Add supplier checkbox

We always prevented to add such checkbox. We wanted to avoid to loose users if they do not find a supplier because of a not checked box.
But we have more and more features that we add for supplier only on the party like Issue 9420: Add default lead/delivery time for product and suppliers - Tryton issue tracker. And I think having a supplier tab on all the parties may also loose the users.
So I think we could add such checkbox that will display or not the supplier tab on the party but without enforcing it with a domain on the purchase party. Instead we could have a warning/error when such purchase order is quoted to warn the user that it is not an ā€œofficialā€ supplier and so it may not be correctly configured.
Also we should neither put a domain on the product supplier for the same reason.

What do you think?

Yes, I think this will actually clarify things a bit for users, who are wondering why this Supplier tab if it is not a Supplier.

You are only talking about the content of the supplier tab, not the ā€˜supplierā€™ information that we find in the ā€˜Accountingā€™ or ā€˜Stockā€™ tab. Because these points also raise a lot of questions for my users: why do I have to fill in these info, it is a client ???

Anything related to supplier. So if they are in other tab, they could be hidden also.
I think also that the warning could be applied also to incoming shipment and supplier invoice.

Only if purchase module is activated?

But if we include all the supplier related settings in a tab wonā€™t the user expect to have another with the customer details?

Yes of course.

I do not want to put all supplier settings in a tab.
For example accounting tab is good as it is.

For a company, everybody is a customer. So everything else is related to customer.

Donā€™t we already have a supplier tab on parties?

https://demo5.6.tryton.org/#demo5.6/model/party.party/15;name="Parties"&views=[122%2C121]

But as I understand your proposal aims to make users less confused, lost.

If that is the purpose I think users will be less confused if we add a ā€œcustomerā€ flag because we also have a ā€œSaleā€ tab (which is not named ā€œCustomerā€, but it could ā€“ or the ā€œSupplierā€ tab could be named ā€œPurchaseā€).

BTW, the field should be a MultiValue depending on the company.

I donā€™t see the reasoning behind the idea that everybody is a customer but not everybody is a supplier.

Many companies have a stablished workflow before a party can be considered a Customer.

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Yes but I did not get clear if we should move all the supplier information there. But this has been already clarified:

I agree that the current accounting tab is good as itā€™s now. Furthermore I think we should not hide the supplier accounting details if the party is not marked as supplier.

Why? There is no reason to show it if it is not a supplier.

I donā€™t see that as exactly the same case. I would say that there are usually fewer users allowed to create products in a company.

As parties are created early in the sales process (we even allow a party to be created without name!) it is highly probably that already somebody created a supplier as a customer or as a prospect (the sales department can be large in some cases).

However, I find that is different for products. Thereā€™s usually a person or small team in charge of managing the products database of a company unless thereā€™s a way to configure new custom products, in which case products can be created dynamically by some kind of configurator in the sale. In those cases, many sale-only products may be created in the database.

The separation between sale-only and purchase-only products is pretty clear, and I think we make the life of the purchase manager easier if only products with the ā€œpurchaseā€ flag are shown.

And viceversa, the life of a sales person will be easier if no purchase products are shown.

I never talked about the purchase flag on product but of the party field on product supplier.

No problem, I think I probably misread things from this point:

As there will be shown only one payment term (and other fields) the user may enter the information on the customer one instead of the supplier one.

Showing both fields makes it clear that it supplier part should be entered on the right side.

Normally you can sell your products to everyon that wantā€™s to purchase them. So if you have itā€™s data on the system you should be able to easly reuse it.

However I understand your point that there are some companies that need to validate some details of the party before selling anything to them. But for me this is a diferent feature not releated to the current discussion. Could you please write a separate thread for it?

But they are clearly prefixed by ā€œCustomerā€ and ā€œSupplierā€. I often get questions about what to put in those field as the party is not a supplier. It is confusing for users.

I understand that. But Iā€™m just raising the point that if weā€™re talking about the confusion of the user when creating a party, it is as surprising for the user to find a Supplier tab when she is introducing a Customer. As it is surprising for the purchase manager to find a ā€œSalesā€ tab when creating a supplier.

My opinion is that newcommers will find it more intuitive to have two checkboxes: supplier + customer which show/hide tabs or sections rather than having only one ā€œsupplierā€ checkbox.

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For me this is not a big issue as the user should know that a party can be both a supplier and a customer. Furthermore if users do not want to see this supplier/customer fields is just a mather of creating access rules for them and Tryton wil hide automatically the tabs without any field.

Why not renaming the tab to Purchases and have the same behaviour as the Sales one?
Currently the supplier tab is shown the second which give it so much importance while it does not have so much. Moving the tab to the end of the form will give the same importance as the current ā€œSalesā€ one.

I agree that that if we add a supplier checkbox the users will expect to have also a customer one. Currently when you activate sale_price_list and sale_*_grouping modules the amount of fields of the Sales tab is moreless the same as on the suppliers one.

Iā€™m not very fan of both checkboxes because latter users will expect to have a filter on sales and purchases and this is something we must avoid to prevent data duplication.

I do not think so because clearly we will put a default value to True for the customer checkbox.
And also it is quite easy to understand that a supplier can also become your customer but the opposite is very rare.

Indeed I think the ā€œSaleā€ name is probably the one to change.
For sure the supplier tab could be position with just the ā€˜insideā€™ clause. But in Tryton we can not really rely on the tab position to make our design. It is just a best effort.

I do not see why because anybody can be a customer when only few can be a supplier. We can not apply symmetry on this.

This is precisely what my proposal tries to avoid. We will not put any filter or domain on this checkbox. We may even raise an exception if someone tries to use it.

Then why we allow to select any party as supplier?
If we have to check a party as supplier showing parties without suplier on purchases will confuse the user.

To avoid duplicates.

I do not understand.

I mean that if we require the user to check a supplier checkbox to include supplier details on the party it will be confusing to show all they parties on purchases.

At least I will expect that the parties shown as supplier as shown first than the parties not checked as supplier.

We have a wizard to merge parties, so Iā€™m wondering if this can not be easy solved by using the wizard to merge the parties at some point of the workflow.

P.S: Sorry if my comments are a little bit contradictory. I still not have a clear opinion about this proposal so Iā€™m just tryton to see all the pros and crons of current/new behaviour.

For me the issue here is that the are some companies that need to validate their suppliers (hence the need to have a checkbox for supplier) and the same applies for other companies for customers as it has been explained by albert. On both cases there is some kind of validation of the party so it becomes an oficial supplier/customer and this process varies for each company. So Iā€™m not sure if the checkbox/warning is enought.