More descriptive name for uploaded receipts

Could the email subject be used as the name for uploaded receipts, rather than a random string?

How are you uploading the receipts?

Email. In this case forwarding an invoice which was in the body of the message.

I guess the reason we did it like this is because email subjects are unpredictable in length and can contain special characters that need to be escaped. I’ll leave it open though and if we have time to review this we can see if it’s possible to use something more distinctive.

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Hi Glenn,
I was reading another thread about this same subject and it got me thinking that there may be some milage in thinking about this a bit more.

We sometimes struggle to find receipts in the hub when suppliers email an invoice to us, but omit a decent description of the file. Often, the file name does not reflect anything to do with the invoice at all, and often we have to search our email folder to see when it was emailed in to QF to at least know a date and then hunt around there.

I take the point that it will be difficult to come up with a method for extracting the file name to use from the subject line… I mean, what happens if the file name is acceptable, but QF changes that for the subject line instead?

Well, I’ve been thinking and I have a simple idea which might support all users…

…If the user inserts a file name in the subject line surrounded by special characters like {} curly braces (or some other character that is not often used) , then QF changes the file name on import… otherwise it leaves it alone.

In this way, those users that are happy with current functionality will never know the difference, and those who need to change file names can use this system as and when they need to.

That seems like a plausible solution, I can’t see any issues doing this!

I have logged a ticket on our internal development system so we can review this shortly. I will update this thread as soon as I have more info.

@james @gino

We’ve now deployed an update that will allow you to override the automatic naming of receipts that come in through the receipts@ inbox. @gino we decided to implement your suggest and allow for the use of curly braces to specify an exact name.

{My receipts for London Trip}

OR

blah blah  {My receipts for London Trip} blah

Essentially whatever you put in curly braces will get used as the name for the imported receipts, even if there is text before or after it.

For multiple attachments it will still use your nominated title but it will suffix with (1), (2), (3) etc.

Hope that helps, let me know when you’ve tried it out.

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