Attachments

[Colin Scott]

I have to say that I think the ability to attach additional information to a transaction would be extremely useful, whether that be simply some extended text for explanation or notes, or images of documentation relating to the transaction, or whatever.  There are many ways I could use such a facility (and I have indeed wished for it on a number of occasions in the time I have been a Gnucash user), and I am sure other users would have their own ideas.  Moreover, given that the underlying data store is a genuine DBMS it is now more than ever a practical proposition - albeit, I would accept, a fairly long-term one.

Your suggestion of an extra column that might contain links, notes or whatever has, of course, the merit of simplicity, but using it to link to external data is a very different kettle of fish from actually *storing* that data with the transaction, and both a great deal less useful and more dangerous - move your GnuCash data to another machine, and even if you remember to also move your auxilliary data there is a good chance the links will no longer work.  So yes, useful, but not the same thing at all!

Actually, I don't find the need for an additional column (though it would be nice if GnucCash could implement its current columns in a friendlier way - limited data space, and very poor ability for displaying long comments in the description field are something of a discouragement to writing comments within a transaction).  Instead I use the number column for transaction reference info, cheque numbers, etc, and find that works pretty well.  But if there were an additional column, I'd quite like it to be able to contain either a system-generated txn serial number, or the date the transaction was entered (as opposed to the date on which it becomes effective)!




Colin