In our non-profit, staff pay out of pocket for small expenses rather than use a company card. Our workflow has been to use the app to directly record receipts against a reimbursement account for each employee. Then, after several small expenses have accumulated, we issue a payment to bring the balance to 0. This means there are no automatic transactions imported from the bank or credit card, so the OCR function saved us a lot of time. Now we'll have to manually enter every single receipt. It will be cheaper for us to switch to Quickbooks instead of paying for the staff time to do that. It's too bad, as we recently started with Wave and it was working so well for us. I do appreciate the free tier with Wave, and would be willing to pay a small monthly/annual fee for the OCR/app, but it's just not worth it for us to stay if it costs us extra staff time. There are other features that Quickbooks has that are missing in Wave, and we were willing to forego those, but losing this one will likely tip it over towards QB. It made me nervous from the start when I saw that Wave doesn't have a proper export capability (i.e., I can't export our financials in a standard format and import into another software). I'm also concerned about staying with Wave if they're going to continue to remove features -- each time they do that, it wastes a lot of my time as I have to set up a new workflow/system. If they go through with this change, I'll wish I had chosen QB from the beginning.
Obviously, this was not for the consumer but for Wave's benefit. The feature you had with the receipts is why we all came and used Wave. We have 4 businesses we run through Wave and 4 of our techs and another client that used Wave. At least you gave us a month to find a better suited program.
Sad you thought this was a great decision.
Chiming in to agree that this is a huge bummer. While I would be happy to have the added options for dealing with receipts, it will be problematic if it comes at the expense of existing features.
@rwgch said:
Why not allow the user to take/upload the photo with the app like they do now, and then when it's in the Receipts queue, allow the option to either generate a new transaction or attach it to an existing transaction.
Yes! This is exactly the solution I have been hoping would be added to Wave for handling receipts better. I still need the option for uploading OCR receipts from the app, email, or bulk uploading right on the receipts page. I still need a quick way to handle receipts that won't show up in my bank feed. The only other hope I had was for the receipts page to be more searchable/sortable, but please don't get rid of it!
I have already been paying for Payroll, Coaching, and now Bookkeeping services for one business in Wave and am in the process of migrating another business over to add more paid services, but am putting a pause on that in light of this news. Like many others have said, I would happily pay a reasonable add-on fee to keep the Receipts app, email option, and OCR feature. I haven't used this feature much in the last 10 months but, under normal circumstances, my team travels for work 90% of the time and the Receipts function was the deciding factor for me when choosing Wave. I really hope this decision isn't final. Personally, I would rather Wave continue to be useful than continue to be free.
I totally agree! Another thing that would make Receipts better is allowing Transactions + associated Receipts to be added to an invoice. We use Wave for 90% of our key business functions, but always need to keep a separate spreadsheet with details and images of receipts that are passed through to a client on an invoice. Wave has the details and images already, so why not allow for association of those pass-thru expenses to an invoice, which the client could easily click on to see the details (report) of all of the transactions + receipts passed thru to them. And/or ability to classify a transaction/receipt onto a project or client for easy invoicing and reporting later. That's the kind of improvement that would offset the huge pain of losing the Receipts app. But to lose Receipts with minimal upside is indeed quite frustrating. I, too, would gladly pay for better receipts / expense functionality. Some apps have a subscription model specifically for expense and/or hours tracking. For Wave this could be just a simple feature.
@Core said:
I think that most haters here do not understand the difference in an app on their phone and a responsive site which you are calling waveapp. I like that you are going with an all responsive site and skipping the app which had very limited usefulness. It is cleaner for you and us both. Thank you for making it simple to attach a receipt to an imported transaction. The OCR function just increased he chance of a miscode.
I only use the responsive site on my laptop because I did not like the limited functionality of the phone app, but I know the phone app is an important feature for many users.
Not everyone wants to link their bank account to import their transactions, or even has the ability to. I linked my RBC account last year, but once again it's not importing transactions, and there's nothing I can do about it until Wave sorts it out on the back end. This is the third or fourth time this has happened in the past year, and unfortunately, even once it starts synching again it won't import all the transactions that were made while it was not working. So without the receipt upload and OCR features, I will now need to enter every single transaction manually.
I use a small company for my credit card purchases, and Wave will not link to them. The receipt upload and OCR features allow me to scan and upload the receipts to create the transaction and then quickly verify that the information is correct, rather than needing to manually enter the entire transaction.
If Wave was just adding the option of allowing users to attach receipts to existing transactions, I would be 100% in favour of this. But the truth of the matter is, by removing the receipt upload and OCR features within the Waveapps program, my workload is going to increase substantially because I will now need to manually enter every single transaction before I can attach the receipt to it.
1) I now have to use a mobile browser
2) Log in with User Name/PWD
3) Navigate to MENU
4) Navigate to PURCHASES
5) Navigate to RECEIPTS
6) Click UPLOAD RECEIPT
7) Find my image, via the FILES app on ANDROID, not the pretty interface from APPLE that you reference in the notification email re: this change.
How is this better for mobile users? APPS are a thing to streamline and make certain functionality when you're on the go, isolate a specific task, etc... Just because these WAVE site is now mobile optimized for visibility, great for tablet users, but I feel the mobile users just got demoted. When will the INVOICE APP find its way on the chopping block.
I'll have to do some homeword and reseach the alternative options:
As most have said... this is a major downgrade in functionality. When traveling, it is a much better workflow to digitize receipts at the point-of-sale (e.g right after signing the bill at a restaurant) and upload them to create a queue of digital receipts waiting to be reviewed at your convenience (e.g. back at your hotel or in the office). This is how the proper expense solutions handle receipt-based processes (Concur, Chrome River, etc.). Yes, these are more expensive solutions, but the design principle for handling receipts in real-time should be simple: Digitize and Discard.
Under this new workflow, you are taking a step backward and providing no solution (that I can see) for the user to take targeted, in-Wave actions on a receipt in real-time. Even without the OCR, the email forwarding alone at least provides some way of directing receipts into a proper intake channel. But under the new workflow, receipts just pile up. The user must wait a day or more until the transaction is posted. Then and only then, the user may rummage through the wad of paper and/or recent pictures on a phone or document cloud. Under such a workflow, even an organized person is prone to either comingling receipts with other documents or losing/deleting a receipt altogether.
Preferred solution: (1) maintain a purpose-built space in Wave to queue digitized receipts (2) allow queue intake from mobile, desktop, email, etc. (3) provide a paid upgrade that supports OCR plus an intelligent "suggested transaction match" feature to merge receipts with bank transactions (4) if the mobile Receipts app is too costly, create SMS method for receipt submittal. For the submission step, this would be better than logging into wave on a mobile browser.
This is a very disappointing change. The receipt upload and OCR feature was the main feature that drew me to Wave. I don’t link my bank accounts, so I will have to manually create the transactions now, creating more work for me to do. The receipt snapshot and process workflow made sense to me, and was incredibly easy to use. It’s so much easier to upload the receipts and then figure out the receipt details rather than creating an individual transaction first. This is a huge step backwards.
**What a disappointment! ** this is nothing but pathetic. Whichever product manager came up with this new idea clearly never ran a small business. I'd just take a picture of the receipt and forget about it. Now I gotta save everything and manually add receipts to each transaction? This is really going backwards.
The OCR tool is an incredible timesaving and productivity feature.
The OCR capability is touted by users to Evangelize the adoption of Waveapps to new potential users.
Losing OCR is a determinate factor in moving away from Waveapps to a new platform.
The Waveapps team seems to be unaware or insensitive to the value of OCR to the current user base. ======================= If at all possible, revisit the decision to eliminate the OCR feature.
I’d pay to keep this feature as it’s something that helps massively. Absolutely at a loss as to who you’ve asked because 9/10 everyone would have surely have said that the receipt app was one of the best things about WaveApp due to being able to load it up with receipts and quickly do expenses on the go.
If you had needed to switch to a subscription model to keep this app going along with the infrastructure that supports it in the backend of it all, id have coughed up some coin but this is extremely disappointing to hear that it’s being dropped completely.
The best thing anyone can do right now is flood all the discussion board threads to notify all the users that the app/OCR is sunsetting. I do not expect Wave to listen, but maybe they will be sold off once enough customers leave and H&R Block takes a loss.
While I appreciate that you’re taking steps to eliminate the problem of duplicate transactions, I really don’t think that this is what customers were asking for. Uploading receipts to existing transactions is a great addition, but I don’t see how it can effectively replace wave receipts for those of us who actively work out in the field and don’t have a lot of office time. What I had personally hoped for was a more intuitive system to identify and flag duplicates for easier merge, not the loss of the receipts app. I started using wave for the convenience of the receipts feature- I have a couple of employees who have bank cards for fuel and materials purchases, and the app was a super easy way for them to quickly snap a picture on the go without a lengthy login process AND without having access to the entirety of the company’s accounting. It seems like now we’re going back to everyone handing me the receipts (if they haven’t lost them during the day), because I’m not going to give employees access to EVERYTHING in wave. This isn’t a trust issue for me, though I know that could be a problem too; there is just too much potential for someone who doesn’t know the system to mess something up if they log in. Also, I know they won’t have time to do that during a quick stop at a gas station! Since I originally started using wave to solve my receipt problem, it sounds like I’ll have to look for another external app to do what wave receipts used to do for me. I’m all for reducing the duplicate transactions, but please don’t get rid of the receipts app!
Thank you for your comments—we appreciate your feedback, and want you to know we’re listening. We understand these changes will affect how you handle receipts, and we’re always considering your valuable input.
6 pages of comments that have one clear msg - I sincerely hope you're going to do more than "listen". Your customers have spoken, clearly. We would like to see "action" - and revert your decision.
@JCowan said:
Thank you for your comments—we appreciate your feedback, and want you to know we’re listening. We understand these changes will affect how you handle receipts, and we’re always considering your valuable input.
@SF_Wave_1 said:
I feel we went backwards! On the surface...
1) I now have to use a mobile browser
2) Log in with User Name/PWD
3) Navigate to MENU
4) Navigate to PURCHASES
5) Navigate to RECEIPTS
6) Click UPLOAD RECEIPT
7) Find my image, via the FILES app on ANDROID, not the pretty interface from APPLE that you reference in the notification email re: this change.
How is this better for mobile users? APPS are a thing to streamline and make certain functionality when you're on the go, isolate a specific task, etc... Just because these WAVE site is now mobile optimized for visibility, great for tablet users, but I feel the mobile users just got demoted. When will the INVOICE APP find its way on the chopping block.
I'll have to do some homeword and reseach the alternative options:
What's with removing a excellent feature and trying to say it's asked for? Not being able to snap receipts on the go is a big step backwards. Be honest about feature downgrades. Listen to that!!
@JCowan said:
Thank you for your comments—we appreciate your feedback, and want you to know we’re listening. We understand these changes will affect how you handle receipts, and we’re always considering your valuable input.
That's great, and I'm glad you're listening. However, listening without action won't do us any good.
I think this is great! I've been looking to go to another accounting software because Wave didn't offer this. I guess I don't need to look any further!
Next, we need to be able to attach documents to contact profiles. Thanks
@JCowan said:
Thank you for your comments—we appreciate your feedback, and want you to know we’re listening. We understand these changes will affect how you handle receipts, and we’re always considering your valuable input.
Does this mean Wave is reading all six pages of negative comments? Will you keep the OCR?
Agree, more than "listening" is needed, since you blatently lied about how this feature was something that was demanded by consumers. People demanded the ability to upload receipts (i.e. attach) them to transactions. They did not ask for the removal of the OCR/Receipt upload ability altogether, and the removal of an app that worked beautifully.
Terrible decision to sunset the mobile receipts app and OCR feature for all the reasons people have stated already. It turns a relatively simple and immediate process of saving receipts and adding transactions to something where we have to keep receipts for days and that's assuming folks have transactions automatically being imported in from their bank. I hope the decision gets reversed.
This is such a time saving enhancement. Efficiency just took a big leap!
I must say, in reading the comments, it does seem many do use the OCR religiously for saving their own time in the way that they are interacting with the site, so perhaps keeping it as an option we can turn on or off from waveapps.com might be useful?
Personally, though, I bookkeep everything from my real uploaded transactions and force myself to obtain, load, correct the OCR mistakes, then merge each and every time. So this is a great improvement in how I can use Wave!
Comments
In our non-profit, staff pay out of pocket for small expenses rather than use a company card. Our workflow has been to use the app to directly record receipts against a reimbursement account for each employee. Then, after several small expenses have accumulated, we issue a payment to bring the balance to 0. This means there are no automatic transactions imported from the bank or credit card, so the OCR function saved us a lot of time. Now we'll have to manually enter every single receipt. It will be cheaper for us to switch to Quickbooks instead of paying for the staff time to do that. It's too bad, as we recently started with Wave and it was working so well for us. I do appreciate the free tier with Wave, and would be willing to pay a small monthly/annual fee for the OCR/app, but it's just not worth it for us to stay if it costs us extra staff time. There are other features that Quickbooks has that are missing in Wave, and we were willing to forego those, but losing this one will likely tip it over towards QB. It made me nervous from the start when I saw that Wave doesn't have a proper export capability (i.e., I can't export our financials in a standard format and import into another software). I'm also concerned about staying with Wave if they're going to continue to remove features -- each time they do that, it wastes a lot of my time as I have to set up a new workflow/system. If they go through with this change, I'll wish I had chosen QB from the beginning.
Obviously, this was not for the consumer but for Wave's benefit. The feature you had with the receipts is why we all came and used Wave. We have 4 businesses we run through Wave and 4 of our techs and another client that used Wave. At least you gave us a month to find a better suited program.
Sad you thought this was a great decision.
Chiming in to agree that this is a huge bummer. While I would be happy to have the added options for dealing with receipts, it will be problematic if it comes at the expense of existing features.
Yes! This is exactly the solution I have been hoping would be added to Wave for handling receipts better. I still need the option for uploading OCR receipts from the app, email, or bulk uploading right on the receipts page. I still need a quick way to handle receipts that won't show up in my bank feed. The only other hope I had was for the receipts page to be more searchable/sortable, but please don't get rid of it!
I have already been paying for Payroll, Coaching, and now Bookkeeping services for one business in Wave and am in the process of migrating another business over to add more paid services, but am putting a pause on that in light of this news. Like many others have said, I would happily pay a reasonable add-on fee to keep the Receipts app, email option, and OCR feature. I haven't used this feature much in the last 10 months but, under normal circumstances, my team travels for work 90% of the time and the Receipts function was the deciding factor for me when choosing Wave. I really hope this decision isn't final. Personally, I would rather Wave continue to be useful than continue to be free.
I totally agree! Another thing that would make Receipts better is allowing Transactions + associated Receipts to be added to an invoice. We use Wave for 90% of our key business functions, but always need to keep a separate spreadsheet with details and images of receipts that are passed through to a client on an invoice. Wave has the details and images already, so why not allow for association of those pass-thru expenses to an invoice, which the client could easily click on to see the details (report) of all of the transactions + receipts passed thru to them. And/or ability to classify a transaction/receipt onto a project or client for easy invoicing and reporting later. That's the kind of improvement that would offset the huge pain of losing the Receipts app. But to lose Receipts with minimal upside is indeed quite frustrating. I, too, would gladly pay for better receipts / expense functionality. Some apps have a subscription model specifically for expense and/or hours tracking. For Wave this could be just a simple feature.
I only use the responsive site on my laptop because I did not like the limited functionality of the phone app, but I know the phone app is an important feature for many users.
Not everyone wants to link their bank account to import their transactions, or even has the ability to. I linked my RBC account last year, but once again it's not importing transactions, and there's nothing I can do about it until Wave sorts it out on the back end. This is the third or fourth time this has happened in the past year, and unfortunately, even once it starts synching again it won't import all the transactions that were made while it was not working. So without the receipt upload and OCR features, I will now need to enter every single transaction manually.
I use a small company for my credit card purchases, and Wave will not link to them. The receipt upload and OCR features allow me to scan and upload the receipts to create the transaction and then quickly verify that the information is correct, rather than needing to manually enter the entire transaction.
If Wave was just adding the option of allowing users to attach receipts to existing transactions, I would be 100% in favour of this. But the truth of the matter is, by removing the receipt upload and OCR features within the Waveapps program, my workload is going to increase substantially because I will now need to manually enter every single transaction before I can attach the receipt to it.
I feel we went backwards! On the surface...
1) I now have to use a mobile browser
2) Log in with User Name/PWD
3) Navigate to MENU
4) Navigate to PURCHASES
5) Navigate to RECEIPTS
6) Click UPLOAD RECEIPT
7) Find my image, via the FILES app on ANDROID, not the pretty interface from APPLE that you reference in the notification email re: this change.
How is this better for mobile users? APPS are a thing to streamline and make certain functionality when you're on the go, isolate a specific task, etc... Just because these WAVE site is now mobile optimized for visibility, great for tablet users, but I feel the mobile users just got demoted. When will the INVOICE APP find its way on the chopping block.
I'll have to do some homeword and reseach the alternative options:
Zipbooks
Akaunting
SlickPie
GnuCash
CloudBooks
Zoho Invoice
NCH Express Accounts
Under this new workflow, you are taking a step backward and providing no solution (that I can see) for the user to take targeted, in-Wave actions on a receipt in real-time. Even without the OCR, the email forwarding alone at least provides some way of directing receipts into a proper intake channel. But under the new workflow, receipts just pile up. The user must wait a day or more until the transaction is posted. Then and only then, the user may rummage through the wad of paper and/or recent pictures on a phone or document cloud. Under such a workflow, even an organized person is prone to either comingling receipts with other documents or losing/deleting a receipt altogether.
Preferred solution: (1) maintain a purpose-built space in Wave to queue digitized receipts (2) allow queue intake from mobile, desktop, email, etc. (3) provide a paid upgrade that supports OCR plus an intelligent "suggested transaction match" feature to merge receipts with bank transactions (4) if the mobile Receipts app is too costly, create SMS method for receipt submittal. For the submission step, this would be better than logging into wave on a mobile browser.
Is this a bad April fools joke...
@JCowan As you can see this was a bad decision. Can you bring this back to the proper team for reconsideration?
**What a disappointment! ** this is nothing but pathetic. Whichever product manager came up with this new idea clearly never ran a small business. I'd just take a picture of the receipt and forget about it. Now I gotta save everything and manually add receipts to each transaction? This is really going backwards.
....RECURRING THEME....
The OCR tool is an incredible timesaving and productivity feature.
The OCR capability is touted by users to Evangelize the adoption of Waveapps to new potential users.
Losing OCR is a determinate factor in moving away from Waveapps to a new platform.
The Waveapps team seems to be unaware or insensitive to the value of OCR to the current user base.
=======================
If at all possible, revisit the decision to eliminate the OCR feature.
Thanks
I’d pay to keep this feature as it’s something that helps massively. Absolutely at a loss as to who you’ve asked because 9/10 everyone would have surely have said that the receipt app was one of the best things about WaveApp due to being able to load it up with receipts and quickly do expenses on the go.
If you had needed to switch to a subscription model to keep this app going along with the infrastructure that supports it in the backend of it all, id have coughed up some coin but this is extremely disappointing to hear that it’s being dropped completely.
Please reconsider.
Da hell, "You asked. We listened".....HUH?! Wave, don't do anything. It's a smooth feature, please leave it.
This is not a good idea. Before it used to be 2 clicks to get a receipt uploaded. Now its 5+
Thank you for your comments—we appreciate your feedback, and want you to know we’re listening. We understand these changes will affect how you handle receipts, and we’re always considering your valuable input.
6 pages of comments that have one clear msg - I sincerely hope you're going to do more than "listen". Your customers have spoken, clearly. We would like to see "action" - and revert your decision.
SlickPie has shut down. Also consider Sunrise. They don't have the OCR, but at least you can upload the receipt and it creates the transaction.
That's great, and I'm glad you're listening. However, listening without action won't do us any good.
I think this is great! I've been looking to go to another accounting software because Wave didn't offer this. I guess I don't need to look any further!
Next, we need to be able to attach documents to contact profiles. Thanks
Does this mean Wave is reading all six pages of negative comments? Will you keep the OCR?
Agree, more than "listening" is needed, since you blatently lied about how this feature was something that was demanded by consumers. People demanded the ability to upload receipts (i.e. attach) them to transactions. They did not ask for the removal of the OCR/Receipt upload ability altogether, and the removal of an app that worked beautifully.
Terrible decision to sunset the mobile receipts app and OCR feature for all the reasons people have stated already. It turns a relatively simple and immediate process of saving receipts and adding transactions to something where we have to keep receipts for days and that's assuming folks have transactions automatically being imported in from their bank. I hope the decision gets reversed.
Awesome! We spoke, you listened.
Thank you!
This is such a time saving enhancement. Efficiency just took a big leap!
I must say, in reading the comments, it does seem many do use the OCR religiously for saving their own time in the way that they are interacting with the site, so perhaps keeping it as an option we can turn on or off from waveapps.com might be useful?
Personally, though, I bookkeep everything from my real uploaded transactions and force myself to obtain, load, correct the OCR mistakes, then merge each and every time. So this is a great improvement in how I can use Wave!