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Attachments to Accounts and Transactions

Michael Hauser

This may have been covered elsewhere (sorry) but I wanted to bring this up and test out my theory of a work around and see if there are any other suggestions.

In early 2019, I made a concerted effort to increase my use of ATTACHING documents to my accounts and transactions. It's a good feature that really reduced paperwork retention and other organizational enhancements. However, there is a downside that I have experienced - it increases the data file size (substantially) and degrads Quicken's speed/performance. I reviewed a few options.

What I ended up doing as an interim step. I created a safety copy of the data with all of the attachments. In my go-forward data file, I deleted all of the attachments (took a while). The end result is the go-forward file size is about 1/6th the large size and is manageable. If ever I need something that was attached, I have the safety copy to pull that document from.

My suggestion (for the time being and going forward) is that I will store my document on my hard drive or other medium and in the FLAG section of the transaction, I will note the location of where I have stored the document. I am looking to see if Quicken will accept a link/hyperlink....is that something that someone is aware of or if not, maybe Quicken can be alerted to this as a suggestion.

Again, the attachment feature was great but does have a risk. I'm interested if anyone else has similar sentiments or if there was something I could have done or do to make this more workable for me.

Thanks.

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Comments

Rocket J Squirrel

Michael Hauser said:
My suggestion (for the time being and going forward) is that I will store my document on my hard drive or other medium and in the FLAG section of the transaction, I will note the location of where I have stored the document. I am looking to see if Quicken will accept a link/hyperlink....is that something that someone is aware of or if not, maybe Quicken can be alerted to this as a suggestion.

This is exactly what I am planning to do with my attachments.

QWin does not recognize hyperlinks in either the Notes or Memo fields of transactions. Currently, we'd need to manually copy and paste the URL into a browser.

The file: URI scheme ought to be useful for this (e.g, file:///C:/users/username/Documents/Quicken/Attach/2019/Jun/24-receipt.pdf), though it would be nice if Q could recognize any link.

I will ask the moderators to convert this to an Idea and move it to an Ideas section of the forum.

Quicken_Natalie

Hello Michael,

Thank you for bringing this to the attention of the Community!

I went ahead and turned this discussion into an Idea thread so that other users are able to vote on it. Our developer's review Idea threads to get an idea of what people would like Quicken to offer.

Be sure to add your vote by clicking on the gray triangle right above the current vote count, located in the blue box at the beginning of this thread:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6031128/uploads/editor/nw/1qlt9am6anpk.png

Thank you,

Quicken Natalie

Michael Hauser

Done, thank you. Hope it gets some traction.

Dave22

That is exactly what I was here looking for. Makes lots of sense for a few reasons. By only attaching a shortcut to a document in the local file system, we 1 - keep the Q file size to a minimum
2 - can update the "attachment"

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth for anyone that wants to remove attachments from their data file, there is now a way to do that without having to do it one at a time.
File -> File Operations -> Copy... -> deselect only the Include attachments, renaming the copy if you like and select OK. That will give a copy without the attachments.

Michael Hauser

Good suggestion. Would’ve saved me a ton of time since I did it manually one by one.

tmaleski

It would be great if Quicken created a tool that would export out All attachments based upon a user defined format.
I will be using "Account Date (YYYYMMDD) Payee Amount" but having an Export Option dialog would allow users to choose.

Dave22

The idea of attaching a shortcut to a transaction was brilliant, but it's now been a few YEARS and I see NOTHING has been done. I'm not a coder, but it sure seems pretty easy to implement. My Q file is 600MB and I hesitate to attach more attachments because of that.

Michael Hauser

I am renewing this idea of allowing hyperlinks in the transaction to link to wherever the related or pertinent document is stored outside of quicken. This way it’s accessible for sharing if needed, and the document does not fatten the size of the Quicken file and degrade performance. The article by John Hewitt recently gave great ideas for using the attachment feature, and I think many of the benefits could be easily accomplished with a hyperlink.

Michael Hauser

I renew this idea once again.

Doug Giannotti

Any transaction on this Quicken? It's been yrs since this was 1st suggested. I'm in the same boat as above, as soon as quicken allowed attachments I started using them. I went back and scanned everything important and added to all record transaction. Right now my quicken file size with attachments is over 4GB. I fear going forward this is just going to keep growing & growing.

Can we please just get the functionality to hyperlink to a document both local & cloud storage. I mean you guys even give us Dropbox storage w the quicken subscription so let us fully use it.

I can't see this as a huge task for development. You already have the basis there in the My Web Links widget for classic Dashboard.

You just need to implement that within the transaction box.

It would also be nice to have a tool that loops through each of the quicken records, grabs the attachments and writes it to somewhere, but now i'm asking for too much.

Just please listen to your community and implement this hyperlink functionality for attachments.

Michael Hauser

I’m kind of curious as to how many of Quicken’s users form a quorum, so to speak. In other words, what quantity of related suggestions gets their attention? I see you’re a beta tester…do you get involved in the product reviews and feature suggestions? I would be interested in participating in a focus group or similar but I’m a simple user and may not be using some of the more detailed features, but I have been using the software for nearly 30 years.

Doug Giannotti

Beta testing is more New features / functionality. You do have a forum to enter suggestions, but it's just another avenue.

mikeo@

I fully agree and support a mechanism to move attachments to separate files with hyperlinks. My Quicken data file has grown to over 14GB and performance is degraded. Back in 2014, I was concerned with the growth of my Quicken data file and Quicken informed me that the Quicken file can have as many transactions as allowed by the size of my hard drive. Based on this, I relied on the attachment capability extensively. In reality, it is still working, but the performance is slowing down. Last year, Quicken recommended that I delete older transactions to reduce the file size - I did not do that as I rely on Quicken to find old purchase records for warranty and maintenance needs. Hyperlinks to external attachment files seems like an easy way to link to attachments without bloating the data file. I vote for Quicken to implement this capability as well as an ability to more quickly manage attachments (e.g., Alt-c, Alt-s, and Alt-f to copy from clipboard, attach from scanner, and attach from file).

Randy 415

I'm not interested in storing my attachments in Quicken. Did that years ago. Then they ended that feature and I lost everything.

Rather I would like a connection (link) from a transaction to multiple PDF files (or similar), I store on my PC or cloud drive. And one that can survive a reorganization of my cloud drive folders or PC file system.

Michael Hauser

Again, I renew my suggestion (first made in 2019) to allow users to insert a hyperlink in any transaction or account description of a document that they have stored elsewhere. This enables off-line storage of the document, thereby reducing the file size of the quicken database and maintain performance.

Thank you.

(The feature to attach documents to transactions was a great enhancement but ultimately, it does have a flip side which is to increase the quicken data file and degrade performance.)

Dave22

It's possible to create a shortcut to the file you want to attach and then attach the shortcut to Quicken instead of the full file. It works, but it's clumsy. It accomplishes the objective of not increasing the Q file size.

The only downside to this is that if you move the original file then the shortcut you attached to Quicken would no longer work.

It really DOES seem like incorporating this into Quicken would be almost trivial.