Quickbooks has a 31 character limit for item names. A lot of my item names are longer than that and abbreviations aren't always helpful when other employees are using QuickBooks to search for and add these items onto billing, bidding, etc. for jobs. QuickBooks won't allow me to have multiple items with the same names (understandable) but sometimes the only difference between these item names are the sizes or some other small property about them so I need to list that in the description. I've read about categories and creating parent types, but some of our inventory items have several categories they fall under... we are an electrical services company that has thousands of items that we use for jobs. When we can't always use the search bar to look for an item in this huge list because of various abbreviations, it makes it difficult to locate the correct item (unless you know the exact item number, but if an employee doesn't have this and they need to get this done quickly, this becomes a problem).
Like I mentioned above, many items have several categories they fit under, and it would be a huge amount of work and hassle to edit each of those thousands of items and add category columns so that all the proper categories are in place. One way I have thought about getting around this problem is to write the full item name in the description (since description allows more characters) and have the description displayed next to the item name in my Inventory Center. Is this even possible? And if so, would I be able to enter text in the search bar to look for an item and have that text produce results from the description category? I want to check before I do this because it would still require me to do a significant amount of editing to my inventory, though it would be less than adding all the categories for each item.
If Quickbooks even had a 50 character limit I would easily be able to accomplish what I need without going through all this hassle but in order to get around this limit I need to find another solution. Someone please help! Thank you
