• Registered: 09/04/2009
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Purchase Order Improvements

I've downloaded FA and theres a few tweaks I'd like to make to the way that purchase orders work. I'm wondering if anyone can steer me in the right direction. I'll be hoping to complete the changes this week-end.

1. On the purchase order page, where supplier is; I would like to add a suplier and load the details without even leaving the page. I know I'll need ajax to do this.

2. I would like to create a new drop down field called 'Department' which will select which department account the PO should be made from.

3. I don't know why, but at the moment, for Item Description there is a drop down field. I don't see the purpose in this, but what I would like to do is create a textbox where the user can type in the description of the item.

4. I would like to ability for a user to say no tax should be applied to this item, or if there should be tax. ie (in the UK, 15% VAT) - Possibly a drop down box.

5. I would like to slightly edit and add to the PDF render an authorisation signature so that orders can be signed off.

6. Regarding point 2 above (This may or may not come under the PO Section), I would like to see how much all the departments have spent.

Thanks for any ideas and help you can provide. I really appreciate it!

Richard

  • Registered: 12/25/2007
  • Posts: 2,448

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

1. You can add new supplier during PO entry using F4 key to call suppliers table editor. This is active on PO entry page when focus is set on supplier selector.
2. I'm not sure what you want to achieve. There is currently 'departments'  support in FA, but if the only purpose is tagging the PO you can entry any description in memo field.
3. You can add to PO only those items you have defined in FA, so there is selector for them instead of text box. Again you can add new item to items table during PO entry by pressing F4 while focus is on item selector.
4. No way for random entry of tax rates. When you pay taxes you know the tax rate is constant for any good. The eventual tax exemptions related to  customer (like tax exempt in export) is implemented by various tax groups/item tax types  in FA.
5. Do you mean electronic signing of pdf file, or simply adding signature image to result pdf?
6.I'm not sure what functionality you mean as 'department', but maybe using multiply inventory locations would be enough?

Janusz

3 Reply by Haunter250 (edited by Haunter250 09/04/2009 06:16:18 pm)

  • Registered: 09/04/2009
  • Posts: 2

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

Thanks for your response Janusz.

1. Great! It works, but firstly, there is nothing on the screen that says you can do this (How was I supposed to know?) and secondly, hitting 'F4' also drops down my URL box (In IE7) to view websites I've visited, so the page is partially obscurred by this. QUite annoying really.

2. Let me be a little bit more descriptive. In my structure, there are different departments and they each have a yearly budget. The idea behind this is simply that, as you stated, the PO can be tagged for a department and the total expense (ie all the PO of that department) can be viewed at a later stage for reporting, etc...

3. For my organisation, we don't need to be this thorough. We also order many things from many suppliers so this would be too time consuming for us. It's fantastic though!

4. Thats OK. I'm sure I'll figure it out. Imagine this scenario though: I'm shopping on a website and it displays its prices without tax. I would like, at the end of filling in the PO for the system to tell me how much tax I'm paying and my subtotal with tax.

In my previous workplace we had a setup like the one below:
[img]http://www.arc4u.org.uk/testbed/po.gif[/img]

5. Just simply a signature image.

6. I don't know if that's what I'm after so I will check it out. To be more specific on my part though, what I meant was, according to point 2, after a PO has been raised, I would like to track how much a particular department has spent. So if department 'a' raised 2 POs, one for £300 and one for £1200 I would like some way of telling that they have spent £1500.

Thanks again for your help so far. I hope you understand a little bit more of what I'm trying to do.

Richard

  • Registered: 12/25/2007
  • Posts: 2,448

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

You can set 'Show hints for new users' under Preferences to see some hints about user interface e.g. special keys like F4 usage. In next FA version legend about special keys will be displayed in bottom bar.

There were some assumptions made during FA design about target audience so not all usable options are included in the code. For example assumption was made that that purchase prices are always stated  excluding VAT/GST, as usually in B2B sales. This is alway trade off between software versatility and speed of data entry, so we try to minimalize number of controls in entry forms. Of course if you need the option here you can customize the code for yourself.

Regarding signature images there should be no problem here. Please look into header2.inc file to find how company logo image is included in reports header.
Janusz

  • From: India
  • Registered: 11/09/2009
  • Posts: 115

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

Hi Janusz,

I would like to suggest that we should display Tax calculation on PO view / print.
It is required for Accounts Department to allocate amount for PO or drawing a cheque.

Is it easy to have this enhancement ? smile

Thanks,

Chaitanya
  • From: Canada, QC, Montreal
  • Registered: 05/16/2010
  • Posts: 167

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

chaitanya wrote:

Hi Janusz,

I would like to suggest that we should display Tax calculation on PO view / print.
It is required for Accounts Department to allocate amount for PO or drawing a cheque.

I agree with chaitanya

Gaston

  • Registered: 12/25/2007
  • Posts: 2,448

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

Agree. Will be fixed in 2.3RC1.
Janusz

  • From: India
  • Registered: 11/09/2009
  • Posts: 115

Re: Purchase Order Improvements

thanks

Chaitanya