Hi the search box on the top left of quickfile was excellent until recently. I have found that it is no longer as clever. If I search for an invoice for example, unless I prefix ‘00’ to it nothing is found so I write 004910 rather than 4910. Previously it worked.
I used to be able to search for customers and find them on the first 3 or 4 characters of their business/personal name. Now I have to get one full name spelled exactly correct.
If I search for a business contact then the results no longer show that person. It may show the business associated with the person, but that requires me to know the 2 are connected. Whereas I may only really know the person, not their ltd company.
The same is true for the bank transaction searches, I noticed these have become more fussy and less powerful too.
This decreased functionality is a back step and a little frustrating.
Just wanted to add something to what Gavin has stated… as I posted a bug earlier this morning on a new issue I discovered with searching client records also : [ Previously I have carried out hundreds of searches in the Client Management ‘View Clients’ within the ‘Client Reference’ field to find those customers with a particular set of characters e.g. ‘diary0124’ or ‘diary0224’. However, the field no longer appears to accept field containing what is entered only if the field begins with it. I am not sure why this has changed as it previously worked fine. Is there a reason?]
Just to add a little context here. Since mid 2023 we have been transitioning our search from very basic SQL searches to a dedicated full text search engine. The reason we have done this is because the old SQL based search approach does not scale and it was harming performance in a very noticeable way. We had to preemptively tackle this before it became a much bigger issue.
In regards to the new search logic, it is now driven primarily by reference to words, rather than simply matching to partial strings. As noted the quick search box only starts returning results once you’ve entered a whole word. You can still get partial results back by putting an asterisk * character at the end, e.g.
Admittedly this wasn’t effectively communicated and we should have added helpers in all the relevant places before the changes went live. We are working on this now as a priority.
One advantage of the switch to the new full text search engine is that we can now perform deeper searches returning text from invoice / purchase descriptions, rather than just the invoice/item name as it was previously. You can also use AND, OR and NOT operators e.g.
“Invoice NOT August” >> Returns results with “Invoice” in the description but not the word “August”.
Again we are working to document this along with the other features at the moment and I apologise that this hasn’t been available sooner.
Finally we are also planning to extend the search and combine with the use of OCR so that you will be able to search text within your scanned receipts and document manager items. We’ll provide further updates on this due course.
Thank you for advising us of the switch to a full text engine search. I’m still unable to do a partial search on the client account number/reference field. In fact unable to search and get any result unless I know in advance the exact match. am I doing something wrong (I tried the wild card at the end) or is this field still undergoing changes please?
