Creating a user friendly invoice management system

1

Hi everyone,

We use Coda in my office to manage 90% of our work and we made a little invoice management system that enables us to plan our invoices and manage liquidity on a monthly basis.

Our system works well and we can leverage it to compare years and plan everything but here are a few downsides :

  • We artificially create empty items for every months so that our layout is clean and to apply automatic formating (showing current month or project that have no planned invoices for example). This works but seems a bit tedious on the long run and could create some system overload.
  • We encounter something that resembles a bug when editing amounts : the item “jumps” and then comes back into place. It’s important to note that this behavior only appears when more that 2 columns are grouped on the left. No idea where that comes from…
    I made a quick video to illustrate this behavior that you can find here :
    SwissTransfer - Envoi sécurisé et gratuit de gros fichiers

I fear that this setup might become to complex and “heavy” in the long run and I’d like to optimize it if possible.

Does anyone have suggestions to optimize our setup or a better way to do this?

I simplified and anonymized our setup so that you can play with it :

Thank you very much for your inputs!

Johan

2

Hello @Johan_Cosandey ,

I don’t think there is a bug, but what you exeperience has probably to do with the way you are grouping. And the grouped table is generally not the place where you are going to edit data, so lock the page for table editing with these type of tables.

About grouping: you are grouping on total fees and unplanned fees - I am not sure I understand what you are trying to accomplisch by grouping this way. Looking at the table with invoices, there is exactly one invoice per projec per month, which seems to be not all that logical (if I understand you correctly, it is done this way for layout purposes, but there are really better ways to accomplish this).

Without a clear understanding of your end goal, I don’t really know where to start to give you some hints.

I would start with a good description of what you are trying to accomplisch, perhaps make a mockup of what is should look like (without formulas, just for showing the communty what you want).
Work with data that resemble a real world scenario - that makes it easier to get an idea.