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Auto-complete for payments

Alexander Adolf

January 11, 2014 13:16

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When taxes or administrative charges are deducted at the source or by the bank, I create virtual payments to get the invoice's balance to zero. I can not simply create payments for the full amount, because the tax office requires our records to exactly match the bank account statement.

For these virtual payments, the description texts are highly repetitive (e.g. "bank transfer fees"). I would therefore appreciate if auto-complete could work at least in the payment description field. Ideally, it would also work in the payment method fields.

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6 comments

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  Rob Sherrard - Imageer January 11, 2014 18:41

  For those repetitive phases in places Studiometry doesn't support auto-complete, I use a third party type-expander program which expands shorthand keystrokes into complete phrases.

  For example, if I type 

       \la

  the type-expander inserts

       The original invoice for this project is now more than 30 days past due, and the project has been assessed a late fee as shown in the attached revised invoice. Please remit promptly to avoid additional assessments.

  The expanded text can be a single word or an entire paragraph.

  The text-expander I use is called Robotype ( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380508,00.asp ) which is a Windows only program, but I know there are several type-expander programs available for the Mac OS.

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  Philip Tobias January 11, 2014 20:39

  Typinator and TextExpander are two good text expansion applications on the Mac. As Rob suggests, utilities like this are very useful.

  ...pt

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  Alexander Adolf January 13, 2014 14:24

  Dear Rob and Philip, many thanks for the pointers. Appreciate your support. I am very well aware of those tools, and they do have a few drawbacks from my point of view (see http://www.condition-alpha.com/blog/?p=842). This is why I am using my own text expansion tool in Apple's Mail.app for example (http://www.condition-alpha.com/software/composeit.html).

  All of the commercial tools hook into OS X's accessibility subsystem. This means that macro expansion is triggered when you type a space. Since I work in technology, abbreviations are galore in my texts. Hence I would want the expansion to be explicitly triggered (like my plugin or Studiometry's auto-complete).

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  Rob Sherrard - Imageer January 13, 2014 15:16

  The text expander I use is active at the OS level in all programs as @Alexander observes, but I have never experienced an inadvertent expansion. This is because the expander is dormant until it sees an identifier character (I've chosen \ as the identifier). When an identifier character is entered, the expander wakes up and examines the following characters until a space is encountered. If the characters following the identifier are in the expander's database, the space triggers insertion of the expanded text. If the characters aren't in the database, then the space returns the expander to its dormant state.

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  Philip Tobias January 13, 2014 18:30

  Hi, Alexander. Typinator on the Mac does not require entering a space to trigger a text expansion. I believe you can specify pretty much any text as a trigger. I haven't used TextExpander for a while, so I don't recall if it behaves exactly the same or not.

  ...pt

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  Oranged Support January 13, 2014 18:35

  We use Dash, which is a documentation browser that also does snippets. You can end your abbreviations with the same character to trigger the expansion, we've used the ` character as it is very infrequently used, but easily accessible. This should also work with other expander utilities as well.

  In regards to built-in expansion, though, it shouldn't be too tough for us to build that into more areas of the app and we are considering getting that into an upcoming version for payment descriptions. Thanks!