Update note:  The custom project described here has now been released as a commercial product, Catch Weights™ for QuickBooks

VP Foods, Inc., is a meat and seafood wholesaler in West New York, New Jersey. They wanted to use QuickBooks company wide, but had a problem:  common business practice in seafood wholesaling is to sell some seafood items (lobsters, for example) by their individual catch weights. An invoice for 15 lobsters needs to show the catch weight of each lobster. But the only way QuickBooks allows individual weights to be entered is by entering a separate invoice line for each weight, and that meant a simple order for various quantities of three seafood items might result in an invoice several pages long.

In other words, VP Foods really wanted to use QuickBooks, but if only it would allow individual catch weights to be entered on a single invoice line. They contacted us to see if it would be possible to make QuickBooks do this by creating a simple add-on.

The result was Catch Weights, a QuickBooks add-on program which accepts the entry of individual catch weights, then adds them in the Description column of the current invoice line and inserts the total weight in the Quantity column...an easy way to get multiple individual weights displayed succinctly on a QuickBooks invoice line, plus automatic calculation of their total.

Catch Weights Pop-Up Window

Anyone entering an invoice at VP Foods can pop up Catch Weights at any time, by pressing a user-selectable hotkey. On Catch Weight's main tab, they can enter individual weights, as shown here:

Clicking the OK button inserts the weight information appropriately in the invoice, where they may complete the line by filling in the Price:

Catch Weights is obviously very simple to use. It was a short, quick project, which solved a very targeted need for our client, VP Foods, Inc.

Even Catch Weight's options are simple, but they let users control some important operating characteristics of the program:

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