The QuickFile Android App is here!

Just a quick update here, you can now request access from within your QuickFile account by going to Help >> Additional Services, and selecting “ QuickFile Beta Features. Use the code AZ1B48
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Brilliant

I’ll pick it up later :grinning:

Hello, just trying to do this but getting the following error message, any idea what I should do?
Thanks
Will

404 - Not Found

The page you are looking for could not be found.

Hi @W_de_P,

Thank you for reporting this, we are looking into it now and will let you know once fixed

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Hi @W_de_P,

We have located the issue and the fix will be released in the next few days

The first bit now works and you can enter the beta code, but the second stage of submitting your google play email does not appear to do anything.

@davem - Let me send you a private message to get some details from you.

Hi. Are you still adding new users to test the Android app? I’d like to! Many thanks - Alison

Hi @aebfitz,

If you are interested you can add your name by following these instructions:

We’re planning to migrate the Android app into the Play Store this week, although we can still add any users to the beta programme for the time being.

Congratulations on launching the App. I should have returned my feedback earlier but I was expecting more functionality before it went live… :grinning:

App version: 1.07
Phone: Google Pixel XL 1
Phone OS: Android 10

My thoughts:

1) App opening
As mentioned elsewhere, the app is slow to start

2) Entering username & password
The on-screen keyboard covers the password field and the submit button so they cannot be seen at all and it is not possible to scroll the screen up.
Originally clicking the keyboard tick did not tab to the password field or submit button but now it does so this is fixed but probably not the best UI design for new users. ScreenShot-1
If you stay logged in then this is a minor issue anyway.

3) MFA Use
a) Google Authenicator is not password/fingerprint protected, and thus quite insecure, so I use Authy. It would be nice to be able to chose which authenicator to use

b) Tip: Using MFA on a phone is a pain of screen switching especially when racing against the 30 second timeout. I use the split screen functionality of Android to show both items. This works well with Authy so long as you have Authy in list mode at the top of the screen. ScreenShot-2

4) Scanning Functionality
This is the area that needs improvement
a) Lighting & Flash: It’s essential to get a good original photo ensuring the receipt is uniformly lit.
This should be rectified by using flash but forcing Android to use flash while in the app blacks out most of the image. Really not sure what’s going on here but other apps can use the flash without issue. QuickFile-App_Flash.pdf (219.9 KB)

b) Cropping & image enhancement: We don’t need the background area of the image, just the receipt. An auto-cropping function with final manual editing would be great. The ability to enhance the images (brighten, darken, sharpness, etc.) and turn into B&W would be a great addition to the app. The latter would also save QuickFile lots of storage space on S3 :wink:

If you want an excellent example of what the scanning function should emulate then take a look at the CamScan app

5) Receipts Viewing
Largely works as expected and it’s great to be able to switch accounts quickly.
Again, when adding a new expense, there is limited scroll functionality but clicking the keyboard tick moves you on.

Summary
A great addition to the QuickFile offering. Personally, due to item 4, I’ll continue to use CamScan but would much rather use this app because multiple accounts on CamScam are a pain. I will however be using it for a minor account so I can monitor progress.

Many thanks for adding this app and ensuring the support from QF is second to none.

Thank you for your comprehensive feedback @norm1710

A few of the points mentioned have been fixed in our development build and will be released in due course along with support for sales invoice / estimate management.

  1. Load time is a little slower than we’d like for Android due in part to our choice of framework (Xamarin), which allows us to utilise one code base for Android and iOS. We’ve made some small optimisations to help improve this. Personally I noticed a big difference when I moved from a Pixel 1 to Pixel 4 XL (now opens in 2 seconds, from 8-9 previously), not that I’m suggesting this is a solution. We are working on various ways to get the load time down to a few seconds for all devices.

  2. This has been fixed and will be deployed shortly.

  3. We adopted Google Authenticator within the web and mobile application due to it being the most widely used MFA solution. It’s a challenge to support multiple MFA providers at this time, but we will look to develop native fingerprint / facial ID support in the future.

4.a. We don’t force the flash on receipt capture (or at least that shouldn’t be happening). You should see a little down arrow at the top of the screen when the camera is enabled with a popout to set the flash to either off, auto or always on.

4.b Cropping can be useful, although the automated cropping you see with tools like CamScanner and Dropbox are actually very complex to achieve. As it’s more a core part of their business it makes sense for them to get this working flawlessly. For us it’s a nice to have, but we are not in a position right now to develop this control natively, so we need to see what libraries are available we can adopt. I see there are now manual crop tools appearing in Xamarin so we’ll be testing these solutions.

We do compress and compile the images captured in the app to improve bandwidth and minimise storage consumption. We’re also contemplating an app setting to capture in greyscale to further improve this.

Again thank you for your feedback it’s really helpful and we’ll take this onboard. We’re expanding our mobile development team so I’m confident we’ll be able to do much more with this in the future.

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Google Authenticator is one app that implements the TOTP authentication protocol, Authy is another, FreeOTP is a third - any of those apps will work for the 2FA on QuickFile right now (and on any other site that says they use Google Authenticator when they should really say they use TOTP).

Once again, thanks for the quick reply. Clarifications:

  1. The response time isn’t particularly an issue at 8-9 secs but it is noticeable compared to other apps which sets expectations.

  2. I wouldn’t have thought expending resources on a native authenicator would be the best approach but that’s down to QF. I was envisaging a settings entry to allow the choice between installed authenticator apps.

4a) I manually set the flash to always on via the Android settings to avoid shadows on the receipts.

4b) Manual cropping is fine and, as you say, there are various libraries including those from the cloud vendors to do the job.

Looking forward to the updates.

Hello,
I’ve been using the app today for the first time and love it. It means I can quickly upload receipts and link to a purchase and bank.
There are a few niggles, which others have mostly covered above but one I’ve not seen mentioned is the lack of ability to add project tags to a purchase…

Looking forward to the next update!

Hi Richard,

That’s great to hear. We’re hoping that we can deploy a new version of the app later this week. It’s the culmination of 3 months of work and introduces sales invoicing, a new dashboard, the ability to process existing untagged receipts and a number of other visual improvements. We’re in the final test stage at the moment and we’ll provide further updates shortly.

I agree in regards to project tags, it’s not in this next version but we should be able to make a minor relase to get this included in the next month or 2.

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Split Screen functionality has changed in Android 10 (Pie) Try this link: https://mobileinternist.com/split-screen-multitasking-android-10

Thanks… we’ve logged that and we’ll see what can be done.

@u4h37u this is now supported on version 2.0.5.

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(Not sure where to post this feedback…)

I’ve been trying the new app for over a week, and it’s much improved compared to the first version. Main issues are:

  • It takes a long time to verify and login, feels like it’s hanging, and
  • Sometimes when you press refresh from within the app, it logs you out, and you have to re-type the full login details. This is not very practical when you have a long/secure password you can’t just remember off the top of your head (and the password manager doesn’t seem to activate), and essentially means you can’t use the app again until you’re back home. Why not enable fingerprint login?