Client selection "bug"

Self-Hosted | v4/Legacy
1

Yeah, it’s quoted because it does not seem to be a bug per se :smiley: Today I found something which, at least for me, does not seem lika a defect in Invoice Ninja, but I’ll report anyway.

This is the situation. I have two clients in the database:
(client #1)
Company name: XYZ
Contact name: John Doe
E-mail: john.doe@xyz.com

(client #2)
Company name: <blank>
Contact name: John Doe
E-mail: johndoenyc@gmail.com

This is so because John Doe used to work at company XYZ, but now he’s on his own and I’m still doing services for him. And in order to not mess with previous invoices, and to properly store client data in new invoices, I did that.

I noticed this cool feature in Invoice Ninja: if I start typing JOHN when adding a new invoice, Invoice Ninja will show both XYZ and JOHN DOE in the customers list - that is, it’ll search in company names and in contact names, so I don’t really need to remember that Doe works at XYZ when adding an invoice. Great time saver.

But in my case the “bug” is that it is showing two JOHN DOEs and both are associated to client #1, when one of these JOHN DOEs should associate with client #2.

This is easy to overcome, I just need to go to the clients list, select the correct one and add an invoice from there. But I thought about reporting this one, just in case. I won’t mind if this is never fixed - that’s why I called it a “bug” and not a bug :smiley:

2

Thanks for reporting this, I agree in cases like this the client selector can be hard to use.

We’re looking into improving this in an upcoming release.

3

I actually like this “feature”. Sometimes I forget the client name exactly but know the contact and type that in.

4

Yeah, I too like that Invoice Ninja searches both client names and contacts.

5

Agreed, it’s important that we search by both fields.

The problem I see currently is that we display the search results poorly, it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a client or the contact. When you match a contact the client is chosen which feels a bit weird as the selected text changes.

Ideally we’d like to show a client card which includes the contacts to improve the UX.

6

“it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a client or the contact”
Well, I don’t have problems with it being as it is. In any case it would assign the invoice to the correct person/company/whatever, so by me it’s fine.

It’s just this specific case, which really, is not a big deal.

7

FYI… here’s the upcoming solution.

https://trello.com/c/kgOG8RcU/154-improved-client-selector-on-create-invoice-page