I usually use a subject line like this when sending receipts@quickfile.co.uk a JPG/PDF: description, date, amount. E.g.
“stationery 2014-11-04 £2.50”
Wouldn’t it be cool if the QuickFile system can tokenise it somehow. Dates are always YYYY-mm-dd and amounts are always prepended with a currency sign, so those can be easily extracted. The rest can be assumed to be the description.
If all else fails, expect hints:
“stationery date:2014-11-04 amount:£2.50”
So these tokens would get picked up and stored as meta data alongside the scan? Presumably then you’d want this to auto-fill whenever you then create a purchase invoices from the receipt? Am I following you correctly here?
Yes, and it just occurred to me that the Supplier can also be specified this way, but using a hint (as described in the OP) so it doesn’t get confused with the description.
Also, when viewing the receipt for the first time, there can be indicators showing “This field was guessed from meta data”.
I’m just wondering how many people would use it or be able to follow the strict naming convention on the tokens?
Matching suppliers would be a bit messy as you’d need to get the text matching perfectly. Also would manually typing out the subject line with the tokens be any faster than actually just referencing it from the scan in the Receipt Hub?
I’d like to think this feature would save time, and if it does, it will get used.
As for the subject line, this is usually done in an idle moment, like on the train back from a client - I’ve not used QuickFile from my mobile phone. (in fact, I send receipts from CamScanner)
I’ve also just noticed that Receipt Hub doesn’t use the subject line anymore - it seems to use the attachment name. So now I really have to look at the scan to figure out what I bought, as opposed to the informative subject line I provide. Sadly, CamScanner gives the attachments very uninformative names like Doc.pdf.
I do wonder what the data says: do QF users tend to use the subject line? Do they provide informative names for the attachments? How about the message body?
You could potentially implement this feature for the case where the email body is populated, e.g. with:
supplier:Google
date:2014-11-02
amount:£10.02
…and not do anything if the body is empty? Understandably, the subject line is a bit of a small space for this much information.
I don’t think the Receipt Hub ever used the subject line in the email, unless there are no attachments. The reason being is that many people attach multiple receipts to one email, rather than list all those attachments with the same header we take the file name instead.
I don’t think using the subject line is the best solution in all honesty, I did initially think that the body would be a much better place to embed this info.
I will give this some further thought, I can’t promise anything imminently as we are committed on a number of other areas at the moment. I will discuss further with my colleagues in due course.
