Credit notes

[John Ralls]

On Aug 30, 2012, at 10:35 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> I started working on full credit note support a while ago. Other than some polishing this support is mostly complete. You can now create credit notes just like you create invoices for both vendors and customers. Credit notes can be refunded or used to "pay" (part of) an invoice.
> 
> I have one more part to finish that I need some feedback on: GnuCash' UI often refers to Invoices and Bills, like in "Find Invoice...", "New Bill...", the tab, dialog and window titles and so on. In may cases these descriptions are deceiving with tne new credit note support. For example: New Invoice... allows you to create either an invoice or a credit note. So in many cases "invoice" needs to be replaced by something that covers both invoices and credit notes.
> 
> I thought of "Sales Document" and "Purchase Document". That would give "New Sales Document...", "Find Purchase Document..." and so on, but those are very long terms. Especially in tab titles this makes the tabs very wide.
> 
> I could make separate menu items for "New Invoice..." and "New Credit Note...", but I don't want to do that really. There are already too many menu items in my opinion. And that doesn't solve the issue there still is with Invoice for Customers, Bill for Vendors and Credit Note for both. Using "Vendor Credit Note" in a tab title is equally bad as "Purchase Document" in tab titles.
> 
> So the challenge here is to come up with good names for the menu items and tabs, while remaining user (interface) friendly.
> 
> Anyone who's good with words, can you voice your opinions here please ?

If you look in an English thesaurus, you'll find that "invoice" and "bill" are synonyms. Using one for Customer transactions and the other for Vendor transactions isn't even necessary since they're in different menus. Using "Purchase Document" and "Sales Document" doesn't really help either, because the document you get from a Vendor is always a "purchase document", regardless of the direction of the cash flow. How about just "Statement" to replace both Invoice and Bill?

Regards,
John Ralls