Best practices for attachments

Regardless of the kind of attachment, it's always a best practice to organize your attachments so that they can be easily found and deleted later if necessary. For the purpose of easily tracking your attachments, we suggest the following best practices:

  • Set up your attachment folder structure for ease of use and searchability. For example, you might have a Bills and an Invoices folder which have subfolders of their own with hierarchy that makes sense to your organization. This practice helps you find attachments easier if they need to be updated or deleted later.
  • Use a naming convention for your attachments that includes the name of the related individual or company. For instance, if you attach a bill from a vendor, you might call it Utilities_Aug2020-Western_Energy. This way, it doesn't get lost in a folder full of many other bills and can be easily found and updated or deleted later if needed.
  • Limit the amount of records where an attachment is stored. For example, if you have an attachment from a vendor, it's best to store that attachment on the vendor record only. Although you can delete attachments from the Attachments list, they need to be removed from the records where they are attached first. Furthermore, it's always a best practice to limit where attachments are stored for security purposes.

Handle sensitive data in attachments

As data privacy becomes an increasing concern and new regulations take effect, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), it's important to consider the types of information that are stored in attachments in Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct is, first and foremost, a cloud accounting solution built to keep your financials secure and up-to-date. Although file management isn't the intended use of Sage Intacct, you can add attachments in the system to support your financial records. For instance, you can attach anything to a record in the system, such as a simple receipt or even the social security information of an individual. However, to support the flexibility and performance of Sage Intacct, attachments aren't password protected or treated differently based on their content. Therefore, we don't recommend storing attachments in the system that contain sensitive data such as:

Recommendations

To reduce risk, we recommend that you redact sensitive data from attachments before storing such documents in Sage Intacct. In this way, you can still attach documents that support your financial records without risking the unnecessary storage of sensitive data.

For attachments you want to store that contain sensitive data, we recommend either encrypting a PDF with a password or considering a separate file management system that is built to handle the security needs that come with storing such files.