Re: Invoice description text

[Luke <..hidden..>]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Keith Edmunds wrote:

> Hi, I'm very pleased Ledger SMB is making such great progress. I'm
> currently testing with a view to hopefully migrating from the only Windows
> application we still use (QB).
> 
> When creating an invoice, we are accustomed to being able to put free
> text in the "description" field, but I can't see how to do that in LSMB.
> For example, we may put, "Linux consultancy - resolve Samba login problem
> and update system". LSMB seems to want to have a service defined for every
> variant of text that appears in the "description" field; clearly that's
> going to be impractical if we have different text for each invoice.

Others answered this, but I thought I might throw in my $0.02:

One thing you could do, if you don't like defining a service and using 
item notes, is to create a service, with nothing entered as the unit.
Set its number to "work" or something.

If your prices are liniar, then set a fixed price on it.  If not, set a 
price of $1.00 or the like, and either use the quantity to change the 
resulting total, or change the price manually to reflect the actual price, 
at time of invoice generation.

As for the description: I haven'te tested this, but you might be able to 
leave the description blank in the item configuration, and just enter it 
at time of invoice generation.  Alternatively, if you can't save with an 
empty description, try something like "[fill in]" and the person 
generating the invoice can empty the field, and enter the actual text.

Something else that you _might_ find practical (although I would not), is 
to modify the printing template for the AR Transaction, so that it looks 
more like an invoice.  The AR Transaction supports the kind of free form 
product/service data you are talking about.

My solution to this has always been (always, as in back in my few years 
with sql-ledger) to set up some vague or sufficiently general product 
description, and use the item notes to specify the real deal.

I have products that are more like categories:

ts-1	Remote technical support
ts-2	On-site technical support
prg-1	Programming/server configuration
...

I then use the itemnotes, which print parentheticly on invoices in my 
templates, to end up with something like:

ts-2	On-site technical support	3	.5 Hr	35.00	105.00
	(Configured 10 workstations to access Samba file shares)

Hth.

Luke