Management Reporting by Department

Vanessa

Hi
I’m am new to Wave and require management reports by business unit/department. How can I setup my accounts to enable this reporting?

Alexia

Hi, @Vanessa.

There has been a lot of discussion on the Community about features that would allow you to do this effectively in Wave, but there are no such features at this time. Sub-accounts have been an especially hot topic of discussion.

If you're just looking to track expenses by department, your best option is to create unique expense accounts for each of these departments. You'll be able to use the Account Transactions report for those accounts to give you insight on the expenses of a given unit.

Alternatively, you use vendor tags to link expenses to specific units, and use the "Purchases by Vendor" report for those same insights. This would lose you the ability to track expenses by their real vendor, however.

I recognize that neither of these options is ideal. They are very much workarounds, but I do hope they'll help out a bit.

Vanessa

Thanks. Will a ‘department’ feature be included in the near future? If so, when is it likely to be added?

Alexia

Hi, @Vanessa.

It isn't something that's in the works right now, but I'd love to hear more about how you would use this feature. It would give me more insight on just how helpful it could be.

Can you tell me what kind of business you run? What's the specific context in which you need to differentiate those expenses? How do you imagine a feature like this working?

ngelani

This is a conversation of interest to me.

I run a non profit business with several projects and donors. I have income per project/donor and the same applies to expenses.

Can I create and generate income and expense per project/donor?
Samwel

Alexia

Hi, @ngelani,

As mentioned in my first reply, there are no dedicated features to handle tracking transactions by project. You could make a suit of custom accounts in your Chart of Accounts to track expenses or income related to specific projects. It would be a bit of work, but it could be done. Your accounts could look something like this:

• Project 1 - Expense type
• Project 2 - Expense type
• Project 3 - Expense type

You wouldn't be able to bring up reports for all of the accounts covered by a project, but it might still help.

As for tracking income by donors, that's possible. You'll just have to consider them customers in Wave. You can assign customers to transactions from the Transactions page. Just click on the transaction in question and go to "Add Customer", under the "Category" drop-down menu in the "Edit Transactions" panel. If you want to find the amount donated by each donor, go to the Reports page and find the "Income by Customer" report.

I hope this helps!

ngelani

This is quite helpful Alexia. I'll achieve a lot with it.

I hope your team is working on express project cost or P&L tracking ability of Wave. These are additional capabilities that any serious client will be willing to pay if Wave decides to cost it.

Thanks