"has attachment" search enhancement

#1

I probably do need a better way to do this, but at the moment I attach all invoices and receipts to the relevant payments or invoices within manager. I do realise this contributes to the size of the database and instead could just keep them elsewhere, but that is what I’m doing at this point. My thinking, anyone else looking at the account can immediately find evidence of why something was paid. Also, it serves to keep two copies of everything, once in the database and my scanning location.

Currently I am going through my purchase invoices and receipts and payments and allocating missing attachments. However I can’t seem to find a way to sort or search by attachment.

I realise this isn’t a core feature of manager, but if the search box could have some keyword or other mechanism for listing “things” by attachment, eg, Caltex <has attachment> or an advanced search.

This way I could go down and populate those entries that don’t have any attachments.

BTW, I did search in custom reports, but that doesn’t seem to fit the bill at all.

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#2

What you want basically happens automatically. Look for the paper clip symbol in any tab listing. For example, go to the Sales Invoices tab and search for a customer. Presence of attachments is indicated by the paper clip icon:

32%20AM

The first invoice in the above list has an attachment, the next two do not.

#3

@Tut i believe the request made by @d3mad was to sort or search the list wrt attachments just like the other column headings can be sorted or searched.

#4

@d3mad initially said “sort or search.” My point was that the search result is effectively always present. No, you cannot sort by whether an attachment exists or not, but since he was looking for the absence of attachments, and the paper clip symbol is in the first column, checking for transactions with missing attachments is easy. You would look in exactly the same place as if the list were sorted.

#5

I agree it would be nice to have the attachment column sortable (to group all transactions with attachments at the top of the list).

I would also like the attachment column visible on the summary screen drill down of accounts in general. Use case; when investigating an area of business I mostly know in which account the relevant transactions will be. So being able to see where the documentation is stored, and which transactions are yet to have appropriate information attached, would be time efficient.

I appreciate columns space is at a premium and others may prefer not to devote the space to a feature they don’t use. To recover some screen space having the edit and view buttons in the same table cell (so they can wrap) would also be nice however I’m not sure how technically difficult that would be to do.

Imo all low priority but nice to have.

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#6

basically what I was after was something like @tut’s suggestion last week where I wanted to find self balancing invoices. clicking the invoice total column brought all those to the top. I would like to have replicated that here, either be able to bring all attachment items to the top (or click again to send to the bottom), or to just show items specifically with or without attachments.

The idea being if I bring up a list of things without attachments I can just simply add them in.

Checking for the paperclip is really sufficient, and it kind of does suit my need, it’s just that often scrolling, next page, scrolling, next page, does tend to get a little tedious when I then view, add attachment and then start again. I can open them in a new tab and take care of them, it just gets a little messy.

If a search could bring items w/o attachments to the top, it’s just a matter of clicking on it and adding one and doing it again.

It’s not a big deal, it would just be nice if there was an easy way to group them.

TBH, turning on sort by that column would do it perfectly and I’d be more than happy with that

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#7

I don’t know if it is technically feasible to sort by the attachment column. All other sorts are conducted on data present on transaction forms. Attachments are not part of transaction forms, but are somehow associated with View screens.

#8

This is cool and helps manage attachments overall:

https://www.manager.io/guides/9817

But in the same way that a specific tab is created for all attachments, it would still be improved by being able to drill down a current list into “has attachment” or “no attachment”

I have been working on trying to do this in the DOM trying to edit and sort the table dynamically but since the cell only has an image and not a value, I am unable to get that column to sort in any useful way.

I’m still working on it though. If I do solve it, I will post the code.