Please allow us to show or hide specific custom fields depending on the user's role and the context.
We've got a lot of custom fields. Some of them are for users to use when creating subscriptions/invoices/etc., but others are used exclusively by custom functions/API's and should never be visible to users. We need to be able to hide these "API fields" from users, otherwise we risk users tampering with important fields used by custom functions, which in turn affect a lot of other things, both inside and outside of Zoho Billing.
In order to reduce the risk of users entering data into the wrong fields, I've had to resort to creating even more custom fields to act as "separators" and "instructions" for users. For example, here's what our users see when creating a subscription:
Look at this mess The fields highlighted in yellow exist for the sole purpose of organizing the page in a meaningful way to make it easier for users to enter data into the right fields. But at this point, there are so many of these bogus fields that it's almost doing more harm than good, since the subscription page looks so cluttered now.
- Without these separators, it's a major pain to train our employees to know which fields to fill out, and which ones to leave alone. We tried it this way for 3 years and still could not get people to fill in the right things.
- With the separators, employees are finding it easier to fill in the right data. However, it comes at the cost of 1) a very cluttered-looking page, but more importantly 2) less custom fields available for us to use, since there are limits to how many custom fields we can create.
Furthermore, CAN WE PLEASE SEPARATE CUSTOM "INVOICE" FIELDS FROM CUSTOM "SUBSCRIPTION" FIELDS??? You guys treat Subscriptions and Invoices as separate 'modules', so why in the world do they share custom fields? There should be custom fields for subscriptions, and custom fields for invoices. Seeing subscription-related fields when creating an invoice for a non-subscription-related customer is annoying to look at, and dangerous.
All of this could easily be solved by adding a few options in the "Field Customization" settings.
Currently, we are able to specify which fields are "Mandatory" and which fields to "Show in all PDFs", but there should also be options for the following:
- "Show For Roles" (multi-select) - allow us to specify which users/roles to show certain fields to
- "Show When Creating Subscription" (bool) - allow us to show/hide certain fields when creating subscriptions
- "Show When Editing Subscription" (bool) - allow us to show/hide certain fields editing subscriptions
While I'm at it, these settings should exist for Invoices, Estimates, Credit Notes, and anything else that uses custom fields too:
- "Show When Creating Invoice" (bool)
- "Show When Editing Invoice" (bool)
- "Show When Creating Estimate" (bool)
- "Show When Editing Estimate" (bool)
- etc.
Thank you,
Josh