Figured I would add my 2 cents as well. I am pretty active in the Short Term Rental space, and was telling lots of new customers how wonderful Wave was instead of Quickbooks online. However, this single change has dramatically increased my workload.
I try to do most of my accounting from my PC. But all my receipts are images on my phone. Now I either have to upload all those to my PC first and go from there, or I have to deal with trying to use Wave from my phone which I dislike as well.
Please bring back the standalone receipts app. It was soooo much easier to enter my expenses. And the OCR functionality helped ensure the accuracy of those expenses. I am sure this was a money decision as maintaining a seperate app plus paying for the additional overhead the OCR servers probably generated. If that is true bring this back as a Premium service. I would pay a small monthly fee or a single yearly fee to use the Receipt app with OCR like it used to be!!
15 pages in, and I have yet to find even one comment fully in favor of this change. Still no word from the company, beside the reply from support i posted earlier. It's a shame. I now spend 2-3 times longer on reconciling receipts, where before with the duplicate entry "issue" (not really an issue) is was 3 clicks and 10 seconds to merge them. What a "Great new feature" you guys released. To Whom ever made this decision to remove the receipt hub and OCR, I do hope you don't have to use your own software for receipt reconciliation. Looks like at the start of 2022 we will be switching to Xero or Quickbooks going forward.
To the point of a previous post, I now use wave apps to show potential clients and friends what a bad accounting system is (Wave Apps) vs a decent ones (Xero or Quickbooks). Is xero or quickbooks perfect, no, but sure are a lot better than Wave Apps when it comes to receipt handling.
This was a pure cost savings play. The compute (CPU) leasing time from the cloud provider AWS (Amazon Web Services) for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the receipts was probably costing Wave too much in overhead, especially when the service is "free" to many users. @Wave, just start charging $1/mo if that would cover it, and people would pay it if you put the OCR back on. The work flow for reconciling transactions now is far worse, more steps, and inconvenient. You can still maintain the "enhanced" transaction interface, but still have the auto upload of receipts page as an ingestion page and the transaction page as a view/edit. @wave Oh, here is another idea, offset the OCR processing and image compression, to the user/client computer and have it traverse only the JSON name-value pairs and image data for the record. This will actually save you on compute cycles and even minimize other data that would have to traverse the gateway, decreasing your operational costs.
Sooooo now that Wave has solved the duplicate issue with the release of the new auto-merge feature, will you bring back the OCR receipt feature again? Because the duplicate transactions was all anyone had an issue with.
Comments
Please listen to your customers this update is genuinely awful.
EXTREMELY disappointed about the email receipt feature being lost - that was a major benefit for me. Now it's more work.
Figured I would add my 2 cents as well. I am pretty active in the Short Term Rental space, and was telling lots of new customers how wonderful Wave was instead of Quickbooks online. However, this single change has dramatically increased my workload.
I try to do most of my accounting from my PC. But all my receipts are images on my phone. Now I either have to upload all those to my PC first and go from there, or I have to deal with trying to use Wave from my phone which I dislike as well.
Please bring back the standalone receipts app. It was soooo much easier to enter my expenses. And the OCR functionality helped ensure the accuracy of those expenses. I am sure this was a money decision as maintaining a seperate app plus paying for the additional overhead the OCR servers probably generated. If that is true bring this back as a Premium service. I would pay a small monthly fee or a single yearly fee to use the Receipt app with OCR like it used to be!!
15 pages in, and I have yet to find even one comment fully in favor of this change. Still no word from the company, beside the reply from support i posted earlier. It's a shame. I now spend 2-3 times longer on reconciling receipts, where before with the duplicate entry "issue" (not really an issue) is was 3 clicks and 10 seconds to merge them. What a "Great new feature" you guys released. To Whom ever made this decision to remove the receipt hub and OCR, I do hope you don't have to use your own software for receipt reconciliation. Looks like at the start of 2022 we will be switching to Xero or Quickbooks going forward.
To the point of a previous post, I now use wave apps to show potential clients and friends what a bad accounting system is (Wave Apps) vs a decent ones (Xero or Quickbooks). Is xero or quickbooks perfect, no, but sure are a lot better than Wave Apps when it comes to receipt handling.
This was a pure cost savings play. The compute (CPU) leasing time from the cloud provider AWS (Amazon Web Services) for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of the receipts was probably costing Wave too much in overhead, especially when the service is "free" to many users. @Wave, just start charging $1/mo if that would cover it, and people would pay it if you put the OCR back on. The work flow for reconciling transactions now is far worse, more steps, and inconvenient. You can still maintain the "enhanced" transaction interface, but still have the auto upload of receipts page as an ingestion page and the transaction page as a view/edit. @wave Oh, here is another idea, offset the OCR processing and image compression, to the user/client computer and have it traverse only the JSON name-value pairs and image data for the record. This will actually save you on compute cycles and even minimize other data that would have to traverse the gateway, decreasing your operational costs.
Sooooo now that Wave has solved the duplicate issue with the release of the new auto-merge feature, will you bring back the OCR receipt feature again? Because the duplicate transactions was all anyone had an issue with.