Customer vs Company

[Retracile]

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 10:00 pm, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Retracile <retracile at earthlink.net> writes:
[snip]
> > I'd like to be able to get a list of all customers.  Nothing more.  I can
>
> There are a number of ways of doing it, but yes, there is not a single
> command to list them all.   One thing you can do is search on regex .*
> or you can search for non-matches of something that you know you don't
> use (as you suggest bellow)...

I think it is a simple task that needs a _simple_ way to do it.  I use regex's 
daily, but my wife hasn't seen one.  It's one more thing I'd have to teach 
her, or get her to memorize.

> > search for non-matches to '?' since none have that in their name.  But
> > there is not a direct way that I can see to just tell me who all the
> > customers are. (To be honest, that is what I expected from the 'Customer
> > Report': just a list of all customers.)
>
> I'm not sure why you'd expect a Customer Report to give you a list of
> all the Customers -- a Customer Report is a report about a
> Customer....
>
> > Basicly,
> > Business -> Customer -> New Customer
> > Business -> Customer -> Find Customer
> > needs
> > Business -> Customer -> List Customers
> > - OR -
> > Reports -> Business Reports
> > needs
> > Reports -> Business Reports -> Customer List
> >
> > and s/Vendor/Customer/ (and s/Employee/Customer/, if applicable.)
>
> Probably the best way to accomplish this would be a "List All" button
> in the search window.  The latter suggestion is out of the question --
> it makes no sense at all.  The former could be done, but I'm still
> hesitant when deep in my gut I find "list all" to be a Bad Idea (TM)
> in general.  It just doesn't scale.

I know it doesn't scale.  On the other hand, I have this printout of my 
customers that I need to enter into GnuCash.  I'd like to have a list to 
compare against my paper list.  And for that matter, a way to make another 
paper list of customers.
It may sound like a hack, but having a dialog pop up that says "You have more 
than 200 customers.  Generating a list of all of them will take a lot of 
time.  Are you sure?" and then have a progress dialog "Generating a complete 
list of customers..." with a [Cancel] button come up if they say [Yes], would 
provide the functionality to those who would use it (since they don't have 
many customers) while warning the user they're about to do something 
computationally expensive.
(Generating a list in preparation for a mail-merge might be another 
possibility, though that might be more of an 'export customer list as CSV' 
function.)
Alternatively, display them 50 at a time.
Even so, I doubt you'd like it. :)  I may try doing something like that 
though.

> > That reminds me....
> > When there is no customer selected, the message is "No Valid Company
> > Selected", which to a new user, isn't very helpful, particularly if they
> > are expecting a list of Customers.  I'd much rather see something like
> > "This report gives information on a selected customer.  Use the Options
> > button to select the desired customer."  It would need to say vendor (or
> > employee?) instead of customer, as appropriate.
>
> Well, expecting a list of customers was just, well.... Silly!  I have
> no clue what gave you that impression.  It's not like there are other
> reports that would do that, so I'm not sure what gave you that
> impression.

Silly?  Well, I was looking for a "Report of my customers".  There _aren't_ 
other reports that would do that, and, well, I expected there to be one, and 
that was the closest match I found.  "Who are your customers?" is a 
reasonable question to ask of a business.

> As for "No Valid Company Selected" -- that's a good idea.  The major
> issue is that the same code is used for Customers, Vendors, and
> Employees so we would need a BUNCH of extra strings in there.  But I
> do like your suggestion -- I'll just but a case statement in there and
> use a bunch of strings like that.

Yay! :) Do you want an RFE filed for that?

> > Come to think of it...  Can we say 'customer company' and 'vendor
> > company' here?  It would at least give a clue about the 'everyone is a
> > company' premise.
>
> No.  I very much dislike that phrase.

Fair enough, I shan't bring it up again. :)

> > > Basically, you are allowed to enter the invoice id yourself if you
> > > wish, but if you leave it blank then then system will automatically
> > > generate one for you -- a monotonically-increasing number.  Hover your
> > > mouse over the ID entry and read the pop-up message.
> >
> > Hmm....  Then I'd be of the opinion that it should be removed.  Add
> > auto-completion or something if you want a shortcut.  But I think having
> > this field adds complexity for the user for little-to-no gain
>
> Just because YOU don't use it doesn't mean someone else doesn't.
> I for one use the IDs.  You can feel free to ignore it, but removing
> it because YOU don't find it useful is a little selfish, don't you
> think?

Umm... I think I must not have presented that statement very well.  Having a 
shortcut is a reasonable thing to want, and not something I want to remove.  
I was looking at it from the perspective that if the shortcut functionality 
was provided through auto-completion, we could then reduce the number of 
fields confronting the user without loss of functionality.
*shrug* It's a minor point, and one obviously subject to debate, so I'll 
pursue the other issues instead.

Keep up the good work!

Eli