.

What would be really nice in FA would be
1 - to have an option to use the invoice id as a reference number.
2 - Or have a way to specify reference number pattern so you could do things similar to a printf and use date, user etc ... This solution should be able to use emulate option 1.

In the mean time , what you can do is, if all your users are in the office, have them speaking to each other to avoid this problem
or use a physical reference number generator (to do FA jobs") :  buy a couple of raffle book, give one to each user and ask them to use the number of the ticket as reference number. If they are not in the same city are buying themselves the raffle book, to be sure to avoid "collision" as them to add the city initial to the reference number.

/Elax

What I mean is if you remove all the fields you added (expiry date and others) which are specific to your industry, the batch number can be seen a sub-type of item. What I mean is Item "A" -  Batch "B" is equivalent to a new Item "A-B".
The only difference is (I guess) you don't need to create a new Item each time a new batch comes and of course you can manage all the batches as a single object . I mean you can set/changes the GL Account prices etc, of all the batches of the same item by just modifying it once (on the item) instead of modifying all one by one if they were all distinct item.

This ability to manage "groups" of similar items is definitely lacking in FA, and is usually called (in other system) "variations".
You can have for example the same T-shirt in different colours, let's say red, blue green, in FA
you'll need either to don't track the colour in FA and create 1 T-shirt item, or create 3 differents one

T-Shirt Red
T-Shirt Blue
T-Shirt Green

Etc ...

Your batch modifications could be easily used to manage variations.
I use this concept of variations in my company (mainly colors).

Now, We also have concept of batch which is slightly different. Each delivery of red t-shirt come with a slightly different red.
I need to be able to track what's left for each delivery (or each batch).
I could (we the current FA) create a new item for each  and have T-SHIRT Red 1, T-SHIRT Red 2  etc ...
Now,the main difference between a batch and a variation is Customers Order T-Shirt RED (ie, the order a specific variation).
However, in general they don't care of the bach (They won't order "T-Shirt Red 1" or T-Shirt Red 2"). Moreover,
they can even order before the batch exists (or the purchase order has been decided). In that case there is no way I can select the batch when I enter a customer order.

When I dispatch the good however, I'll need to specify which batch has been used. This is similar to Serial Number tracking (a serial number can be seen as a new batch for every items), the customer doesn't order a specific serial number: he order something, and get one, with a serial number.

I just wanted to clarify those points, because what you've done, I think solves a problems that other people will see as "1 dimensions variations" but not solves problems seens as "batch" or "serial number" tracking.

I'm interested in both ;-)

/Elax