We’ve been requested some times to add some notes on parties that will be used later for related documents. Some examples:
In customer shipments, if the customer have special request for receiving the shipments. (i.e: Only in the morning, closed some days).
In sales: A special person should be contacted, it needs some aproval by sales representative. Some special discount has been agreed for the next order.
In Invoices: For example to indicate that invoice should be also sent by postal mail and email.
Proposal
We have the option to Copy resources to created documents so we can activate such feature by default on operation modules, allowing to copy notes from parties to operational documents. This way, once creating the new record related to a party the user will have a unread note that should be checked allowing him to have the relevant information needed.
Why? We already do that for some fields (i.e: Payment term, tax_identifier on invoices).
The fact is that one note is valid for some time and we may have another data for the future.
Also this helps comunication before diferents users on the system and diferent departments.
Indeed there are cases where a solution by adding new fields on parties and adding some warning/notifications on the operational workflow may also solve the problem.
The idea is to avoid the customization by adding dedicated field for each case and empower our users to use the notes for its own usage. That’s why I added some examples of usage. The feature is not related to just such usages, but mainly focused in improving comunication and make the information available to the right person at the right time.
This is not the same to copy a reference than copying a full document.
But I do not think this is a correct design but sounds more like a gadget. A gadget that can be come quickly a nightmare to manage properly.
I think most of the similar needs should be filled by common dedicated fields and workflows. And once most of them will exist the need of such gadget will disappear.
I’ve created an checkbox for that and modified the workflow, so when a user post an invoice, based on the checkbox it will come up with an email dialog to send the invoice by email. If you want to do it even more automatically you can also use triggers.
Also for sales it’s basically the same, move the sale into another state and use a trigger to another person by email. Or use a wizard to help the user choose the person.
I see this more of something for the carrier. If you are the carrier yourself, this can go onto the shipment report. Most of the times this kind of messages are very specific for certain times and not always needed.
But what if you turn the whole thing around? Instead of copy. add a list of models to the Note and maybe a date Not After. Let the system search all the notes by filtering on model and date.