Please do not add recurring billing. I am building a competing small business accounting app and it helps me very much that you do not offer this basic feature.
Hi newbie here also. I really do love the free app. I think it is amazing, mostly. I am a little disappointed it doesn't have a recurring bill section. In my mind it seems so simple to be able to click a check box that says "recurring" and it would automatically set the bill up to be due the same time every month. I would use this feature not just for time-saving efforts but to also plan ahead for my monthly expenses vs income. We are a very small car dealership and having a vision of our recurring monthly expenses vs our sales would be huge for budgeting. Thank you, hopefully this would be in the makes soon. I appreciate what you guys are doing!
However, I will use the duplicate transaction option like Alexia had suggested, until a recurring monthly transaction is available. As soon as I pay a recurring monthly bill, I will go to transactions and make a duplicate and set that bill due for the next month. Although I would rather be able to plan ahead greater than one month in advance.
PS.. I did try to make a duplicate of the transaction but since I already paid it, it does not let me duplicate. I get a message that says cannot copy payment transaction. I guess its only possible to duplicate a bill before its paid.... please please consider making a recurring bills section because I'm finding this is not practical. Thank you
I can explain what happened there. We found an issue where duplicating a payment to a bill would automatically add it as another payment to that bill, which would affect your "Accounts Payable" in ways that were likely not intended.
So say you had a paid bill for $100 and duplicated that payment, the payment would be added to that same bill. Since, to Wave, that would mean that you paid $200 on a $100, it would set your Accounts Payable to $-100. We disabled that ability to prevent this accounting error from happening in the future.
If you record one of those payments as a simple expense instead of a bill payment and duplicate that expense from now on, you shouldn't encounter this issue again.
With all of that said, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We really appreciate it.
Hi @moffy, thank you for adding your voice to this discussion.
I can imagine how this could save time for our users, but I am surprised to hear you say it would save hours each month. Could you tell me a bit more about the recurring bills you have to record on a given month? What field do you work in? Is a large number of recurring bill common in your industry?
It would definitely save me 1-2 hours each month. Manually entering bills takes some time and some are weekly bills. Bills like:
3x phone bills
2x car insurances
gym memberships
Industry memberships
P.I insurances
home insurance
Internet bill
Website bill
domain bill
Email hosting
website hosting
Multiple Software subscriptions (up to 5).
Wages
cleaners
rent/mortgage
rates
I would imagine these are pretty typical bills across a majority of industries.
and the point is, recurring monthly bills are repetitive and a drain when not automated efficiently. In a small business, the sum of efficiency in all areas of your business is your profit margin! This would lead one to weigh options of a free, pretty good accounting software vs. software for a fee which when a good fit for your business, increases efficiency, therefore profit. Time is money!
I think this is a great idea and would save so much time for me as well! I have so many software subscriptions every month that would be great to automate
I just started using Wave couple of days ago. Really surprised to see recurring bills being omitted from an accounting software. Please add the feature. At least an option to duplicate the previous bill in the meantime will go a long way.
Thank you for adding your voice to this conversation, @Gits.
Can you tell me more about the bills you enter right now? Do you have a large number of bills you have to enter on a regular basis? Are they mostly utility bills? I ask so that we can have a better idea of the kind of impact a feature like this would have, as well as see how much time this would save you for you.
Sure Alexia. These are utility bills for electricity and phone/internet etc. Also some other expenses where we have service providers/trainers who are there with us for few months. We have to pay their fee but we don't have any way to mark it in Wave.
If payroll was available to us in India, we might have been able to utilise it for the latter.
Not having any of these we will be forced to look elsewhere as it is not worth spending so much time creating all these bills each month.
I too would love a way to have recurring expenses / bills looked after in Wave. Every year when my taxes are due I have to add any recurring expenses separately because to be honest I just don't remember to add them as I go along since they are "invisible" to me. For example Adobe Creative Cloud is charged automatically to my credit card monthly, so I forget to add it to Wave since there's no real world reminder to me to do so.
As others have said previously, thank you for an incredible free way to look after my accounts though.
Your feedback is absolutely valid. It's fair for you to expect this feature and it's clear to see how much time it would save for you. Thank you for taking the time to share!
Thank you for your support as well. While Wave is free, I can assure you that it won't stop us from constantly improving our platform and building new features!
I just wanted to jump in and say that I would also love this feature - since most of my incoming invoices are for different amounts, but most of my bills are the same amount every month, I would personally benefit from having this automated.
Thanks for such a wonderfully easy and free service. Running a small business, this is exactly what I need
@FrankPrendergast said:
I too would love a way to have recurring expenses / bills looked after in Wave. Every year when my taxes are due I have to add any recurring expenses separately because to be honest I just don't remember to add them as I go along since they are "invisible" to me. For example Adobe Creative Cloud is charged automatically to my credit card monthly, so I forget to add it to Wave since there's no real world reminder to me to do so.
As others have said previously, thank you for an incredible free way to look after my accounts though.
A solution might be to pay your CC all at once - you also save a little bit
I too am amazed that there is no facility to handle recurring bills. By far the majority of our bills recur on a monthly basis - for example hosting companies billing us for hosting clients' websites, licence fees for software, utility bills. The only difference between one month and the next is that the date changes. We spend far too much time each month entering all the details of each bill, almost exactly the same as the details we spent time entering last month. We really need to be able to set up each bill as a recurring item. As a short term fix, simply being able to copy and paste the previous month's bill would help - at least then we then only have to edit the date!
I'd be willing to pay a small fee for Wave if it had recurring expenses. I was really hoping your new enhancements and changes you just announced encompassed this feature. As with many small businesses we have recurring charges for services and products we use every month. In fact, most of my expenses are recurring. If they are automatically charged to my credit card, then having accounting software with recurring expenses only makes sense because it saves an enormous amount of time.
Agreed! I just signed up for Wave today, and I am disappointed that I can't specify item is a recurring bill.
For example, all my recurring bills are being paid on my CC. The card transactions are imported, but I cannot set them to show in the "Bills you owe" section. Would be nice to see one a figures populated in that area.
Count me in as well for needing this feature, i had signed up and was playing with the software, seeing if we could make the switch from quickbooks, to save some money. I would also be ok with there being a small fee (5 bucks a month or so to add this and/or inventory feature, one that actually tracks stock quantity, not value of inventory. I mean your invoices and billing allow me to type in my quantities, so the data is there... Everything else about the app is great. Hope you get these features one day so i can make the switch.
I'll add my vote as well. We would have switched our small business accounting over to Wave but the accountant said that memorized transactions (for recurring bills) was a must. So we upgraded to the newest version of Quickbooks for the time being as we were already using that and it already had that feature.
Our recurring bills are similar to what others here have posted:
Utilities, Phone, Internet, Electric, etc...
Insurance payments (Life, Health, Auto, Home)
Subscription fees for software or other things etc...
In many area's Wave would beat the features we have with QBO but without that feature we are unwilling to officially make the jump! Would love to see this added!!!
Hello there @Susan and @Ant! Potential revenue stream there (note to self!) but our work with automation and Machine Learning would then be negated! We want to make Wave as smart and as efficient as it can be. Part of this would be automatically recognizing patterns in your accounting habits and then taking action on your behalf to save major time in the end. Our rebrand acts almost like the start of this exciting journey so cheers to the future!
@Alexia said: I agree, having to recreate these every month sounds like a chore. We'd love to be able to give you back that time.
Is there a public roadmap of features? We could upvote and prioritise the most requested.
+1000000 for recurring bills! I could go on adding zeros but feel it would be a bit silly
Hey @P4NCH, echoing Alexia's thanks for contributing here! We have a section dedicated to discussing potential and planned features (check out Wave Features under Wave Discussion). For a little more insight into how we decide what to build, @Charlotte wrote this great post a while back
Just signed up and this was one of the first things I wanted to do. So surprising this isn't a feature. More surprising is the amount of people that have requested it, on this thread and others, for so long, yet nothing has been done?
Is there an issue? If not, why not add value to Wave and implement this? Add a 1% fee?
Hi @Jjr54. As this is something that is definitely on our radar, we want to set certain expectations for our users without putting ourselves in deep water. With that being said, I will definitely nudge our development team to see when/how far along we are in terms of adding recurring bills to Wave.
Iam a Quickbooks user and just saw the Wave now. I have 3 separate companies run on Quickbooks and would be happily migrate to Wave if this recurring expenses/billing is implemented as we are heavily using it on Quickbooks. I think it is a basic feature in any accounting software.
Also if you charge a fee for that feature we wouldn't mind
Comments
Please do not add recurring billing. I am building a competing small business accounting app and it helps me very much that you do not offer this basic feature.
Hi newbie here also. I really do love the free app. I think it is amazing, mostly. I am a little disappointed it doesn't have a recurring bill section. In my mind it seems so simple to be able to click a check box that says "recurring" and it would automatically set the bill up to be due the same time every month. I would use this feature not just for time-saving efforts but to also plan ahead for my monthly expenses vs income. We are a very small car dealership and having a vision of our recurring monthly expenses vs our sales would be huge for budgeting. Thank you, hopefully this would be in the makes soon. I appreciate what you guys are doing!
However, I will use the duplicate transaction option like Alexia had suggested, until a recurring monthly transaction is available. As soon as I pay a recurring monthly bill, I will go to transactions and make a duplicate and set that bill due for the next month. Although I would rather be able to plan ahead greater than one month in advance.
PS.. I did try to make a duplicate of the transaction but since I already paid it, it does not let me duplicate. I get a message that says cannot copy payment transaction. I guess its only possible to duplicate a bill before its paid.... please please consider making a recurring bills section because I'm finding this is not practical. Thank you
This feature definitely needs to be added. This would save hours each month.
Hi @newbiemj,
I can explain what happened there. We found an issue where duplicating a payment to a bill would automatically add it as another payment to that bill, which would affect your "Accounts Payable" in ways that were likely not intended.
So say you had a paid bill for $100 and duplicated that payment, the payment would be added to that same bill. Since, to Wave, that would mean that you paid $200 on a $100, it would set your Accounts Payable to $-100. We disabled that ability to prevent this accounting error from happening in the future.
If you record one of those payments as a simple expense instead of a bill payment and duplicate that expense from now on, you shouldn't encounter this issue again.
With all of that said, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We really appreciate it.
Hi @moffy, thank you for adding your voice to this discussion.
I can imagine how this could save time for our users, but I am surprised to hear you say it would save hours each month. Could you tell me a bit more about the recurring bills you have to record on a given month? What field do you work in? Is a large number of recurring bill common in your industry?
Hi @Alexia
It would definitely save me 1-2 hours each month. Manually entering bills takes some time and some are weekly bills. Bills like:
3x phone bills
2x car insurances
gym memberships
Industry memberships
P.I insurances
home insurance
Internet bill
Website bill
domain bill
Email hosting
website hosting
Multiple Software subscriptions (up to 5).
Wages
cleaners
rent/mortgage
rates
I would imagine these are pretty typical bills across a majority of industries.
and the point is, recurring monthly bills are repetitive and a drain when not automated efficiently. In a small business, the sum of efficiency in all areas of your business is your profit margin! This would lead one to weigh options of a free, pretty good accounting software vs. software for a fee which when a good fit for your business, increases efficiency, therefore profit. Time is money!
I think this is a great idea and would save so much time for me as well! I have so many software subscriptions every month that would be great to automate
Thank you, everyone! The information from your comments is invaluable. Thank you for taking the time to share.
I just started using Wave couple of days ago. Really surprised to see recurring bills being omitted from an accounting software. Please add the feature. At least an option to duplicate the previous bill in the meantime will go a long way.
Thank you for adding your voice to this conversation, @Gits.
Can you tell me more about the bills you enter right now? Do you have a large number of bills you have to enter on a regular basis? Are they mostly utility bills? I ask so that we can have a better idea of the kind of impact a feature like this would have, as well as see how much time this would save you for you.
Sure Alexia. These are utility bills for electricity and phone/internet etc. Also some other expenses where we have service providers/trainers who are there with us for few months. We have to pay their fee but we don't have any way to mark it in Wave.
If payroll was available to us in India, we might have been able to utilise it for the latter.
Not having any of these we will be forced to look elsewhere as it is not worth spending so much time creating all these bills each month.
I too would love a way to have recurring expenses / bills looked after in Wave. Every year when my taxes are due I have to add any recurring expenses separately because to be honest I just don't remember to add them as I go along since they are "invisible" to me. For example Adobe Creative Cloud is charged automatically to my credit card monthly, so I forget to add it to Wave since there's no real world reminder to me to do so.
As others have said previously, thank you for an incredible free way to look after my accounts though.
Hi, @Gits,
I'm sorry to hear that, but thank you for giving us a try and for sharing your feedback. We really appreciate you taking the time to do so.
Hi, @FrankPrendergast,
Your feedback is absolutely valid. It's fair for you to expect this feature and it's clear to see how much time it would save for you. Thank you for taking the time to share!
Thank you for your support as well. While Wave is free, I can assure you that it won't stop us from constantly improving our platform and building new features!
I just wanted to jump in and say that I would also love this feature - since most of my incoming invoices are for different amounts, but most of my bills are the same amount every month, I would personally benefit from having this automated.
Thanks for such a wonderfully easy and free service. Running a small business, this is exactly what I need
A solution might be to pay your CC all at once - you also save a little bit
I too am amazed that there is no facility to handle recurring bills. By far the majority of our bills recur on a monthly basis - for example hosting companies billing us for hosting clients' websites, licence fees for software, utility bills. The only difference between one month and the next is that the date changes. We spend far too much time each month entering all the details of each bill, almost exactly the same as the details we spent time entering last month. We really need to be able to set up each bill as a recurring item. As a short term fix, simply being able to copy and paste the previous month's bill would help - at least then we then only have to edit the date!
I'd be willing to pay a small fee for Wave if it had recurring expenses. I was really hoping your new enhancements and changes you just announced encompassed this feature. As with many small businesses we have recurring charges for services and products we use every month. In fact, most of my expenses are recurring. If they are automatically charged to my credit card, then having accounting software with recurring expenses only makes sense because it saves an enormous amount of time.
Just in case anyone is keeping count I agree: important feature to add.
Agreed! I just signed up for Wave today, and I am disappointed that I can't specify item is a recurring bill.
For example, all my recurring bills are being paid on my CC. The card transactions are imported, but I cannot set them to show in the "Bills you owe" section. Would be nice to see one a figures populated in that area.
Thank you for adding to this conversation, everyone. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback.
Count me in as well for needing this feature, i had signed up and was playing with the software, seeing if we could make the switch from quickbooks, to save some money. I would also be ok with there being a small fee (5 bucks a month or so to add this and/or inventory feature, one that actually tracks stock quantity, not value of inventory. I mean your invoices and billing allow me to type in my quantities, so the data is there... Everything else about the app is great. Hope you get these features one day so i can make the switch.
I'll add my vote as well. We would have switched our small business accounting over to Wave but the accountant said that memorized transactions (for recurring bills) was a must. So we upgraded to the newest version of Quickbooks for the time being as we were already using that and it already had that feature.
Our recurring bills are similar to what others here have posted:
Utilities, Phone, Internet, Electric, etc...
Insurance payments (Life, Health, Auto, Home)
Subscription fees for software or other things etc...
In many area's Wave would beat the features we have with QBO but without that feature we are unwilling to officially make the jump! Would love to see this added!!!
Hello there @Susan and @Ant! Potential revenue stream there (note to self!) but our work with automation and Machine Learning would then be negated! We want to make Wave as smart and as efficient as it can be. Part of this would be automatically recognizing patterns in your accounting habits and then taking action on your behalf to save major time in the end. Our rebrand acts almost like the start of this exciting journey so cheers to the future!
Is there a public roadmap of features? We could upvote and prioritise the most requested.
+1000000 for recurring bills! I could go on adding zeros but feel it would be a bit silly
Hey @P4NCH, echoing Alexia's thanks for contributing here! We have a section dedicated to discussing potential and planned features (check out Wave Features under Wave Discussion). For a little more insight into how we decide what to build, @Charlotte wrote this great post a while back
Just signed up and this was one of the first things I wanted to do. So surprising this isn't a feature. More surprising is the amount of people that have requested it, on this thread and others, for so long, yet nothing has been done?
Is there an issue? If not, why not add value to Wave and implement this? Add a 1% fee?
Hi @Jjr54. As this is something that is definitely on our radar, we want to set certain expectations for our users without putting ourselves in deep water. With that being said, I will definitely nudge our development team to see when/how far along we are in terms of adding recurring bills to Wave.
Iam a Quickbooks user and just saw the Wave now. I have 3 separate companies run on Quickbooks and would be happily migrate to Wave if this recurring expenses/billing is implemented as we are heavily using it on Quickbooks. I think it is a basic feature in any accounting software.
Also if you charge a fee for that feature we wouldn't mind