This would definitely help a lot. A question I have that I have not seen anyone else ask is why can you not scan a bill into the system the same way you do with a receipt?
Another way to make this task easier is if you change the options on wave for adding a collaborator. I do not think the three options you have at present is helpful. Why would I want a collaborator that can view all my finances without being able to do anything. If you add a collaborator option that can create and save estimates, invoices, receipts and bills only without being able to approve them or send them out. Further they should not be able to view accounting or banking functions. Then at least I can have some admin person do the tedious typing work required to create all these items, and I can just do the verification before approving and sending or making allocations.
For your first point, bills are much more complex than receipts are. When Wave scans a receipt, it only look the total, and the entire receipt is always assigned to a single account. The amount of the taxes is added manually.
For a bill, individual line items have to be written in, categorized appropriately, priced and assigned individual taxes. It gives our OCR software a much bigger chance for potentially costly mistakes. A feature like this one wouldn't just be a matter of using the same core as the receipt uploading feature for different fields. With that said, it's not impossible that we'll build such a feature one day.
There's also been a lot of talk around the Community on the subject of fine-tuning collaborator permission. I can't promise it's something we'll add to Wave in the future, but I can tell you that we do listen to our users' feedback and take it into account when looking into what to build next.
Thank you for adding your voices to this discussion. I'd love to hear more about the kinds of bills you manage on a monthly basis. Do you process a large number of bills that would benefit from a feature like this? What kind of bills are they? Do you mostly use bills for utilities and rent, or for something else?
Currently, we only handle a dozen or so recurring bills each month. Other seasons of business we have handled a greater volume. Types of bills that are common as recurring are: utilities (gas, electric, water, internet), mortgages, insurances for buildings, payments for services which are the same each month (ie...consultants that are contracted for a specific amount per month), vehicle bills (payments, insurances, and the calendar of regular maintenance for the fleet), standard supplies that are ordered to be delivered and paid for every month, and monthly subscriptions (for example amazon, or in our case a subscription to use specific testing services which must be paid monthly).
You can see why, if I have to enter each of these manually every month, the time it would take to use Wave would be an obstacle.
Thanks for your time and consideration! Truly, I appreciate it
Please can you prioritize adding a recurring bills feature? We have a dozen or so recurring bills each week. Wave is good but this feature will make it great and overall determine whether we change to another accounting system.
Just started using Wave and have noticed already this is a MUST have feature, not only does it help you keep track of future liabilities but saves you time having to enter them in each month; obviously you should be prompted to "review" them just in-case you stopped the service with the respective provider or the price varies slightly each month.
There are a lot of factors considered in our decision-making process for what we build next. We're always listening and assessing what new feature will benefit the biggest number of Wavers, and we always welcome feedback. It helps us get a better insight into what you need to run your business as smoothly as possible.
While our priorities might be elsewhere right now, that does not mean this feature will never be added to Wave. The best thing you can do to help us understand exactly how much time a feature like this would save you is to give us as much information as possible about your current process in recording bills, about the kinds of bills you wish you could make recurring, and about the amount of time you spend handling bills at this time.
I understand this can be frustrating, especially if this is a feature you would expect us to already have, but I can promise you that we have your feedback in mind every time we choose a new project to build for Wave.
I agree this should be a standard feature.
It allows for the option to not sync your bank accounts yet keep reconciling easy without having to download and import statements.
It helps with setting up recurring income which is stable and consistent. Expenses which may be stable or not.
We can then open the bank site and a client's specific account compare side by side with the same client account in Wave and reconcile with having to download and upload statements (which is very time consuming).
I'm not sure you're talking about the same feature previously mentioned. Recurring bills would not create transactions automatically and would still need to be matched with the appropriate transaction, they would just prepare a bill at regular interval. It would work similarly to how recurring invoices do.
Payments would still need to be recorded against those bills, but you'd save some time not having to re-enter your phone bill every month on the Bills page.
Thanks,
Perhaps I misstated.
I mean recurring expenses and income. It doesn't appear I can schedule these to show automatically as an unreconciled transaction for future dates.
Example, an individuals account receives 1200. deposit (income) every month on the 3rd.
They also have a 154.00 cable bill (expense) on the 14th. of every month.
It doesn't appear with WAVE I can set these as occurring on the 3rd and 14th for the next twelve months and they then automatically show in the persons account as an unreconciled transaction each month as those dates occur.
Each month going forward on the 3rd there'd automatically be an unreconciled income of 1200. on the 14th there'd be an unreconciled expense for 154.
Is there a way to do this? Thanks.
First of all. I have to say thank you for offering us a** FREE Accounting software.** Please keep this in mind. Second, it s not a big deal to record the bill once a month everytime you get it. However, a reminder pop up feature that the bill is due will be very useful. (may be it is there already and i just did not see it). Thank You again all wave team for an awesome work
@Rentsecure, the first one could be set up as a recurring invoice, if that makes sense according to the context. You would still have to record payment for it manually or categorize the payment to your invoice if it's being uploaded through a bank connection. As for the expense, that is exactly what other users in this discussion are asking about. It's not something that can be done at this time, however.
@oukhchi, thank you so much for the compliments and for the suggestions!
@Alexia Thanks for posting and replying to this thread. We've been using Wave for 3 years+ it's great. Literally the only thing I wish it had was the ability to have recurring expenses / bills. I understand you may have other priorities, hopefully it gets added at some point. Thanks again!
Thanks for joining in, @crabcomp, and thank you for sticking with us for so long! I'll pass your feedback along to our developers and make sure it's seen and considered.
This would definitely help a lot. A question I have that I have not seen anyone else ask is why can you not scan a bill into the system the same way you do with a receipt. If the software can pick up the important info from a receipt why not from a supplier invoice to create a bill?
Hi,
I'm new to Wave after Xero increase in fees and I only do 3 invoices a month. I'm willing to try Wave. I to had my home office bills paid back to me using a recurring bill. So I have power, gas, phone etc as one transaction back to me all categorized as home office.
I think a work around is to create some products and services under purchases and it is very quick to create a bill if you have them pre loaded with values or percentages of your house. In my case my home office is only 0.08 so I put that as my price and the quantity will be my bill amount without the tax.
Thanks for the free software.
Hello, I also agree that recurring bills is a BASIC and MVP feature. Not being on the roadmap at all is surprising. Hopefully these comments will at least convince you that it should be somewhere on the roadmap even if you don't consider it top priority.
Hi guys, Wave newbie here having the same issues. Is there an easy way to set up recurring DEBITS (NOT invoices) from my account for my studio rent, power bills etc? It's annoying to have to add them every month. Also I'm still trying to figure out if I should be adding these outgoings as bills? I don't receive monthly invoices for these things so is creating bills the only way to lodge them?
So far this seems to really be the Achilles heel of some otherwise good software.
Let me start by welcoming you to Wave, and to the Community!
It isn't possible to create recurring expenses right now, but you can create copies of past transactions. That might save you some time. Just find your rent from last month on your Transactions page, click on it to bring up the "Edit Transaction" panel and click on the "Duplicate Transaction" button at the bottom. You'll just have to change the date on the copy.
Those generally would be created as bills, yes. Whether or not you create a bill or just enter them as an expense is up to you and how you prefer working. Using bills will mean a bit more work, but also a bit more data you can use to get insight into your business.
Thanks for your feedback! And again, welcome to the Community, we're happy to have you!
Hi, nice work! I am currently testing the solution you are offering. I am BDM myself and I was wondering whether you have consider the first priorities of your customers in order to create the roadmap?(not neccessarly placing them at very first place though). Reccuring expenses are, in my opinion, maybe the most important feature small business owners are looking for (your main target group - at least for now). When you are a small business owner you dont have an accountant reminding you about the expenses and the timing, neither you have the manforce for inhouse role taking it as consideration.
Cheers,
Kostas
We do consider the needs of our users when we're looking into what we will build next for Wave. It's, in fact, one of the most important factors, if not the most important. We're always happy to receive feedback from our users and that feedback has a significant impact on what we do next.
I can tell you that we are aware of how useful that feature would be to some of our users. I can't promise that this is something we'll prioritize in the immediate future, but we are listening.
Hi, @3101 and @TimK. Thank you for joining in on this discussion.
@3101, we use an optical character recognition software to read the information from receipts. It only really looks for the date and the total of that receipt. These pieces of software aren't always the smartest, which is why we require you to verify everything before a receipt is uploaded to your Transactions page. Setting up something similar to this feature to handle bills would require a much more powerful OCR system, as well as a lot of work on the Bills page as it appears now. That isn't to say that it's impossible, just that it wouldn't be quite as simple as using the same tool we use for receipts.
With all of this said, I'm happy to pass along your suggestion!
Comments
This would definitely help a lot. A question I have that I have not seen anyone else ask is why can you not scan a bill into the system the same way you do with a receipt?
Another way to make this task easier is if you change the options on wave for adding a collaborator. I do not think the three options you have at present is helpful. Why would I want a collaborator that can view all my finances without being able to do anything. If you add a collaborator option that can create and save estimates, invoices, receipts and bills only without being able to approve them or send them out. Further they should not be able to view accounting or banking functions. Then at least I can have some admin person do the tedious typing work required to create all these items, and I can just do the verification before approving and sending or making allocations.
Hi, @3101.
For your first point, bills are much more complex than receipts are. When Wave scans a receipt, it only look the total, and the entire receipt is always assigned to a single account. The amount of the taxes is added manually.
For a bill, individual line items have to be written in, categorized appropriately, priced and assigned individual taxes. It gives our OCR software a much bigger chance for potentially costly mistakes. A feature like this one wouldn't just be a matter of using the same core as the receipt uploading feature for different fields. With that said, it's not impossible that we'll build such a feature one day.
There's also been a lot of talk around the Community on the subject of fine-tuning collaborator permission. I can't promise it's something we'll add to Wave in the future, but I can tell you that we do listen to our users' feedback and take it into account when looking into what to build next.
agree
Hi, @CDM and @awassall.
Thank you for adding your voices to this discussion. I'd love to hear more about the kinds of bills you manage on a monthly basis. Do you process a large number of bills that would benefit from a feature like this? What kind of bills are they? Do you mostly use bills for utilities and rent, or for something else?
Currently, we only handle a dozen or so recurring bills each month. Other seasons of business we have handled a greater volume. Types of bills that are common as recurring are: utilities (gas, electric, water, internet), mortgages, insurances for buildings, payments for services which are the same each month (ie...consultants that are contracted for a specific amount per month), vehicle bills (payments, insurances, and the calendar of regular maintenance for the fleet), standard supplies that are ordered to be delivered and paid for every month, and monthly subscriptions (for example amazon, or in our case a subscription to use specific testing services which must be paid monthly).
You can see why, if I have to enter each of these manually every month, the time it would take to use Wave would be an obstacle.
Thanks for your time and consideration! Truly, I appreciate it
Thanks for following up, @CDM.
I agree, having to recreate these every month sounds like a chore. We'd love to be able to give you back that time. Thanks again!
Please can you prioritize adding a recurring bills feature? We have a dozen or so recurring bills each week. Wave is good but this feature will make it great and overall determine whether we change to another accounting system.
Wow, come on - how can this not even be on the roadmap?
Just started using Wave and have noticed already this is a MUST have feature, not only does it help you keep track of future liabilities but saves you time having to enter them in each month; obviously you should be prompted to "review" them just in-case you stopped the service with the respective provider or the price varies slightly each month.
Thank you, @Mister and @cypyix333 for joining this discussion and sharing your feedback.
Hi, @cyphix333.
There are a lot of factors considered in our decision-making process for what we build next. We're always listening and assessing what new feature will benefit the biggest number of Wavers, and we always welcome feedback. It helps us get a better insight into what you need to run your business as smoothly as possible.
While our priorities might be elsewhere right now, that does not mean this feature will never be added to Wave. The best thing you can do to help us understand exactly how much time a feature like this would save you is to give us as much information as possible about your current process in recording bills, about the kinds of bills you wish you could make recurring, and about the amount of time you spend handling bills at this time.
I understand this can be frustrating, especially if this is a feature you would expect us to already have, but I can promise you that we have your feedback in mind every time we choose a new project to build for Wave.
I agree this should be a standard feature.
It allows for the option to not sync your bank accounts yet keep reconciling easy without having to download and import statements.
It helps with setting up recurring income which is stable and consistent. Expenses which may be stable or not.
We can then open the bank site and a client's specific account compare side by side with the same client account in Wave and reconcile with having to download and upload statements (which is very time consuming).
Hi, @Rentsecure.
I'm not sure you're talking about the same feature previously mentioned. Recurring bills would not create transactions automatically and would still need to be matched with the appropriate transaction, they would just prepare a bill at regular interval. It would work similarly to how recurring invoices do.
Payments would still need to be recorded against those bills, but you'd save some time not having to re-enter your phone bill every month on the Bills page.
Thanks,
Perhaps I misstated.
I mean recurring expenses and income. It doesn't appear I can schedule these to show automatically as an unreconciled transaction for future dates.
Example, an individuals account receives 1200. deposit (income) every month on the 3rd.
They also have a 154.00 cable bill (expense) on the 14th. of every month.
It doesn't appear with WAVE I can set these as occurring on the 3rd and 14th for the next twelve months and they then automatically show in the persons account as an unreconciled transaction each month as those dates occur.
Each month going forward on the 3rd there'd automatically be an unreconciled income of 1200. on the 14th there'd be an unreconciled expense for 154.
Is there a way to do this? Thanks.
First of all. I have to say thank you for offering us a** FREE Accounting software.** Please keep this in mind. Second, it s not a big deal to record the bill once a month everytime you get it. However, a reminder pop up feature that the bill is due will be very useful. (may be it is there already and i just did not see it). Thank You again all wave team for an awesome work
Hi, @Rentsecure and @oukhchi.
@Rentsecure, the first one could be set up as a recurring invoice, if that makes sense according to the context. You would still have to record payment for it manually or categorize the payment to your invoice if it's being uploaded through a bank connection. As for the expense, that is exactly what other users in this discussion are asking about. It's not something that can be done at this time, however.
@oukhchi, thank you so much for the compliments and for the suggestions!
@Alexia Thanks for posting and replying to this thread. We've been using Wave for 3 years+ it's great. Literally the only thing I wish it had was the ability to have recurring expenses / bills. I understand you may have other priorities, hopefully it gets added at some point. Thanks again!
Thanks for joining in, @crabcomp, and thank you for sticking with us for so long! I'll pass your feedback along to our developers and make sure it's seen and considered.
I could use this same feature. Need to be able to have rent/utilities/payroll occur monthly, not entered in manually each month.
This would definitely help a lot. A question I have that I have not seen anyone else ask is why can you not scan a bill into the system the same way you do with a receipt. If the software can pick up the important info from a receipt why not from a supplier invoice to create a bill?
Hi,
I'm new to Wave after Xero increase in fees and I only do 3 invoices a month. I'm willing to try Wave. I to had my home office bills paid back to me using a recurring bill. So I have power, gas, phone etc as one transaction back to me all categorized as home office.
I think a work around is to create some products and services under purchases and it is very quick to create a bill if you have them pre loaded with values or percentages of your house. In my case my home office is only 0.08 so I put that as my price and the quantity will be my bill amount without the tax.
Thanks for the free software.
Hello, I also agree that recurring bills is a BASIC and MVP feature. Not being on the roadmap at all is surprising. Hopefully these comments will at least convince you that it should be somewhere on the roadmap even if you don't consider it top priority.
Thank you, @alanS and @michaeltaylor3d, for sharing your comments and feedback!
Hi guys, Wave newbie here having the same issues. Is there an easy way to set up recurring DEBITS (NOT invoices) from my account for my studio rent, power bills etc? It's annoying to have to add them every month. Also I'm still trying to figure out if I should be adding these outgoings as bills? I don't receive monthly invoices for these things so is creating bills the only way to lodge them?
So far this seems to really be the Achilles heel of some otherwise good software.
Thanks in advance for any help...
Hi, @superdef.
Let me start by welcoming you to Wave, and to the Community!
It isn't possible to create recurring expenses right now, but you can create copies of past transactions. That might save you some time. Just find your rent from last month on your Transactions page, click on it to bring up the "Edit Transaction" panel and click on the "Duplicate Transaction" button at the bottom. You'll just have to change the date on the copy.
Those generally would be created as bills, yes. Whether or not you create a bill or just enter them as an expense is up to you and how you prefer working. Using bills will mean a bit more work, but also a bit more data you can use to get insight into your business.
Thanks for your feedback! And again, welcome to the Community, we're happy to have you!
Hi, nice work! I am currently testing the solution you are offering. I am BDM myself and I was wondering whether you have consider the first priorities of your customers in order to create the roadmap?(not neccessarly placing them at very first place though). Reccuring expenses are, in my opinion, maybe the most important feature small business owners are looking for (your main target group - at least for now). When you are a small business owner you dont have an accountant reminding you about the expenses and the timing, neither you have the manforce for inhouse role taking it as consideration.
Cheers,
Kostas
Recurring bills. Yes please.
Hi, @kostashania.
We do consider the needs of our users when we're looking into what we will build next for Wave. It's, in fact, one of the most important factors, if not the most important. We're always happy to receive feedback from our users and that feedback has a significant impact on what we do next.
I can tell you that we are aware of how useful that feature would be to some of our users. I can't promise that this is something we'll prioritize in the immediate future, but we are listening.
Hi, @3101 and @TimK. Thank you for joining in on this discussion.
@3101, we use an optical character recognition software to read the information from receipts. It only really looks for the date and the total of that receipt. These pieces of software aren't always the smartest, which is why we require you to verify everything before a receipt is uploaded to your Transactions page. Setting up something similar to this feature to handle bills would require a much more powerful OCR system, as well as a lot of work on the Bills page as it appears now. That isn't to say that it's impossible, just that it wouldn't be quite as simple as using the same tool we use for receipts.
With all of this said, I'm happy to pass along your suggestion!