Import workflow is painful for mobile-first brokers (documents only exist on the phone)

[digitalerdude]

Several supported brokers (Trade Republic, Scalable Capital, ...) are mobile-first: statements/confirmations are only readily available in their phone app, not synced anywhere reachable from the desktop. Today, getting a document into PP's import means manually transferring each file from phone to desktop (AirDrop, email-to-self, cloud-drive upload) before the PDF/CSV importer can even see it — for someone who imports across multiple mobile-first brokers, that's a lot of manual round-tripping per transaction.

The official mobile app (portfolio-performance/mobile-app) is currently read-only and doesn't import or sync transactions, so it doesn't help here.

Not proposing a specific implementation (that's a bigger architecture question — local-network transfer, QR-code pairing, a documented watched-folder convention via existing cloud-sync clients, mobile-app-side capture, etc. all have different tradeoffs), but wanted to open this for discussion: is there appetite for making it easier to get documents from a mobile-first broker's app into the desktop import pipeline, without relying on manual file wrangling each time?

[Sn1kk3r5]

In my opinion, the most efficient method for saving PDFs on mobile devices is to directly to the cloud drive. On desktop, the process is straightforward, involving a direct import from the cloud drive. While the exact number of steps saved may vary, this method offers a significant advantage.

Other methods, such as email, airdrop, and similar, are more personal and may not cater to the preferences of all users. However, it is important to recognize that no software can fully satisfy every individual’s personal preferences.

[buchen]

I am doing it similar to @Sn1kk3r5: I have an "inbox" folder where I store the files when I am on my mobile phone (or when downloading it from the browser on the desktop). This folder is on a cloud storage provider (in my case iCloud). The folder is remembered and preselected when I pick "import..." in the desktop.

But let's brainstorm: what kind of process do you have in mind?

Extending the mobile application for writing (first step) and the running the PDF extraction code (second step) is very, very big. I would not want to introduce a server component (data protection et. al.)