Hi all, I hate the term, but nevertheless I am a “newbie” to quickfile.
I have a couple of hundred inventory items I want to import into QF, howeverwhat is troubling me is that, having experimented with a few, it seems that one can only “search” (ie drop-down and pick) the “Item Name” field.
Quoting from your help page on the subject:
"…You can store thousands of inventory items in your account and quickly deploy them into your new invoices"
But all I can see is a list of part numbers in the dropdown. So one can only add from the inventory list if you know all the part numbers off by heart! Keyword search would help, in the description field for example.
Am I missing something key here or have I hit a brick wall with using QuickFile?
When importing inventory items into an invoice it will only search the item name field. This is a short field and so we can use it for predictive search. Applying predictive search to the description field will result in poor performance as this particular field can be 500 characters in length. I think we’d need to look some other solution to this.
Thanks for the response, and yes I see that, Glenn, however the Item Name field would not allow enough characters to define between the varied versions of similarly named products that we have - perhaps an example would help:
We make several types of miniature railway buffers, for example, but also these are available in different scales, so one basic type might have up to six variants. To use the Item name field successfully would mean having to re-name all the product codes we currently use, on our website and in our printed catalogue (which are simple alpha numeric codes like “5RM026”) to some type of elongated abbreviation like 5BUFFTPRH for: 5" gauge buffers Turton & Platt type round head - this would become very unwieldy to try and implement across our entire range!
Any further suggestions are most welcome.
What about the possibility of search on say the first 40 or 50 characters of a description? Or a way of selecting an item, or multiple items, from the inventory list page, then auto inserting them into the invoice?
We’ll certainly consider these options, unfortunately I don’t see a quick fix solution at the moment. I think any solution would require some more complex changes to the user interface. I’ll leave your thread open and if other users add their vote to this we can explore in more detail.
In the mean time it’s probably best to keep the inventory area open in a separate tab to search and retrieve the item names by the descriptions. You can then populate these into the invoice.