Topic: Better UI for customer management (mockup inside)
Hello devs,
As it currently stands, FrontAccounting has a pretty rudimentary system to select a customer on the "Add/Manage Customers" page. It works but it is not very powerful (can only search by name) or intuitive. If search is enabled, it is quite easy to miss the tooltip telling you to press space to display the search box, and without that tooltip, you will probably never guess to do that.
I've made a mockup of an easier-to-use customer lookup system. I've used something like this in conjunction with a database with hundreds of thousands of customer entries, and the UI design works quite well in that context, so I think it would be a very useful addition to FrontAccounting.
Initial display—all customer entries are shown by default (split across several pages as appropriate, of course). If you know this is a new customer you can go ahead and click "Add New". If you want to search for an existing customer, you can search by Name or other appropriate fields (perhaps an GSTNo. or some other kind of customer ID number?) or you can browse the entries manually (which might be faster for smaller companies). Clicking the 'Edit' icon brings up the familiar customer edit form currently in FrontAccounting.
After entering search—only customers that match the search query are displayed.
This customer lookup system would be useful not just for Add/Manage Customers, but in any case where customer records are being used, e.g. when creating an invoice.
Somewhat related: it would probably be useful to add a field to the customer table for an ID/account number. For example, I sell mostly on Amazon, so it would be useful to be able to associate a customer's Amazon account number with their record. Then I could look them up simply by keying in their account number.
