Sub-categories, classes and "tags"
PBrooksMac
Member Posts: 5
Hello! I was wondering if the use of "tags" to track certain projects or customer transactions within Wave has ever been discussed or considered.
Short of (i) going with a full-blown Class or Project Tracking system (similar to what QB uses); or (ii) having the ability to assign accounts other than Income to bills and invoices (assign pre-paid invoice items or pass-through expenses to a liability account instead of income), it would definitely be helpful to apply a tag to any transaction. I could then view all transactions with that have that specific tag...either income or expense.
Don't expect the complexity of Classes or Project Tracking, but use of tags seems like a relatively simple fix to an issue I've seen discussed here many times.
Thoughts?
Comments
Can we create an expense group/ category and sub-group/sub category. For example: Category : Advertising and within this category a sub category could be: Print Media, or Trade show events or catalogs etc. How can we incorporate this? Similarly for Payroll and other major categories. Thanks
Hi Raza! Wave does not have the ability to create sub-accounts and groups. You will need to create a separate account in your Chart of Accounts for each one that you need to create.
I need to clean up the chart of accounts and delete those accounts that we don't need. How do I do that?
Hi Chenley! What you would want to do here is archive the accounts you do not need. This FAQ explains the archive function.
A workaround would be to use the common term as a prefix to many accounts. i.e. Advertisements-Media , Advertisements-Newspaper etc.
Hi
We're doing multiple projects for numbers of customers. Our questions are:
1. Is there anyway that we could track and compile income and expenses for particular project by using waveapp?
2. Is there anyway that we could track and compile income and expenses for particular customer by using waveapp?
3. Is there anyway that we could track a particular expense (eg: material cost) for a particular project or customer by using waveapp?
Cheers
You can create Multiple accounts using a desired Prefix (to identify each project) I believe this is the only current solution. Then you can upload your General Ledger Transactions to Excel and Prepare Project wise reports using your Prefix as the sorting criteria.
I have similar problem, that I need to address. I have rental properties and I need to keep track of expenses for each one.
Should I create expenses and Income for each one?
Like "Property One Property Tax" and "Property Two Property tax" ?
for each of the expense categories ?
A bit of inconvenience . id say.
Hi @andreayuriza. We are working on adding the ability to attach vendors or customers to specific transactions, on the transaction page, which will allow you to track much of what you are trying to. The feature isn't quite ready yet and I can't give a timeline, but our engineers are hard at work!
If you're curious about what else is coming to Wave, I recommend checking out this article from the Help Center.
Hi
I also have different building projects and would like to track income and expenses per project. Let us know when the new functionality is available or when you have a launch date?
The best way to do this, for now, @Derek_Brand, is to create a set of accounts for specific projects, and categorize all transactions involved in that given project in one of those categories.
As for the launch date for that feature, I don't have a timeline to give right now, but I can post something on here when I do have more information. Stay tuned!
Any update on this feature?
Hi, @pandagurl.
This feature is not currently on our roadmap. I can't make promises as to whether or not we will eventually build this feature for Wave, I can tell you that we are paying attention and that feedback from Wavers has a significant impact on how we choose what to bring to Wave next.
Project tracking would be very helpful.
Thanks for your feedback, @K_Wiest! Could you tell us a bit more about your business and your workflow, to give us a better idea of how a feature like this one would benefit your business?
When your feature is ready, please ensure we are able to regroup all our INCOME/COG accounts that it is less messy. While we're at this, much appreciate if you can introduce Sub-Categories of of accounts, a few tiers.
There are times we do not wish to show our project costing, etc. And an option for us to list all Income / Expenses generally just under Rental Income, Rental Expenses. All the details are there. Is just we can't see the categorization when we present the accounting records.
Thanks for the feedback, @Kenj.
If you'd like to discuss this further, I encourage you to read this post and then start a new discussion on the subject under Wave Features.
Hi, can I add a vote as well. We work as consultants and need to track expense by project in order to invoice correctly. Either by setting up a separate account, or by tagging, which would then allow expenses to be sub-totaled by category.
Thanks
Thank you, @Gorter, for adding your voice to this.
Would I be right to assume that this would mostly be to get reimbursed for expenses incurred through that project?
Hi, @PBrooksMac.
I'd love to hear more about the kind of impact that would have your business! Can you tell us what field you work in and share a real-world example of how you'd use a feature like this one in the context of your business? We're always looking to better understand the needs of our users, and the best way you can help us see the impact a feature like this one would have is to tell us more about how your business works.
Thanks for the response, Alexia!
We are a small but growing baseball academy that will be managing multiple teams, leagues, tournaments, and individual players.
One big example of where we would utilize tags is in tracking & reporting income/expenses associated with a specific tournament or league. We may have multiple expenses (umpire fees, equipment purchases, field rental costs) that are incurred over multiple tournaments or leagues. A tag would allow me to easily review the expenses for a specific tournament without having to bog down the chart of accounts with event-specific expense/income accounts.
Tags would also be a back-door way (in the absence of project tracking or classes) for me to "earmark" income and track associated expenses without having to make multiple journal entries into and out of a short term liability account.
For example, if I make multiple deposits under a "Sponsorships" income account, I could apply a specific tag for each team and easily see how many sponsorship dollars that team has available. Then as the team has expenses those sponsorship dollars are intended to pay for, I apply the same tag to keep a running balance. It could all be done at the invoice/receipt/bill stage with a simple "tag" field.
Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product. I just figured tags would be a simple workaround that would benefit your users. It wouldn't have an impact on the actual accounting, but it would be hugely helpful in dialing in reporting.
Hope this makes sense!
Hi Alexia, tags will also help my business. Our main business is e-commerce but we also sell products to companies by project, tag would help us to track expenses for specific projects. I believe this would be a great feauture.
I agree - tags would be great. I use tags in my project management tool, asana, and they allow me to be able to view associated tasks, which span multiple projects, at a glance. I sell kite making kits, to different kinds of customers, and it would be useful to be able to display my invoices/sales by product type/customer type/event type they were used for - lots of things. It would also be good to be able to customise the dashboard to show sales by product type/tag - unless you can already do this? Thanks :-) p.s iv'e only been using wave a week so I'm a total newbie!
Thank you for adding to the discussion, @PBrooksMac, @jalop123j and @Jenny_kitekids! Your feedback is invaluable to us!
@Jenny_kitekids, huge welcome to Wave! I hope you're enjoying using our platform thus far! There are no reports by product on Wave at this time, but you can get around this by assigning unique income accounts to each product you sell and relying on the Account Transactions report for the same information. It's very much a workaround and is a bit of work to set up, but it might still help! With that said, I'll be sure to pass on your feedback.
It is frustrating to learn that Wave doesn’t support class tracking after investing a lot of time in this direction already. In my case, it is not about time tracking or reimbursement but about being able to see reports showing how each property is doing with regard to income and expenses. A number of businesses have different investments or projects that need to be tracked separately and the idea of duplicating the chart of accounts is untenable (Not going to have 5 different “internet” expense accounts for 5 different properties).
Back to the drawing table to find an accounting solution :’(
Hi, @Samscribe,
I'm sorry to hear Wave didn't meet your expectations. It's fair of you to be frustrated when finding out that a feature you assumed we would offer was nowhere to be found. It's a good indicator that we should better communicate what Wave can and can't do.
With that said, I'll be sure to forward your feedback to our product team. There are a few other alternatives I've seen a few Wavers use with success with real estate businesses (treating different properties as different businesses attached to the same account is the most common one), but I do understand if you find that those workarounds aren't convenient enough. If your conclusion is that Wave simply isn't a good fit for your business as it is right now, we do hope you'll find a platform that suits your needs better.
+1 for this feature, I am a freelancer with multiple different projects on at once, hardly ever repeat clients either. It would be amazing to track income and expenses for each project, even if it was just to assign tags to transactions, Them I could export into excel and sort the data by project to be able to invoice accurately and come up with my end of year accounts. Let me know what i need to to to suggest this more officially?
Hello,
Expense/invoice allocation per project is a must have feature. I agree with @jellydonut that a tag system could be implemented and alleviate this issue. I'm also a freelancer with multiple projects at once and I currently need to maintain an on the side accounting system on top of Wave. The tag system or a possibility to have different contact within the same company would also be helpful. Even If I have a new project with the same company I still have to create a new client because if I change the contact name, it messes up older invoices. I don't think the workaround proposed in previous post are appropriate because they are ''workaround'' creating other issues and in the end you have a messy accounting. Please integrate this asap.
Thank you, @jellydonut and @Piluma, for taking the time to share your feedback.
@jellydonut, you're in the best place to have your feedback heard. I can't promise that this feature will be added to Wave, but I can tell you that feedback from our users does have a significant impact on how we choose what to build next. The members of our product team visit the Community to collect feedback frequently, so posting here is the best way for your comments to gain both visibility and traction.
thankyou @Alexia - I think it would be a very versatile feature.