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.

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:


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.