Image enabling gnucash?

[Bakki Kudva]

Hello everyone,

I am new on this list and gnucash. I do have it on my Red Hat 6.2 box 
and am very impressed with what I see.

I am a consultant/integrator in the business document management 
solutions. One of the major application of 'imaging' is to image enable 
legacy accounting apps, usually running on some host via some sort of 
terminal emulator. Using screen scraping  host based accounting apps can 
be image enabled so that scanned images associated with particular 
transactions  can be indexed(with additional indexes if necessary), 
stored, retrieved and displayed. Most of the time these supporting 
documents are scanned tiff images but could also be any type of file. 
Most businesses spend a  lot of time handling supporting paper documents 
and imaging can really improve productivity.

I browsed through the project goals at linas.org but didn't see anything 
related to image (document) enabling of gnucash. I wanted to get some 
opinions on this feature. I am a programmer with reasonable skills and 
would be interested in adding these features if there is interest.

The only modifications to gnucash would be that register windows have 
additional buttons called 'scan', 'attach', 'documents'. These buttons 
would be tied to method calls into the imaging client with index info. 
Scan and attach commands would invoke a scan program via 'SANE' or allow 
attachments much like email. Additional index fields could be defined 
and filled in (vendor id#, account# or whatever) in addition to the 
automatic fields such as date, transaction id etc. Seperate window would 
display the images and/or other apps launched based on mime types. Back 
end could be mysql and the imaging engine can have its own API so that 
other apps can share the functionality.

So what do you folks think?!

cio,

bakki
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