Attachments
Since I started adding attachments with Quicken many years ago, it is not easy to get to the attachments and use them. It would be very helpful for Quicken to add recursive export -- such as export for an account, attachments in a register with perhaps the description/date, etc. Right now, while helpful to get one attachment, the attachments being embedded in the QDF makes them significantly less useful -- especially for someone that has lots of years of adding them.
Comments
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I quit trying to use attachments years ago because of difficulty. I support any improvement in the Attachment arena.2
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I was glad to find this thread - it saved me a lot of time! I decided to plow ahead with attachments, mostly out of curiosity. I found that, if I added a tag for "attachment", it was easy to find a list of Itemized Tags through Spending Reports.1
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I love being able to scan directly from my printer to a transaction. But I can only scan one page and then I have to attach previously scanned pages after that. I would like to scan a multiple page document, such as a credit card bill, all at once into a single transaction.0
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I concur that having an ability to to better manage attachments in bulk would be a welcome addition. E.g., an export to pdf and file tree options.
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+1 would love to be able to do this to also take advantage of paperless-ngx which has awesome OCR etc.
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+1 on mass-exporting attachments. Would like to see this at an account and file level. Maybe from multi-select transactions in account or "All transactions" registers too. I'd like to feed the images into a document library manager which would then OCR the images/PDFs and make the receipts searchable.
File naming is honestly up in the air — anything to get this feature into the product — but would be nice to be able to provide a format field and variables like:
%0 - account name
%1 - amount (always positive)
%2 - downloaded amount (always positive)
%3 - payment or deposit ("P" or "D" or "0")
%a - amount
%A - downloaded amount
%b - balance
%B - balance (always positive)
%c - category name (or "SPLIT")
%C - cleared field (nothing, "c", or "R")
%d - transaction date
%D - downloaded posting date (%d if empty)
%e - expensed (nothing or "E")
%f - flags (nothing or name of flag color)
%F - alert for follow-up date
%I - downloaded ID
%m - memo field
%M - downloaded memo
%n - check # field
%N - downloaded reference
%p - payee field
%P - downloaded payee (%p if empty)
%t - tag name
%x - tax-related (nothing or "tax")
%X - tax line item (nothing, "SPLIT", or tax line item without the colon)
%z - attachment date
%Z - attachment number (index starting at 1)
Date text format should be able to be specified, but should default to a sortable format like YYYY-MM-DD.
The default recommendation for attachment export name could be: %d_%p_%a_%Z
In the event of a file name collision during export (file already exists), the standard "<space>(#)" rule would apply. The user could most likely easily solve it by using the balance (%b) unless the amount (%a) was 0.2 -
This would be an awesome tool to have. I could DEFINITELY use this!
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I have to admit, that when the attachments were moved out of the Quicken data directory (as separate files) and into the QDF itself, I stopped using them. I think this was around 2009?
For starters, this blew up the size of my QDF file. Not so great for doing backups. (Though to be fair, backing up large files is a lot faster now than it was in 2009!)
I've spend the ensuing years moving attachments out of my Quicken data directory — which is where the Quicken upgrade at the time left them — into more useful directories, and deleting them from Quicken, gradually one-by-one. Spoiler alert — I still have several hundred to go.
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It is worrisome to me that at some point Quicken may decide to abandon the Attachment feature. (Using Quicken Classic Deluxe on Mac)
Being a paperless office, I have used it for many years and look back to those attachments often for doing taxes, insurance claims, you name it. Main point is they are very important since I don't keep paper files. I know some would say you need to have both. But, what's the point of going paperless, if you can't rely on your digital documents. In other arenas other than accounting, those are saved in Devonthink Pro Office in a folder hierarchy that I create-easy to find. These are automatically backed up many times per day. But, with Quicken, although there are backups, they are so embedded in Quicken's folder hierarchy it would be crazy if you were forced to try to find something there. The only reasonable way is to find them within Quicken's application. I really do love that the attachments are right there with the transactions. But, yes I worry, because I'm relying on Quicken for the safety of those attachments staying where they are --no changes from Quicken.
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It is worrisome to me that at some point Quicken may decide to abandon the Attachment feature.
Like a lot of features put into Quicken Windows, the attachment feature was pretty much abandoned right after it was put in. The one exception to that is syncing them to the Quicken Cloud dataset.
The attachments never had any kind of good organization system to work with them. It has always been one attachment at a time.
Over the years, there have been many requests to improve this, but it has never happened.
Quicken Windows is the "feature rich, abandoned feature capital of the world."
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