The new and improved Transactions page
JCowan
Member Posts: 10 admin
Hi Wavers!
We're very excited to announce the official release of the new and improved Transactions page. We’ve leveraged your feedback to develop a new version of the page which makes it faster and easier than ever to manage your bookkeeping in Wave.
For existing beta customers, the new page will become permanent on Monday, March 22nd, and will be released to all other Wave customers on Tuesday, March 30th.
If you’ve been following the Accounting Release Updates thread here in the community, you may have seen that a limited version of the new Transactions page has been available to beta customers for some time now. As we’ve developed the new page to include all of the functionality of the original, we’ve continued to leverage your input to optimize the experience (many thanks to all of our beta customers!).
The new Transactions page now matches the functionality of the original page, with the addition of some exciting new features and designs to optimize your bookkeeping experience. The biggest updates that come with this new experience are the release of improved inline editing and fully responsive designs. What does this mean for you?
Inline editing
With full inline editing, it’s now easier to bookkeep and edit your transactions on the Transactions page. Rather than clicking on a transaction to open up the details and modify things like description, date, or account, you can now click directly on any of these fields to edit them inline (pro tip: click the “tab” key to swiftly tab your way through the fields!).
Responsive designs
With responsive designs, the page is optimized for you to manage your transactions on your desktop, mobile or tablet device. It’s now easier than ever to stay on top of your books while you’re on the go!
Other improvements
Apart from the new features listed above, the functionality of the page overall remains the same, but with improved designs for accessibility and ease of use. You can read all of the details about how to use the Transactions page in the Help Centre.
Login to Wave and head to the Transactions page to see the new look and feel for:
- Transaction details & notes
- Split categorization
- Reviewing transactions
- Filters
- Bulk edits
- Journal transactions
Thanks again for your valuable feedback, and many thanks to the great input provided by our customers in the beta period! We invite you to continue sharing your thoughts with us here so we can help build better tools for you. Happy bookkeeping!
Comments
You mention this new transactions page is optimised for productivity, why is it so much harder now to see the notes on each transaction? Also there is no way to search or filter a list based on the notes.
I do not download transactions from bank & credit card - I manually enter everything. Using the new transactions page when I attempt to enter the expense to my checking and categorize as Transfer to Bank, Credit Card or Loan I get a mess. It creates 2 transactions (Transfer to and Transfer from) which is fine but the dollar amount is zero. If I go to details and try to change the amount on either transaction I get an error saving.
The only way I have got this to work is to enter the payment (income) on the credit card account and leave it uncategorized. I then create an expense in the checking account and when I categorize it as a transfer it finds the credit card income. Is this a bug or just the way I have to do things now?
The new transaction page does not lend itself towards manual entry of multiple transactions (granted neither did the old one but it seems even more difficult).
Anybody else experiencing this?
I find it astounding that we can no longer see the balance of our REGISTER! It only shows bank balance, so there is no way to know at all how much money you actually have accounted for??
I mean how can anyone be ok with this? anything you have that has not cleared it gives you NO indication of what your balance is including everything pending. HUGE oversight IMO.
It is bad enough we have no running balance on the side of the screen, like every check register since the dark ages. I just don't even know if I can continue to use this service even for my smaller company... I may have to move it over to QB like my main companies are. Ugh
If I am wrong here, please let me know. I really hope I am wrong!
thank you for creating new transaction page. for some reason i cannot open the expenses or the income button, it does not do anything. How do i create a new transaction?
I just sent a long email. Ugh. I love the changes, y'all. Except...every account that I have ever created is listed in the dropdown menu on the transactions page. When I originally tried the beta a long time ago, I informed you of this. I was told it was being worked on. Well, it's still there on mine. i won't go into it further, as I sent an email about it. You all truly the best financial tracking platform I've ever used (and it's not even close), and that's why this is so upsetting. I hope it's fixed soon. Thanks.
On a split expense, it no longer calculates the remainder of the difference and lets you categorize it. It did not work in the Beta either. Is anyone actually looking over these updates before making them final and even thinking they improve functionality?
This is very frustrating. Where is the "save" feature when finishing a line? I have 1 check and multiple invoices and you just made it harder and NOT user friendly. AGAIN, how do I SAVE the transaction when done.
I'd like to start by saying I'm always excited to see improvements being made with Wave. Thank you for everything you guys do! The new Transactions interface is definitely a step in the right direction.
Things I love:
1. It's clean!
2. Inline editing of the transaction description is super useful.
3. Overall the improved Journal Entry interface is great. Seeing the 'Difference' amount so that we know exactly what we need to add/remove is much better than the unhelpful message yelling at us that we're "Unbalanced!", haha.
4. The URL gets updated with filter parameters in plain(er) English, rather than being encoded in Base64, so we have a better idea of what it is we're sharing with clients when we send links.
5. It's great that when you click on 'Add expense' or 'Add income' the date field is automatically popping up. That field was almost always ignored and almost always needs to be changed to some date in the past, so it's helpful to be reminded
6. It's also nice that for new transactions it shows a compressed edit panel making the inline editable fields more visible, without the large edit panel being displayed.
7. Might be subjective, but there seems to be improved responsiveness in the interface. Perhaps due to using the GraphQL API instead of the old RESTful one?
Things I'll miss:
1. It was helpful for the transaction notes to be immediately visible when opening a transaction/journal entry. It seems this new interface makes the assumption that notes aren't important.
2. I liked the red 'uncategorized' text, rather than a dashed underline, as it was a much stronger visual cue. Is there perhaps a compromise here? A more subtle red?
3. Being able to see/change the filters with the dropdown panel that optionally 'stuck' to the top of the interface was more efficient/convenient than the new method of having to click to open a dialog.
4. Being able to open a transaction/journal entry by clicking just about anywhere on a line made deeper edits quicker. Now, most of that space is for inline-editing, so understandably we're asked to use a tiny dropdown arrow (or pencil for journal entries) all the way to the right in order to open the panel. Can we have it so that clicking anywhere on a line that isn't associated with inline editing acts as though we're clicking on the dropdown arrow?
5. It was useful to have a barrier between the user and key transaction fields that really shouldn't change 99.9% of the time. With the new inline editing, it's really easy to change the date, anchor account, or the amount, but changing any of those may break reconciliation so we're adding risk by making it easier to edit those things. In a perfect world, the only thing that would be easily edited inline are the description and category (and taxes!).
6. Minor as it didn't really apply to me much, but it was nice to be able to categorized the 'missing' split amount when splitting a transaction.
Things that really need fixin':
1. There's no longer a checkbox to 'Mark selected transactions as reviewed' in the bulk edit panel. Is there a technical reason for this? Clicking the slow-to-respond checkmark for every single transaction is a pain.
2. Please add a 'Clear all' button to the header for the transaction filter... Don't force us to open a filter dialog in order to hunt for the small 'Clear all' link at the other end of the screen
3. We need to be able to share a URL directly to a specific transaction. Before, when you clicked to open a transaction edit panel, the URL would update to show the transaction ID so that if you copied the URL to share with a client, it would open directly to the transaction in question. I know this is possible, because if I manually add the transactions ID to the URL, it still works to take me directly to that transaction.
4. Since the Notes are now hidden from plan view, it would be really helpful to see a red dot or some other visual cue/icon next to the 'Notes' text of the tab when notes are present (in both standard transactions and journal entries). Even better would be having a little 'notes' icon somewhere on the transaction line when notes are present in a transaction, and having the notes appear in a small box when you hover over it, and the notes panel immediately open when you click on it. Don't underestimate the importance of notes/memos for good bookkeeping!
Improvement opportunities:
1. It's great that we have inline edit now, but why can't we inline edit the transaction's sales taxes? Establishing a column for a prompt to bring up the tax dialog for a single-line-item transaction would be a game changer in terms of productivity. There's already a space for this column to the right of the transaction amount, where the tax flags appear. Applying taxes in bulk isn't always much more efficient.
2. One thing I was really hoping to see with the URL changes, is that selecting a specific anchor account filter from the top left drop-down box would add a '&anchorAccount={{ACCOUNT_GUID}}' query parameter so that when we share links to specific transactions filters, it remembers that anchor account filter setting.
3. Another minor point with the URL changes, is to have the sort order shown in the URL as well, such as '&sort=asc'.
4. In the Journal Transaction edit panel, if I click on a debit/credit amount, I would expect that the amount would be highlighted so that I can start entering a value right away. Currently, it doesn't even add a cursor in the box, so I have to click a second time just to get the cursor to show up.
5. I'm not sure why the Journal Entry edit panel needs to be so BIG, taking up the entire browser window. Nothing in that panel needs to be that far spaced apart; it makes it harder to read/scan. Can we size it down a notch?
6. Minor annoyance, but being able to re-sort transaction and journal entry line items by dragging them up/down would be a welcomed feature for the growing minority of folks that identify as anxious/OCD, haha.
7. Lastly, isn't it a bit premature to be rolling this out with no ability for users to jump back to the legacy Transactions page? If I want to bulk-verify 100 (or 1,000) transactions, I'd definitely want to switch back to the legacy page, if I could. Is there a URL link that takes me to the legacy page?
Thank you for your time
Sebastien Benoit
> I'd like to start by saying I'm always excited to see improvements being made with Wave. Thank you for everything you guys do! The new Transactions interface is definitely a step in the right direction.
....
>
> Thank you for your time :)
>
> Sebastien Benoit
Sebastien, so many excellent points you bring up… Hopefully they will actually read this post and consider the things you’re saying.
I just wanted to ask you about there being no register balance and no running balance on the transactions page? It seems no one else is bringing this up, so I’m wondering how do you function with only being able to see the bank balance and having none of your uncleared transactions accounted for? Seeing the bank balance is great but I don’t know how to use this system without being able to see how much I will actually have in an account after everything has cleared… In QuickBooks they show you your bank balance and your actual balance for every account. I guess I’m just not understanding why no one else is up in arms about this change. I have always thought it’s absurd that there’s no running balance column on the right side of the screen but now they’ve taken away the actual balance total as well. I just don’t get it… Thanks in advance for your reply.
As another poster commented, there isn't a "save". Naturally, you would think that pressing "enter" would save. I have figured out that you click elsewhere on the page to get out of the edit mode to save. Such odd behavior.... how did that get into production from beta?
In general, I love what you have done. Kudos on your bravery for not offering it as an option in the beginning to avoid the wrath of those of us who are resistant to change in order to receive some angry feedback.
Specifically, since I still need to open the details on EVERY transaction to add customer and/or vendor details and I often use cloning, it would be convenient for me if the toggle for that was at the beginning of the line --or-- if those boxes could be optionally included automatically for those of us who ALWAYS use them. (Am I the only one? They seem ESSENTIAL for good bookkeeping to me ...??)
... and, what @SBenoit said ...
Please bring back the red font for Uncategorized Income. It made it so much easier to spot these transactions while scrolling through the page - now I have to hunt for them when merging transactions.
Hi @pdetti !
I'd like to start by saying that Wave isn't QuickBooks, so expecting it to work the same way generally ends in disappointment, haha. There's no concept of 'uncleared transactions' in Wave, this process would need to be done through clearing asset/liability accounts. The Transaction's page is not the same as an account register in QB; it's more like the bank feed. If you want to ensure your account is reconciled periodically, you would use Accounting -> Reconciliation, which does show a running balance next to each transaction. True, there's no live comparison anywhere between what Wave believes an account balance is and what your latest imported bank balance is (according to Plaid), but that's easy enough to compare between the Dashboard or Banking -> Connected Accounts and the balance shown in the dropdown of the Transactions page.
If you want to get more out of Wave as an accounting platform, you'll need to let go of your expectations that it will act the same as other platforms. Wave has a basic yet very effective methodology for creating/establishing your books which enables you to do whatever you want (sometimes with lots of clever automations, so don't view this simplicity as necessarily being tedious).
Take care.
Thank you for your reply... yes I use reconcile each month and that works great... but to me not having the most basic of a simple check register makes using it tedious and unnecessarily complicated to know where you are at on a daily basis. I don't get what you mean by compare the transactions balance and the balance from the banking connected accounts page... they seem to be the same which is my main problem here.
I just can't understand entering a bunch of payments that are to go out or be processed this week lets say and not being able to see how much you have left, lol. It was always bad with no running balance, now it's useless for me with no balance at all that reflects what you have entered but has not cleared yet. Can't even weekly forecast easily by seeing what you have and what you have going out.
I know it's not Quickbooks and don't expect it to be, it is a long ways from that obviously, but wow, this is some simple stuff right here that is missing and making my daily use very difficult. I guess I am on the hunt for another platform once again... thank you for your time.
Those balances are not drawn from the same source. The one in the Transactions page is your Wave account balance (in the account currency, not the business 'home' currency), and the balances shown on the Dashboard and the Connected Accounts pages are always the latest balances straight from the bank feed (if you have a bank connection for that account). If you add an expense in the Transactions page, it will affect the balance of the account in the dropdown of the Transactions page, but NOT affect the balances shown on the Dashboard/Connected Accounts pages.
To be clear, I'm not seeing the same issue you're seeing. If your minimum requirement is to see an updated account balance taking into account post-dated transactions you've created, that is still happening if you look at the balance in the drop-down box of the Transactions page. If your balance isn't updating, try refreshing the page.
The extended functions your describing (budgeting/forecasting/clearing) aren't even listed features in Wave, and I've never heard of anyone using Wave that way by pre-loading payments only to have the bank feed upload those transactions later anyway, so I'm not really sure what to tell you other than to just make a spreadsheet...
Seb
The new transactions page is disappointing and has made the bookkeeping harder. I will be looking for a new platform.
The visual does not scale well, and hides most of the details if you're not using a very large monitor. There are several visual bugs that have not been ironed out. The New Transactions page is also very buggy and giving multiple errors on not being able to change category. After attempting 5 times, it randomly worked. It has been frustrating.
The Legacy Transactions page is much more usable, can see more data in a detailed way. It is upsetting to see that this was taken away as it has lowered the value of WaveApps for me unfortunately.
>
> To be clear, I'm not seeing the same issue you're seeing. If your minimum requirement is to see an updated account balance taking into account post-dated transactions you've created, that is still happening if you look at the balance in the drop-down box of the Transactions page. If your balance isn't updating, try refreshing the page.
Well, it clearly is not working for me. The old page showed the balance up top of all transactions entered. The new page doesn’t for me. If I at least had that balance I could get by.
> The extended functions your describing (budgeting/forecasting/clearing) aren't even listed features in Wave, and I've never heard of anyone using Wave that way by pre-loading payments only to have the bank feed upload those transactions later anyway, so I'm not really sure what to tell you other than to just make a spreadsheet...
>
> Seb
What I am asking for is a simple running balance column like every bank register and accounting program has had since the beginning of time. lol Even the simplest of simple programs has a column for balance.
Sorry but this is dumbest biggest oversight I have ever seen. Supposed to use this to run a business and you can’t see a running total of your accounts? Laughable.
I do thank you for your time. It’s clear no one at Wave cares enough to even respond to any of these posts. And this clearly should still be in beta.
So I figured out that the balance on the new transaction page no longer includes anything post-dated. For me, this is a deal-breaker. It has been years without recurring bills or bill reminders. Now if you input upcoming bill payments on the dates they will be paid for a given month, so you have some semblance of order in tracking your available funds, it no longer includes it in the balance. This should at the very least be a setting you can choose to include or not. Also sorely lacking is the ability to automatch entries with downloads from the bank, but that is another separate issue with this system.
Thank you for the new sleek look. I come from a long time of software implementation and I know any change is hard on users moving from a legacy method to a newer method. I'm currently working with the new transactions page and I'm getting the hang of the new process. For me the only issue is the remaining balance when splitting a transaction. Hopefully it will come back as now I'm having to pull out my calculator again to help with this.
I will acknowledge that change is always hard and there is always a learning curve. I can already tell that I am going to need a different circumstance with notes. Having them on a separate tab is wasting my time because I am like did I make the note or not, oh gosh I gotta go look again. A few extra clicks breaks the continuity and flow. Efficiency is lost. Please consider notes coming back to front and center. Thanks.
I appear to be missing some income accounts when doing bulk categorization in the new Transactions page, anything I should be doing differently? Note that when I edit the category on a single transaction that all list items show up...
I do like that the reviewed transactions are greyed out, making it easier to differentiate from the unreviewed. However, the whole page makes my head hurt, (and my eyes)! Some of the issues that I have with it so far.
1. Uncategorized incomes are no longer red, making this much harder to see.
2. Once a transaction is reviewed the date, description, and amount all get unbolded, making the thin black lines on a grey background very hard to read.
3. I can only see the first word or two of the categories, and now have to open the transaction details anytime I want to see a category. Ex: I used to be able to read, "Transfer from checking account" but now all I can read is, "Transfer from ch". This is even worse when it is an invoice, the old "Invoice #______ Payment from ____..." is now just, "Invoice #______..."
4. Whitespace is crucial to any page's design, and the old whitespace that you would see in the middle space between description and amount is now gone. "Whitespace not only creates harmony, balance, and helps to brand a design, it can also be used to lead a reader from one element to another."
5. When I want to view the transaction details, I usually am comparing it with another transaction, therefore I need to be able to see both the details and the other transactions.
6. When I click show transaction details and then try to mark it as reviewed or save it, it tells me I need to categorize it first... but it already is. If I just click the checkmark without opening the details it works just fine.
I've only interacted with the transactions page for about 10 minutes, so maybe it will get better, or maybe I'll find more issues. I'd love to be able to have the option to use the old version. Please fix the common problems that have been mentioned in previous comments, or give us an option to use the old design!
I am all in for the new features - But unfortunately the transactions are so much harder to work with.
I cannot fully see the notes / DescriptionI used to put for each transaction.
A simple modal pop up could actually help to see what we are adding in the description text area when we are trying to edit or add a new transaction rather than doing it on a grid row for a cleaner UI...But hey! what do I know !
Eugh, can I get the old one back?
90% of our accounting is the same journal transactions repeated daily/weekly/monthly. You have successfully made this operation about 3 times harder/slower to do.
Before, to clone a transaction I had to find the transaction, click once and the new transaction would be there. I could repeat this in bulk in succession.
Now, I have to do click the edit icon and wait for a dialog to appear, find the clone icon at the bottom, click this, wait for the dialog to close, find the new duplicated transaction, edit it and wait for its dialog to open, then edit, save, wait for it to close. Then repeat.
Also the dialog is so much slower to use. Previously you could do pretty much all of it with the keyboard by tabbing through; even find invoices etc. Now to change amounts on an entry you seem to have to click in to using the mouse - I can't find anyway to make a field go to edit mode using the keyboard.
When you're in the field handling invariably ends up with leading 0s unless you use the mouse to select all and overwrite.
And finally, the keyboard Save shortcut now doesn't work if there is an edit field active.
Absolutely terrible, sorry.
This is so broken. Is there really no way to go back to the old one, while all of these bugs get fixed?
Agree with everyone above - for lack of better words, this new interface is not functional at all. The simplicity of being able to do notes on a transaction quickly in 1 window has been replaced with a slow and annoying drop down window. This new interface has made transactions a little easier to sort through at the cost of tripling the time it takes to do the transaction.
If you must keep the new interface, at least give users the option to use the old one, which like I said before, was much more functional for basic bookkeeping than this new one. If not, I guess like some of the other folks here, it may be time to look for a new platform.
Hi. New transaction page loading time is longer and the page keep lagging.
I also keep getting error : An Error Occured while fetching categories
Please help on this. Thanks
100% agree with the other comments - this new Transactions design makes it MORE DIFFICULT to work with Transactions, not easier. Extra clicks, date selection makes it jump down and then you have to find it again, Vendor not displayed in listing or field immediately available. Did you do any user testings on this? Doesn't seem like it.
> 100% agree with the other comments - this new Transactions design makes it MORE DIFFICULT to work with Transactions, not easier. Extra clicks, date selection makes it jump down and then you have to find it again, Vendor not displayed in listing or field immediately available. Did you do any user testings on this? Doesn't seem like it.
It is a bit crazy… The Beta was available for a while but I never heard anything about any feedback about it and I checked it out but didn’t use it because I didn’t think it was better. Apparently many people here feel the same and no one from Wave is moderating or replying to any of these posts… It’s absurd.
At the very least they could leave the option up top to use the old view. I still can’t get over the fact that post dated entries are not included in the balance at the top of the screen like they always were. I honestly can’t figure out why anyone would want it to specifically not include an entry that was post dated. Bad enough we don’t have a balance column like every other program ever made for accounting.
I have to agree completely with this comment, and I seem to not be alone. Please bring back the red font for 'uncategorized' transactions.