Editor tips: inline products, customers, taxes, and reordering rows

Most of what you would otherwise do in Business settings — adding a product, creating a customer, defining a tax rate, registering a bank account — can be done directly from the invoice or estimate editor, without losing the row you were typing into.

Inline product creation

Typing in a line item searches the product catalogue. If nothing matches, the freeform name is accepted as-is.

To turn a freeform line into a reusable product, click the line's name and choose Save as product. The product panel slides in with the name, price and tax rate from the line; saving links the line to the new product record so future invoices autocomplete it.

When a line is already linked to a product, the same place shows Edit product — editing changes the product record, but lines already on existing documents keep their original price and tax (see Historical data in invoices and estimates).

Inline customer creation with business-registry autofill

Start typing a customer name and, if the business's country supports it, Sliptree queries the local business registry in the background. Matches appear under Results from Business Registry below the input.

Picking a match fills in the registration number, VAT number, legal address and country. Customers that do not show up — sole proprietors, foreign businesses, private individuals — can be filled in manually; the customer is saved when the document is saved.

Reordering line items

Every line item has a grip handle on its left edge. There are two ways to use it.

Drag the handle up or down to drop the row anywhere in the list:

Or click the handle to open a menu with Move to top, Move up, Move down, and Move to bottom — handy on touch devices or when the list is long:

Next to the grip handle, a + button inserts a new empty row immediately after the current one — so a line does not have to be added at the bottom and dragged into place.

On-the-fly tax editing

Clicking the tax rate on any line opens a dropdown of the business's tax rates. From the same dropdown, Add tax rate defines a new rate without leaving the editor; the new rate is available everywhere immediately. Full rules for editing and deactivating rates are in Managing tax rates.