Chart of Accounts
SMCSG
Member Posts: 5
I have several transactions which are linked to the same Chart of Accounts category, but I need some way to allocate them to a subcategory. For example, I have transactions under a category called "Activities Income", and I need to specify further to which particular activity it is linked. I seem to be stuck on how to solve this:
Option 1: Hierarchical Chart of Accounts
Unfortunately Wave doesn't seem to allow a user defined hierarchical structure for it's CoA. I cannot add my subcategories directly in the CoA since this would make all reports too granular!
Option 2: Add a Note in the Transaction Description
This is a less reliable approach, since it is prone to input error. However, I cannot seem to find a way how to edit the Description for many transactions in one go. When i try to do a bulk edit, I can only change the Category and Tax.
Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem?
Comments
@Alexia
Thanks for calling me over, @m1cr0ch1p!
Hi, @SMCSG. I'm sorry to see we missed your post when it was shared.
Neither of these is currently possible in Wave. I have seen discussions about features like both of these elsewhere on the Community, and we're well aware of how useful the ability to track transactions by project would be to our users.
I'd love to hear a bit more about your business. What kind of business do you run? Do you typically work on larger projects? What would be the biggest advantage of being able to track expenses and income for a given project be to you, personally, in the context of your business?
The business in question is actually a Non Profit Organisation. There are two types of income / expenses - those related to large projects (of which there can be several each month) and others which are miscellaneous. The miscellaneous items are captured under their respective Chart of Accounts entries, but the other project transactions are currently all classified under one or two Chart of Account entries. It doesnt really make sense to add new entries to the CoA each time we have a new project, but we do need to some to mark a number of transactions as belonging to a particular project since we ultimately might also need to report at that level.
Thanks for following up with more information, @m1cr0ch1p. I'm happy to pass this feedback along.
The 3rd option is to name the categories to look like sub-categories. For example, I use categories (and pseudo sub-categories) like below:
COG
COG:Product, COG:Shipping
COG:Shipping:Ocean, COG:Shipping:Air
This still makes the reports and statements too granular, but slightly better than the 2 options you listed. Sub-categories, in my view, is the most felt missing feature in Wave. I am surprised the Wave team has not realized its importance enough to prioritize this feature yet.
Agreed - I keep looking at Wave, then not switching over to it from QB because I need to track expenses and assets in hierarchical groups.
I am pretty frustrated by this...I would like to use Wave, but the lack of sub-categories makes it really hard for me to make sense of anything.
@davidpablocohn @benthicbread Thanks for your feedback on where our product is falling short. This is definitely something that is on the radar of our Product Team, however, in full transparency, I cannot provide a timeline for this sort of feature being added. In saying this, many users who require project based or department based reporting have opted to create a second business that manages the specific product. This will allow you to have access to the reporting that you are looking for. When you are looking for an aggregate view of your business, you can manipulate the data outside of Wave to include all of the projects/departments. I understand that is not ideal, however, I hope that this sort of workaround might provide you with an alternative way to use Wave in the meantime.