Purchase Order Printing Evaluation

I have started to test/evaluate Front Accounting. I thank the developers for such a great product.

I sincerely hope that my comments are taken as constructive and not nit picking. After all, Joe has done an incredible job so far and should be applauded for his hard work.

As I work through FA, I will post the results of my tests/evaluations.

Purchase order PDF

Customer Number appears on the PO but is blank.

I feel there should be a field under Suppliers where this should be entered. Then it can be displayed on the PO.

Charge To has the Supplier Details.

Surely this should show our Company details as configured? In its present form, this infers that the Supplier is charging itself! If this corrected to show our Company details, where would the Supplier details be shown ? Extra space would be needed for the Supplier details.

Shipping Company appears on the PO but is blank.
I feel there should be an drop down in PO creation to choose a shipping company when creating the PO. Possible choice could be [Collect/Deliver/Shipping]

Due Date appears on the PO but is blank.
I feel there should be a field in PO creation (calender pop-up?) to choose due/delivery date.

Your VAT number appears on the PO but is blank.
I feel there should be a field under Suppliers where this should be entered. Then it can be displayed on the PO.

Our order number appears on the PO but is blank.
Our order number is already displayed on the top of the PO. This caption could be left off and the space used for something else.

Customers Reference appears on the PO but is blank
During PO creation a Suppliers Reference field is available but not referenced on the PO PDF.  I feel Customers Reference should be the person to whom the PO is directed at the supplier and the Suppliers Reference should be the person creating the PO possibly getting this from the user name configured.

Item Code / Item Description
The Item description is under the Item Code heading with no Item Code displayed (This has been reported elsewhere).
I feel there should be an option to choose the display of our Item Code or the suppliers code or both somewhere under a configuration option, maybe under supplier setup on a per supplier basis, the choice defaulting to supplier code first. Should space(width) be an issue on the PO PDF, I would suggest 2 lines be use for the code and description.

For example

SUPCODE: XX123-FGR008 <- supplier code
          20mm Widget with bell & whistle.
or

INTCODE: Widget20mmBW <- our code
          20mm Widget with bell & whistle.
or

SUPCODE: XX123-FGR008  /  INTCODE: Widget20mmBW <- both codes
          20mm Widget with bell & whistle.

My example is not very elegant so maybe someone else has a better suggestion.

Delivery Date
I feel this is just a waste of valuable horizontal line space and could be moved elsewhere into the header. After all this would be repeated for every item on the PO PDF, possibly this could be combined/replaced with Due Date in the PO header.

Address at the footer.
I dont see the purpose of this here. I feel this should be removed and the space reclaimed.

Phone/Fax/email at the footer.
I dont see the purpose of this here. I feel this would be better served if it was part of the Charge To suggestion as discussed above.

Bank at the footer.
I dont see the purpose of this here. I feel this should be removed and the space reclaimed. Why a supplier should need to see a bank account on a PO is beyond me. What if we are paying cash.

Bank A/C at the footer.
As above.

General
I feel there should be entry fields for further supplier contact info on the Suppliers entry such as contact person/telephone/facsimile. We have the e-mail field already so it would be nice to have the other stuff as well. This should also appear on the PO PDF with the rest of the supplier info. So if the shipping Co. needs to contact the supplier the info is on the PO PDF.

Although I have little or no PHP or MySQL skills (bows down to Joe's skills) I would be happy to assist in sytem analysis and making graphical mockup-ups for discussion.

I look forward to the forums comments.

Regards