Disable product drop-down?

Is it possible to disable the product drop-down when adding a new line to a quote or invoice? Because of the way our business operates, I need to produce a new product every time a line is added to a quote or invoice.

You can prevent it from auto-filling the details on Settings > Products but you’d need to self host the app and modify the code to disable it entirely.

Thanks Hillel.

I have tried that but a new product is not generated if I enter a product name that has been used before.

Allow me to explain the background to this query :

Using our current system, we quote and invoice our customers for parts and consumables. We have some custom scripts that extract data from the invoicing system database and use this data to track the status of line items on quotes and invoices in another database. For example, we can produce purchase orders from individual items on invoices, track their payment status, assign locations to line items when they are delivered to us, and create packing lists from line items on invoices. Our custom scripts rely on the fact that line items on quotes and invoices have a unique ID that do not change. Using this ID we can track an individual item’s progress through our procurement procedure, even if two items on different invoices have the same name. The system works well but the invoicing software is old, un-maintained, and lacks certain features that we need.

Invoice Ninja has all the features missing from our current software. I would switch immediately, and happily pay a subscription, but for one problem : the id of invoice items changes when a previously added item is removed. Because of this, there is no way for a third party to relate line items in Invoice Ninja to data on another database. There is not a unique identifier for each line item that does not change. I thought a solution would be to force Invoice Ninja to create a new product for every line item on an invoice, regardless of whether that item name had been used before. That way I could use the product id instead of the line id as an identifier for the custom scripts. There does not seem to be a trivial way of implementing this though, and I’d rather not modify Invoice Ninja code at all if possible.

Id’ be interested in your thoughts on my conundrum.

Kind regards,

One option may be to use a custom product field but you’d have to manually handle setting the id which isn’t ideal.