I did try making a simple spreadsheet with recurring transactions.
You need three columns: DateDescriptionAmount
Fill each of your recurring transaction in on a row. For example:
01/01/2019 Rent for Store -1250
The amounts should have a negative number.
When you are finished upload your Excel File to Google Sheets and then Download it as a CSV. (Google Sheets seems to format it in a more friendly way than Microsoft Excel.)
Then one thing you will notice is uploading future dated transactions is not possible, so just make all your transactions dated for the first of the month.
I would only upload one month at at time.
Once you import the transactions you can categorize them.
You can then predict your Cash Flow using the Account Balances Report and then clicking on the Account you imported to and setting the dates for the Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4.
Another option I am considering as a workaround is to prefix all transactions with the word "Recurring" and then Search for and Duplicate them each month.
Recurring expenses would be a great feature. We all have subscriptions, cloud fees, hosting, etc. I know I have missed entering details in the past because they were not carried over. It would also save hours of admin work.
I feel like we have been asking for this for years and Wave just aren't listening! Why is something so simple not being listened to!!!
I want to feed money back into this company to support them and watch them grow but when hundreds of people are asking for something and they simply aren't listening it makes you wonder!!!
I am currently having to manually input every month my bills for internet, wifi, insurance, rent etc and it is getting arduous!!!
Just trying to switch over from Quicken to your software and am very disappointed you do not have a recurring bill function. I use it to see cash flow, when I need to move money from one account to another, etc. Not sure if this software is going to work for me now.
Your software was recommended to me last Summer as a great alternative to costly accounting software for small businesses.
Turns out there seems to be a good reason to pay for software.
I have been very frustrated with having to enter recurring transactions every single month. Alternatively, if I miss one, I have to go back and enter it every month in the past to get current.
The issue at hand is the lack of recurring bills. SEVERAL people (thats an understatement) have expressed interest, and several have said they are going elsewhere simply due to the fact that it doesnt exist with your software. Now, that alone would have a good business getting on top of adding it ASAP, but here we are, and its nowhere to be found.
The issue with not having it, and yet saying that you should be able to pull it from your bank accounts when you upload the data is that one, some peoples banks dont allow that functionality, two, some people simply dont want to do that due to trust issues with online only data (which is why some banks dont allow it as well), and three, some people with small businesses are using one bank account for both their business and their personal finances. Now, this obviously isnt the best way to go about it, but it happens.
If Im entering 15 bills each month, and 8 are exactly the same every month, why should I have to enter those as well?
If Im spending 15 minutes doing this (and thats for the computer savvy, not the guys who hate doing it, but have to), and cut it down to 7 because I no longer have to enter all the recurring bills, Ive saved myself almost an hour and a half on the year. When time is money, every minute is worth something.
Regardless of the why, what is very obvious from the time this started until today is that Wave has zero interest in actually making recurring bills a reality.
Its actually a very simple change that wouldnt take much time at all to implement, but we keep hearing from Wave that "we are forwarding your messages" or "added to conversation" or "we are looking into it" or "we appreciate the feedback", but all that amounts to is a polite way of saying, thanks for your comment, but we arent actually interested in doing that.
You see, from a new small business owners perspective, I need things to make my life easier, not more difficult when Im starting out. Wave is making it more difficult, and for what? No reason that anyone here can see, and there is no explanation as to why the feature doesnt exist, only more questions from Wave about trying to "understand."
If you dont get it by now, you either never will, or never had any intention of adding it anyway, in which case most of your replies are disingenuous at best.
Again, sometimes free just isnt worth it.
Like I said above. Time is money, and if something I paid $150 for does this for me automatically, the time saved is worth that, and sometimes a lot more.
So, either add the feature or just tell everyone its not coming.
There was no reason to prolong this issue to this point, but you have, and its just going to keep costing you clients.
@goto10@Gits@pdetti@tekfranz@JimB@Margaret@MayaMercer@mahout@ABDPhotography and others: we hear you and we empathize with your need and your frustration. We've gotten great details that are useful to the product team in eventually designing the right solution, and we appreciate that. I'd also like to be frank with you as that's what you deserve:
Our amazing user base makes many requests, each unique to their individual needs. We have a wide swath of software that we build. We take into account quantity of requests, degree of pain, applicability to a broader audience, impact on business revenue, and many other factors into our development prioritization. It's not an exact science, but we try to do our best to serve you honestly while being an effective business. We fully admit that at times, that causes us not to focus on the areas of your particular needs. We will never hide behind "free" as that's not how we see our value to you, and we wouldn't be a viable business if we didn't win your trust to then earn some revenue from our financial services (depending on your geography).
When it comes to recurring bills, the effort to bring to life a feature of the calibre of our recurring invoicing, is quite a bit of work, on the order of months for a team to tackle. We appreciate that you need not be concerned with this, as you just need your software to work for you. We have prioritized bringing a "Copy Bill" feature within the next several weeks that should make the manual effort much faster. We also have a "Copy Transaction" feature already for people on our latest accounting platform. While not the perfect solution, these should make your efforts much smaller to get in-month or multi-week visibility. We do recognize it's still a manual task that can be forgotten.
As we finish migrating all users over to our latest accounting platform (an ongoing effort that we hope to wrap in the next couple of months), our team will then begin work on enhancements to that system. We'll revisit recurring bills as a feature then and see if there are any opportunities to bring it to market later in 2019. We cannot guarantee this though, and we want to be upfront about that so that you can make the right decision about the software you use for your business.
Thank you for being so open about your development plans. Appreciate you prioritizing the copy bill feature to help ease the pain until a permanent solution is developed.
@Mani said:
1. What is your primary motivation for entering these bills every month rather than categorize a transactions when it gets pulled in from your bank? Is it to get a sense of cash flow? Is it for maintaining a greater level of detail? Is it so your Accounts Payable numbers are always clear to you? We've seen millions of users come and go, but we don't like to presume for those on this thread. Of course, some folks like @jennyshushu don't have a bank that allows automatic data feeds, so we appreciate that reality and know it's frustrating to manually input the data.
Yes to all of that. Put simply, having a way to represent these recurring expenses in the app helps us model reality more accurately. Not only would it make it easy to project cash flow out into the future (which is something you'd also need to support), but it would help us quickly see our current obligations. Categorizing transactions as they come in from a bank feed doesn't help with any of that. Of course, then there's the issue of repetitive data entry. It's a waste of time, which is a scarce enough commodity as it is.
How often do your recurring bills vary in amount? Do you find that your bills are the same amount each month, or do they vary from month-to-month because of usage (like a utility)? If they vary, how do you imagine the system should respond to the need to collect more information from you?
My bills are pretty fixed. There is the potential for some variance based on usage, but the usage for those is based on headcount, which isn't going to change frequently.
Like the others, I appreciate your consideration of this feature.
Big vote for the recurring bill feature. We run several businesses that use a plethora of online services that are billed monthly (e.g. InfusionSoft, Clickfunnels, Spotify, G-Drive, Google Suite, iCloud, Monday, Zapier, Zoom, Office365 just to name a few), as well as other monthly paid services (e.g. phone bills, internet bills, office rental, etc.) and some yearly (e.g. Dropbox, internet domain renewals, hosting services, Wordpress templates, train discount card subscription, etc). It's a big pain to enter these bills every month manually.
Since most of these bills come into my email inbox automatically, it would be fantastic if there could be a similar service to TripIt: whenever an email comes in with a trip itinerary (e.g. flight, train, hotel, car rental booking), it automatically imports it to the TripIt app. So the ideal scenario would be to have Wave add the bill automatically to the stack whenever a recurring invoice enters my mailbox.
In any case, copying an existing transaction would already help, please implement asap... Thanks!
Hey @Ubergeeksov, in the transaction details panel, click the button that looks like two panes at the bottom lefthand corner of the panel to copy the transaction.
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.
Please, just tell me how a product like this get built and totally neglects a recurring transaction feature. Seriously, what was the mindset and where was the insight.... Clearly people want this, it is a standard feature in every other package. If I was a shareholder i'd say it needs to be put to a high priority asap.
@KWes said:
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.
@tekfranz said:
I was thinking about this. Has anyone tried making an Excel Spreadsheet with their recurring bills and importing it at the beginning of each month? Sorry I am new to Wave but I see transaction import is an option.
@pdetti said:
Charlotte, I think it is just that users are not even understanding how you cannot have a recurring bills feature. It is just as important as recurring invoices and would work the same exact way. It is the most basic of basic accounting features I can remember having it in the 90's in the early versions of Quickbooks. Seems like a huge oversight here and is making what is really amazing software crippled so badly that it is forcing me continue to look for alternatives. The fact that is not even on the roadmap is mind boggling for something so simple. Time saving keeps coming up in this discussion but it really is not about saving time, it is more about knowing that any time you look at your income versus expenses forecast, you know exactly where you are. You don't have too worry that you forgot to enter a bill. Especially with so many not sending paper bills anymore, it is a basic necessity to run a small business. Thanks for listening.
I totally agree. You have explained the frustration correctly. I think Wave staff need to take a step back here and accept that the ball was dropped and that until a recurring feature is added to the product, it is a fail. It is essential that Wave adds this to their priority road map and stop acting like it is a non-essential feature.
I am done and after trialing both Business and Personal profile there are way to many limitations and frustrations. Many of my bank connections are broken and most of my tasks are entries need to be manual anyway. If I am going to do so much manual work without time savings, I might as well just take a full featured software.
I know it is free but ....There is no such thing as a Free Lunch....
I also would greatly appreciate this basic feature. Forecasting my cashflow requires that I make a bill for each month multiplied by how many recurring bills I have. Even the ability to import bills (not transactions) would greatly improve UX. Allowing access to create a bill via the API would also help the issue for tech-savvy owners or those using Zapier. Thank you!
At the beginning of 2019 I went from using Billdu to using Wave and I think I am going to stay. Recurring bills is one of the features I miss already. I don't know about others but I personally will occasionally forget to add the recurring bills each month (especially after not having to with Billdue) then I realize and have to go back a month to enter them and enter the current month also, so double workload.
I would also like to see something similar for 1099 contractors, where all their payments was entered under their name in the bills list. Just so their name is listed once and not 50 times in the list. However, my top priority vote goes to recurring bills
We continue to appreciate the building dialogue here. We don't mind the sarcasm or the repeated sentiment that this is a "clear requirement" for our offering. We'll continue to listen intently and bring this feedback in to our bigger prioritization efforts as a software company in service of you.
We're very close to launching the aforementioned stop-gap of Copy/Duplicate Bill. That will help many, but not all, overcome the lack of a recurring bills feature. I'll jump back on the thread to let you all know when it ships.
@Chipfo I'd be curious to learn more about your 1099 contractors suggestion. Have you tried to Purchases by Vendor report? If you'd be able to elaborate here, or on any 1099-related thread, we'd love to learn more.
Hello Mani. Let me see if I can explain it, I use 1099 contractors for labor and one or two of them work every week so every week I make a 1099 contractor bill, if I do that every week for James at the end of the year James will be entered 52 times. It would be nice to be able to just enter his name and others just once in the list , put in a payment each week under his name, that way it's not making the list so long.
Thank you very much for asking! I hope I explained it right.
@goto10@Gits@pdetti@tekfranz@JimB@Margaret@MayaMercer@mahout@ABDPhotography@TMGH@Chipfo@JaysonWonder and others. I'm happy to report that we have shipped our Duplicate Bill functionality. We won't pretend it's equivalent to a Recurring Bills feature. We also aren't kidding ourselves that this is a permanent stop gap. However, we hope that this feature will help many of you be more efficient in Wave.
@Mani
This is great and will help out. Thank you...
Now being a standard end user for a min. with this in a manageable state can you look at and maybe get an update to the community on https://community.waveapps.com/discussion/comment/7430.
You did a great job engaging with the Wave community on this issue I hope you can do a similar push with the time tracking issue linked above. You are now a victim of your own success
I am also looking for this feature as we have regular utility bills and Rents. It also makes your software useful for small companies who don't wish to connect their bank accounts due to various reasons.
Comments
I did try making a simple spreadsheet with recurring transactions.
You need three columns: Date Description Amount
Fill each of your recurring transaction in on a row. For example:
01/01/2019 Rent for Store -1250
The amounts should have a negative number.
When you are finished upload your Excel File to Google Sheets and then Download it as a CSV. (Google Sheets seems to format it in a more friendly way than Microsoft Excel.)
Then one thing you will notice is uploading future dated transactions is not possible, so just make all your transactions dated for the first of the month.
I would only upload one month at at time.
Once you import the transactions you can categorize them.
You can then predict your Cash Flow using the Account Balances Report and then clicking on the Account you imported to and setting the dates for the Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4.
Another option I am considering as a workaround is to prefix all transactions with the word "Recurring" and then Search for and Duplicate them each month.
Hello,
Recurring expenses would be a great feature. We all have subscriptions, cloud fees, hosting, etc. I know I have missed entering details in the past because they were not carried over. It would also save hours of admin work.
Thank you in advance
Yes please!
This would help tremendously with keeping an actual balance!
I feel like we have been asking for this for years and Wave just aren't listening! Why is something so simple not being listened to!!!
I want to feed money back into this company to support them and watch them grow but when hundreds of people are asking for something and they simply aren't listening it makes you wonder!!!
I am currently having to manually input every month my bills for internet, wifi, insurance, rent etc and it is getting arduous!!!
Just trying to switch over from Quicken to your software and am very disappointed you do not have a recurring bill function. I use it to see cash flow, when I need to move money from one account to another, etc. Not sure if this software is going to work for me now.
Your software was recommended to me last Summer as a great alternative to costly accounting software for small businesses.
Turns out there seems to be a good reason to pay for software.
I have been very frustrated with having to enter recurring transactions every single month. Alternatively, if I miss one, I have to go back and enter it every month in the past to get current.
The issue at hand is the lack of recurring bills. SEVERAL people (thats an understatement) have expressed interest, and several have said they are going elsewhere simply due to the fact that it doesnt exist with your software. Now, that alone would have a good business getting on top of adding it ASAP, but here we are, and its nowhere to be found.
The issue with not having it, and yet saying that you should be able to pull it from your bank accounts when you upload the data is that one, some peoples banks dont allow that functionality, two, some people simply dont want to do that due to trust issues with online only data (which is why some banks dont allow it as well), and three, some people with small businesses are using one bank account for both their business and their personal finances. Now, this obviously isnt the best way to go about it, but it happens.
If Im entering 15 bills each month, and 8 are exactly the same every month, why should I have to enter those as well?
If Im spending 15 minutes doing this (and thats for the computer savvy, not the guys who hate doing it, but have to), and cut it down to 7 because I no longer have to enter all the recurring bills, Ive saved myself almost an hour and a half on the year. When time is money, every minute is worth something.
Regardless of the why, what is very obvious from the time this started until today is that Wave has zero interest in actually making recurring bills a reality.
Its actually a very simple change that wouldnt take much time at all to implement, but we keep hearing from Wave that "we are forwarding your messages" or "added to conversation" or "we are looking into it" or "we appreciate the feedback", but all that amounts to is a polite way of saying, thanks for your comment, but we arent actually interested in doing that.
You see, from a new small business owners perspective, I need things to make my life easier, not more difficult when Im starting out. Wave is making it more difficult, and for what? No reason that anyone here can see, and there is no explanation as to why the feature doesnt exist, only more questions from Wave about trying to "understand."
If you dont get it by now, you either never will, or never had any intention of adding it anyway, in which case most of your replies are disingenuous at best.
Again, sometimes free just isnt worth it.
Like I said above. Time is money, and if something I paid $150 for does this for me automatically, the time saved is worth that, and sometimes a lot more.
So, either add the feature or just tell everyone its not coming.
There was no reason to prolong this issue to this point, but you have, and its just going to keep costing you clients.
@goto10 @Gits @pdetti @tekfranz @JimB @Margaret @MayaMercer @mahout @ABDPhotography and others: we hear you and we empathize with your need and your frustration. We've gotten great details that are useful to the product team in eventually designing the right solution, and we appreciate that. I'd also like to be frank with you as that's what you deserve:
Our amazing user base makes many requests, each unique to their individual needs. We have a wide swath of software that we build. We take into account quantity of requests, degree of pain, applicability to a broader audience, impact on business revenue, and many other factors into our development prioritization. It's not an exact science, but we try to do our best to serve you honestly while being an effective business. We fully admit that at times, that causes us not to focus on the areas of your particular needs. We will never hide behind "free" as that's not how we see our value to you, and we wouldn't be a viable business if we didn't win your trust to then earn some revenue from our financial services (depending on your geography).
When it comes to recurring bills, the effort to bring to life a feature of the calibre of our recurring invoicing, is quite a bit of work, on the order of months for a team to tackle. We appreciate that you need not be concerned with this, as you just need your software to work for you. We have prioritized bringing a "Copy Bill" feature within the next several weeks that should make the manual effort much faster. We also have a "Copy Transaction" feature already for people on our latest accounting platform. While not the perfect solution, these should make your efforts much smaller to get in-month or multi-week visibility. We do recognize it's still a manual task that can be forgotten.
As we finish migrating all users over to our latest accounting platform (an ongoing effort that we hope to wrap in the next couple of months), our team will then begin work on enhancements to that system. We'll revisit recurring bills as a feature then and see if there are any opportunities to bring it to market later in 2019. We cannot guarantee this though, and we want to be upfront about that so that you can make the right decision about the software you use for your business.
Thank you for being so open about your development plans. Appreciate you prioritizing the copy bill feature to help ease the pain until a permanent solution is developed.
Yes to all of that. Put simply, having a way to represent these recurring expenses in the app helps us model reality more accurately. Not only would it make it easy to project cash flow out into the future (which is something you'd also need to support), but it would help us quickly see our current obligations. Categorizing transactions as they come in from a bank feed doesn't help with any of that. Of course, then there's the issue of repetitive data entry. It's a waste of time, which is a scarce enough commodity as it is.
My bills are pretty fixed. There is the potential for some variance based on usage, but the usage for those is based on headcount, which isn't going to change frequently.
Like the others, I appreciate your consideration of this feature.
@Mani
Thank you for the information. A copy bill feature would defiantly help in the short term, and we shall wait as patiently possible.
Thank you for the great efforts and product.
Big vote for the recurring bill feature. We run several businesses that use a plethora of online services that are billed monthly (e.g. InfusionSoft, Clickfunnels, Spotify, G-Drive, Google Suite, iCloud, Monday, Zapier, Zoom, Office365 just to name a few), as well as other monthly paid services (e.g. phone bills, internet bills, office rental, etc.) and some yearly (e.g. Dropbox, internet domain renewals, hosting services, Wordpress templates, train discount card subscription, etc). It's a big pain to enter these bills every month manually.
Since most of these bills come into my email inbox automatically, it would be fantastic if there could be a similar service to TripIt: whenever an email comes in with a trip itinerary (e.g. flight, train, hotel, car rental booking), it automatically imports it to the TripIt app. So the ideal scenario would be to have Wave add the bill automatically to the stack whenever a recurring invoice enters my mailbox.
In any case, copying an existing transaction would already help, please implement asap... Thanks!
Hi @Mani ,
How do you use the "Copy Transaction" feature that you mention? I cannot find it.
Thanks,
Richard
Hey @Ubergeeksov, in the transaction details panel, click the button that looks like two panes at the bottom lefthand corner of the panel to copy the transaction.
Great - thanks.
Please, just tell me how a product like this get built and totally neglects a recurring transaction feature. Seriously, what was the mindset and where was the insight.... Clearly people want this, it is a standard feature in every other package. If I was a shareholder i'd say it needs to be put to a high priority asap.
Just my 2 cents worth.
I love the sarcasm here.
A solid work around. I am going to test this out.
I totally agree. You have explained the frustration correctly. I think Wave staff need to take a step back here and accept that the ball was dropped and that until a recurring feature is added to the product, it is a fail. It is essential that Wave adds this to their priority road map and stop acting like it is a non-essential feature.
I am done and after trialing both Business and Personal profile there are way to many limitations and frustrations. Many of my bank connections are broken and most of my tasks are entries need to be manual anyway. If I am going to do so much manual work without time savings, I might as well just take a full featured software.
I know it is free but ....There is no such thing as a Free Lunch....
I also would greatly appreciate this basic feature. Forecasting my cashflow requires that I make a bill for each month multiplied by how many recurring bills I have. Even the ability to import bills (not transactions) would greatly improve UX. Allowing access to create a bill via the API would also help the issue for tech-savvy owners or those using Zapier. Thank you!
At the beginning of 2019 I went from using Billdu to using Wave and I think I am going to stay. Recurring bills is one of the features I miss already. I don't know about others but I personally will occasionally forget to add the recurring bills each month (especially after not having to with Billdue) then I realize and have to go back a month to enter them and enter the current month also, so double workload.
I would also like to see something similar for 1099 contractors, where all their payments was entered under their name in the bills list. Just so their name is listed once and not 50 times in the list. However, my top priority vote goes to recurring bills
We continue to appreciate the building dialogue here. We don't mind the sarcasm or the repeated sentiment that this is a "clear requirement" for our offering. We'll continue to listen intently and bring this feedback in to our bigger prioritization efforts as a software company in service of you.
We're very close to launching the aforementioned stop-gap of Copy/Duplicate Bill. That will help many, but not all, overcome the lack of a recurring bills feature. I'll jump back on the thread to let you all know when it ships.
@Chipfo I'd be curious to learn more about your 1099 contractors suggestion. Have you tried to Purchases by Vendor report? If you'd be able to elaborate here, or on any 1099-related thread, we'd love to learn more.
Thank you very much for asking! I hope I explained it right.
@goto10 @Gits @pdetti @tekfranz @JimB @Margaret @MayaMercer @mahout @ABDPhotography @TMGH @Chipfo @JaysonWonder and others. I'm happy to report that we have shipped our Duplicate Bill functionality. We won't pretend it's equivalent to a Recurring Bills feature. We also aren't kidding ourselves that this is a permanent stop gap. However, we hope that this feature will help many of you be more efficient in Wave.
Here is a loop showing it in action.
This will make it a little bit easier, so thank you very much!
@Mani
This is great and will help out. Thank you...
Now being a standard end user for a min. with this in a manageable state can you look at and maybe get an update to the community on https://community.waveapps.com/discussion/comment/7430.
You did a great job engaging with the Wave community on this issue I hope you can do a similar push with the time tracking issue linked above. You are now a victim of your own success
@Mani Thanks for the update...
While we wait for the full recurring bills, duplication will surely help a lot.
Kudos to Wave team for you are way better in responding to your users needs/requirements than many companies that charge a bomb for their products.
Not sure if this has changed, but there is a Duplicate option in each bill's drop-down menu. This should help things.
Hey @zemien thanks for the great suggestion! You are correct Bill duplication is available and will hopefully help in situations like these.
I really would love to see recurring bills! The accounting software that I used to use - Quasar for Linux, had this capability and it was awesome.
One of the reasons I am using Wave is that there is no decent replacement for Quasar on Linux - and I needed something.
Recurring billing should be easy to implement! And it would be so very handy!
I am also looking for this feature as we have regular utility bills and Rents. It also makes your software useful for small companies who don't wish to connect their bank accounts due to various reasons.