First, thanks for posting. This is of course quite helpful. On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 4:43 AM, James McDonald <[email protected]> wrote:
> The Add admin user interface has an Import yes / no radio button. What > does that mean? If the import option is clicked, it won't change the password but will import an existing database user into being a LedgerSMB user. > > When you add an admin user there are upwards of 50 checkboxes to > complete. Is that what is supposed to happen? What sort of UI change > will be done to allow templated choices or roles? Right now, the group management interface is pretty untested and I am working on it in addons It is possible to create groups for a specific database manually by prefixing it with lsmb_[dbname]__ (create role .... with inherit nologin). Basically the group management interface would automate that when complete. Note the db name is followed by two trailing underscores. It will then appear as one of the checkboxes. You can then grant roles to that, and use that to manage groups of users. > > Adding a customer: > There is a control code on the first screen. What is it? > When you save the first screen it jumps to an account section. What is > the Customer Number is that the same thing as the Control Code on the > first screen. What do all the account fields mean? So this needs to be better documented. LedgerSMB 1.3 allows for multiple customer and vendor accounts to be tracked to the same entity. The entity control code is the control code for that entity (company). The entity could have several types of accounts. You could have some invoices billed to one department and other invoices billed to others. The two departments could have different payment terms, early payment discounts, bill to names, etc. > > Why once you have added a customer doesn't the sales invoice form become > a drop down and allow selecting the customer or at least a javascript > type a-head for customer auto complete. Is ledgersmb going to use AJAX > or is it going to support text based browsers as before? Currently it is a search form which accepts either customer/vendor number or partial company name. This will support text browsers. I would like to add optional Javascript autocompletes. > > You mention file upload is working. Where is the directory that holds > the uploaded file? Or is it committed to the database? I asked because I > am getting an access denied and can't discern from the apache error.log > file where the access denied is occuring. The database. Note that for database errors we log the SQL state, the full SQL error message, etc. You can pull out all db errors by grepping 'Logging SQL State' from your web server logs. Also I doubt we will expose a lot of information to the user in an Access Denied error but we try to make it obvious to administrators what is going on. Feedback for improving this is welcome. > > I added a business type and then went back into a customer and found > that the business type was now in the customer business type field > although I hadn't selected it which would mean an incorrectly assigned > value if I click save. Sounds like we are not adding the blank top record. Filed bug 3386818. Will fix shortly. This is a user interface bug but it affects your ability to deselect business types and would affect customers created after the business type. > The javascript customer entry screen seems flaky. Clicking doesn't > always display a populated form. More information please: 1) What web browser are you using (name and version) 2) Does it have an error console? 3) If so, when this happens are there any errors on the console? > > Adding an employee the address options are Sales, Billing, Shipping. > Where does one define these defaults? And how do you filter them to > display correctly depending on context? Might be good to rename "Sales" as "Contact." Billing can be used here generically perhaps as where to send the paycheck as long as we document it, if everyone is ok with that. Maybe we could do without the shipping address on employees? In general, I think fewer, consistently reused text strings are better and less confusing in the long run. > > When adding a new user/customer despite setting a default country I > still have to select the correct country. Ok, filed bug 3386821 to investigate further. > > I tried to do a cash receipt and I got an error "42P01:ERROR: relation > "employee" does not exist" Filed bug 3386822. > > LedgerSMB as a project may benefit from: > http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321344758/ref=cm_cd_asin_lnk/184-0022203-6180405 > > All this is on a debian squeeze box. > A couple quick points on the usability side: first LedgerSMB is an accounting program rather than a web site. The two have somewhat different usability rules. While web sites typically provide a lot more information to the user than the user provides back to the web site, accounting software is a lot more complex to use by its vary nature. I am not at all sure that trying to apply web site usability principles to what is essentially business management software will get us very far. It would be quite a bit more helpful to get a discussion going about specific workflows, what works and what doesn't. One thing we can do is provide alternate workflows. The current contact management interface is complex, but not needlessly so at least for many users. We've had many requests on this list and elsewhere to be able to track customer and vendor accounts to the same company, and one of the users of 1.3 in production is currently using multiple customer accounts per company. Maybe someone wants a contact management workflow which doesn't support multiple shipping addresses, or multiple customer/vendor accounts per company. We can create a screen for entering that. Since the API is pretty standardized, this doesn't pose issues like it did in prior versions. That's not to say that if there aren't specific suggestions as to what can be done to make it easier to get started using the application we can't discuss them and see what we can do, but accounting software by its nature is something that requires a fair amount of complexity. So with that in mind, do you have specific changes you think would enhance usability without sacrificing: 1) The ability to track multiple addresses 2) The ability to track multiple customer.vendor accounts per company if you think something would make the application less confusing we can at least talk about it. Maybe we do things your way, and maybe in the discussion a better way comes up. But either way the application benefits. Best Wishes, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-users
