One of my jobs here is doing some accounting. Not exactly a thrill a minute, but it's something that I can do well, and a good way to learn a bit about the company. Today was not great (I had to go to the Tanzanian Revenue Authority, wait in lots of lines to submit one of our tax forms, got sent back and forth to lots of counters and wound up losing two hours in there), but yesterday was actually slightly painful.
I was working with our accounts and trying to sort out the details with our inventory, but I couldn't find what I was looking for in the software that we use. So I went to the help page and searched through the articles on inventory. I found the correct one and tried to follow the steps. When I reached step 4 (out of 10), I was at a complete loss. They told me to click on a drop down menu that was nowhere to be found. I tried tweaking lots of different settings and even called over a coworker to make sure I wasn't staring at it and missing it. Finally, after 30 frustrating minutes of this, I contacted their help staff (unfortunately, that requires waiting until US business hours, which is not very useful for us over here). Below is an excerpt of the reply that I received:
"Unfortunately, you accessed an article that is for the upcoming release, but the instructions in the article do not apply yet."
Hmmmm, seems like they might want to fix this. Then, the staff member sent me a link to their help page (which I had clearly used to access this article) and suggested that I might find it useful for future queries. I checked, but I couldn't find an article that says that random articles are actually useless on the current version. Funny how this is a "professional" version of the software. I am pretty sure that free software like GnuCash doesn't pull shenanigans like this.
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