Attachments in QuickBooks - How do you do it and how can they help?

An often overlooked feature of QB is document attachments. Supporting documentation can be directly attached to any transaction: scans of bills, deposit slips, spreadsheets for recurring invoices, photos for estimates - I could go on. There are many important reasons to attach documents in QB:

1. This feature provides an excellent resource for your tax preparer. No more need to dig through files (or piles) to find the source documents for any question they might have  - the documents are right there for them to review.
2. Did you ever want to have a "paperless" office? If a piece of paper such as a bill arrives in your office, scan it, attach it to the bill in QB, then get it out of there! The same can be done with receipts and deposit slips.
3. The third way attachments can be helpful is with client communication. Spreadsheets, Word documents, photos, pdfs can all be attached to invoices or estimates sent from QB to clients or customers.

​So how do you do it? In QuickBooks Desktop, look for a paperclip that says "Attach File" in the ribbon at the top of, in this example, a bill.
​Enter the bill information, hit "Save", then click on the paperclip. The Attachments window will open. Here you can drag and drop, browse the computer files, or complete a direct scan of as many documents as needed.

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There is also a document center that can be found under the Company menu where many documents can be imported at once. When looking to attach a document, click on "Doc Center" in the Attachments window to bring up a list of the documents you imported earlier. Choose the one you want and save.

For QuickBooks Online, I prefer the drag-and-drop method. There is a box at the bottom of transaction pages where the documents can be "moved". QBO also has an attachments page where documents can be uploaded en masse (found under the Lists menu) - but when I go to find the unlinked ones on the transaction page, they don't stay in any particular order and I have to hunt for the one I want each time which can be tedious if there are quite a few.

This box already has an attachment which has become a permanent link to an image of the document. One of the wonderful things about cloud-based accounting software is that this image is now stored off-site with bank-level security, but now always available. If this was an invoice being emailed to a customer, the document would then be an email attachment. If the "Show existing" link is clicked, a list of all unlinked attachments in the Attachment center will appear in a column on the right side of the screen. Then just choose the correct one.

Need help working with attachments in your QuickBooks file?
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