I started using Wave a few years back. I quickly migrated back to my old version of simply accounting due to waves inability to track revenues and expenses for projects, It seems like a very simple feature to ad. Now, my only activity with wave is sending invoices, which I later recreate, in my simply accounting software, to record the data.
I would gladly switch to Wave for all my accounting if you added project tracking.
Is this something that is on the horizon?
I can absolutely appreciate that this is a necessary feature for your business and I'm happy to pass your feedback along. I'm not in a position to say whether or not this is something the product team has planned or is considering as a feature to add in the foreseeable future. I can tell you that they are keeping track of feedback received by Wavers and that this feedback has a significant impact on what they'll choose to build next. In short, I can't make any promises, except for the promise that we are paying attention to your comments.
Hello. I vote to have these features too. Wave is great, it has really helped. Now my businesses are growing and I need to be able to track income and expenses per project, as well as produce reports by manipulating this data. Unfortunately I've had to start looking for other accounting software that provides these features. Instead of leaving Wave, I'd much prefer that Wave added this functionality or at least committed to delivering it soon.
As an self-employed contractor, some form of 'tagging' of transactions to allow a degree of project tracking is, for me, the one crucial feature missing from Wave at the moment.
A few years back I rejected Wave for my accounting needs because it was missing then. It's a real shame to find that's still the case now, but nevertheless since I love Wave's simplicity I've recently decided to give it another go in spite of this. I was just so disappointed to find that tagging hadn't been added in the intervening period.
Incidentally, my partner also has her own small business & loves Wave too. But again, she also would like some method of tracking expenses related to the different projects she runs. I understand it maybe not a core Accounting function, but it does make planning & managing business finances just so much easier to do day to day.
I feel this is now a feature badly needed & long-overdue.
As an self-employed contractor, some form of 'tagging' of transactions to allow a degree of project tracking is, for me, the one crucial feature missing from Wave at the moment.
A few years back I rejected Wave for my accounting needs because it was missing then. It's a real shame to find that's still the case now, but nevertheless since I love Wave's simplicity I've recently decided to give it another go in spite of this. I was just so disappointed to find that tagging hadn't been added in the intervening period.
Incidentally, my partner also has her own small business & loves Wave too. But again, she also would like some method of tracking expenses related to the different projects she runs. I understand it maybe not a core Accounting function, but it does make planning & managing business finances just so much easier to do day to day.
I feel this is now a feature badly needed & long-overdue.
@Alexia,
Can you let me know when "tagging" or "classes" are added to Wave. I love this product, but I'm going to need to use Quick Books until this feature is available. With two rental units and two LLC's on the same checking, I'm going to need this feature in order to make sense of everything. As soon as it's available, I'll make the switcheroo. Thanks!
Need to be able to categorize by project / property / whatever.
The project might be 1234 E Wave St. or ABC Company Project, however the user wants to name it.
Then the expense categories / accounts would all be the same, but the user can see or create charts / reports / statements for each project, as well as charts / reports / statements for the business as a whole (includes all projects), or could select certain projects to combine into a chart or report. Perhaps you wanted to see how all the properties in Cleveland were performing, so you could select just those properties and create a report / graph.
Really need this to edge out QB
I would use tagging to identify different rental properties. I'd like to answer questions like "Is 123 Main profitable?" or "How much HOA am I paying for at 123 Main?" The alternative is to create a duplicate Chart of Accounts for each property/project/account but that's brittle. Imagine HOA:123 Main or 123 Main:HOA and how much work it would be to add/remove/manage that Chart. Instead, I could run a report as "Balance Sheet where the tag = 123 Main". See Gmail/Google Docs as a good implementation of tagging and the accompanying search.
I have the same problem for a voluntary group - once a year or so we attend a foreign dance festival or whatever and we need to identify all the expenses and income arising from that in one ledger. It doesn't have to be in Wave but we must be able to capture the data there for export to say Excel.
I have just become the treasurer of our group and thought I could do it in Wave by putting a special code in square braces eg "[sr]" at the beginning of the description on all the relevant transactions.
I did all that but then found I have to juggle two sheets of exported data "bill items" and "invoice items". I haven't got so far yet as to deal with journal items or simple bank payments and receipts - all of which will be necessary.
It would be so much easier if Wave had a "cost centre" or "project code" field that could be applied to any transaction - billed item, invoice item, journal/bank payment/receipt and then a filter for the P&L and Balance sheets to only include transactions from user selected codes.
Lots of great insight here about how we can make Wave even better. Job-based, contract-based, etc. projects are a highly requested feature (as you can all see) so I am confident we will continue to investigate the feasibility of rolling this out.
There are workarounds as mentioned (i.e. customized Category names, using specifics accounts, etc.) but running things this way can get a bit messy as Wave was not designed to be used that way. We always want a business to be successful and sometimes that means using other tools to supplement the parts of Wave that are presently absent.
I also agree this is a critical feature missing, and not incredibly complex to add from a dev standpoint in at least some basic form. To add, it’s a feature that’s so critical to run a business and see where your winning and losing across clients. I bet if it was implemented you’d a huge bump in subscribers.
Very disappointed to see that project tracking (assigning transactions to specific customers or orders) is STILL NOT AVAILABLE AFTER SEEING IT'S BEEN HEAVILY REQUESTED FOR A YEAR NOW. This has seriously made me think twice about moving forward with Wappeapps. If after a year of your clients requesting simple project tracking features there still isn't an ETA I'm very skeptical if this bookkeeping site is the right fit for our business.
Any updates on when this feature will get pushed? Would love to be able to tag or track projects rather than creating a category every time. It's becoming increasing hard to stay organized on Wave.
Apologies that this hasn't been implemented yet despite the popularity of the request, and unfortunately we do not have an ETA at the moment. I can confirm though that this on the radar for our team and they are aware of how frequently it is requested. At Wave we get a lot of feature requests, but are only able to action a few at a time. As such our teams work hard to prioritize actioning new feature requests, which means some updates can take longer than others. That being said, no feature requests ever get ignored and we pass each on so that they can be tracked and considered for implementation. I want to thank everyone for the awesome feedback in this thread so far (and across this Community) and insights you've given our team in this matter! Keep an eye out for updates!
I'm looking for new accounting software but this has put the brakes on Wave for me... it really needs a project tracking feature for anyone in a consulting / agency / service model business.
+1 on this feature. i have a woodworking business. i'll shop supplies for multiple projects on the same order so a split feature is necessary. when i sell a product, i need to review how much material costs went into that item. currently have to use another program to track all the costs i am already putting into wave. i love waveapps, i think you guys are right on with what people want. it's like you are one step ahead of me. but on this item, it seems like a very logical part of accounting that's missing. hopefully a workaround will help
+1 for this feature. I want to be able to track income & expenses at the program/project/department level so that I can monitor & report on the financial the health/performance of each area.
Coming up with a feature that would allow tagging transactions to allow this kind of tracking & reporting would be great! A must have feature.
Please push to the top of your list of features to implement. It is the one thing that I am looking for above all else.
Yes! I would love tags as well. I have a company that creates SaaS apps and tags would allow me to track income/expenses by product. Creating separate accounts in the Chart of Accounts would be a pain to manage.
So many people are requesting this, it really needs putting to the top of the list for inclusion. Such a basic but useful (essential) feature should've been added long ago...
I also want to add a +1 for requesting this feature. Its such a shame that this is requested on multiple threads for near 12 months and still isn't in.
I'm loving wave apps, it really makes most things easy but we provide IT solutions and trying to track the expenses for individual projects is a bit of a nightmare. I would also just be happy for a simple solution like tagging transactions and then pulling a report up on those tags.
@kacit@twestrick@pyba@shawnthompsonllc@Jenny_kitekids@jalop123j@PBrooksMac I'd like to thank you all for participating in this conversation. We're listening very carefully to this feedback. Truth be told, we've explored this in the past but chosen not to move forward, but it seems the time has to come to revisit as a product group and see if it now makes more sense for our users in 2019. No promises, but we hear your need loudly.
@PBrooksMac I also would like to respond to one comment in this thread: "Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product". We're committed to you, and every other Wave user. We will never neglect your collective needs by being the "free product". Free is part of our ethos because we believe in helping every entrepreneurs around the world increase their odds of success by having the right tools to run their business without unnecessary overhead. For North American users, when they need financial services to get paid faster, pay their employees, or smooth out their cash flow, we're there to help should they entrust us with solving those needs. That's how we earn revenue. We'll never use free as an excuse, and you should always hold us to a high standard.
Thanks so much for being such wonderful users. To all new readers: please keep the comments pouring in. We're listening.
+1 This is a definite must have feature, Im also a freelancer and I need this feature to track costs for projects I work on and while I understand some features on the wave roadmap are under the hood and or functional, this feature is basic and critical for users who want to join Wave or those that want to scale on wave. I may be forced to migrate 2 of my 5 businessis on wave to Quick Books et al particularly since the wave team is non comital to an ETA for this feature
Could Admin please state without prevarication (i.e. clearly) whether or not this feature is planned for inclusion & will be added at some date in the near future, or it's currently being worked upon and will be added sometime soon.
I love Wave, but I need this now. This is a major shortcoming & I will migrate away if this isn't added soon.
Hey everyone! Thanks again for giving a +1 this particular feature request. Our development team is definitely aware of how important it is for our brave entrepreneurs to have a tracking feature available to them in our software. With that being said, it's something that has been discussed heavily, and could be implemented in the future. I don't want to come on here and set a complete expectation of when this will be available to our users, since that wouldn't really be fair if we can't deliver on what we say we can. As far as I can say, the feature being asked about is well known and has been in discussion for future planning on how to improve our software to meet client needs.
I am a current Quickbooks desktop user and I am always on the lookout for alternatives. I see Wave as promising but just not suitable yet for the businesses I operate. Given the fact that there is no job costing or even classes available for Wave, I could have probably worked around this with a hierarchical account structure. For example, a top level account could be Property 1 and all the child or subaccounts, i.e. insurance, maintenance, utilities for that property, followed by something identical for Property 2 and so on. In QB, I just create a class for each property and then have one chart of accounts for all 3 properties, filtered by the class when I want to see a report for that property. So hopefully, one day Wave could have this functionality.
As for job costing, in QB, the solution is quite easy. Once a customer is created, that customer also doubles as a "job". If there were multiple projects under that customer, I can simply add another job underneath the customer if I needed to. When categorizing expenses for vendors and payments received, I just select the job that it goes to and then filter job reports when I need to see a P&L for a particular project.
Thanks for sharing your feedback! You're right that the Chart of Accounts doesn't support sub-accounts, although we're always looking to improve and refine what we offer. We appreciate you taking the time to check us out!
Thanks for responding so quickly. Here are some other ideas to explore: I also use Buxfer and although it is not a robust accounting type software, it does allow subaccounts. The other thing that Buxfer does to help group expenses is they enable the use of tags, kind of like wordpress tags and the tags are integrated them with budget reporting. The tags would be a great addition since that could be used for classes or even job names.
I've never heard of Buxter @americanriver! Good insight for us to hear though - always nice to know what other options are out there. This kind of thing is very much on our radar and as Ryan said, we always want to get better.
Comments
I started using Wave a few years back. I quickly migrated back to my old version of simply accounting due to waves inability to track revenues and expenses for projects, It seems like a very simple feature to ad. Now, my only activity with wave is sending invoices, which I later recreate, in my simply accounting software, to record the data.
I would gladly switch to Wave for all my accounting if you added project tracking.
Is this something that is on the horizon?
Hi, @Cracktilian,
I can absolutely appreciate that this is a necessary feature for your business and I'm happy to pass your feedback along. I'm not in a position to say whether or not this is something the product team has planned or is considering as a feature to add in the foreseeable future. I can tell you that they are keeping track of feedback received by Wavers and that this feedback has a significant impact on what they'll choose to build next. In short, I can't make any promises, except for the promise that we are paying attention to your comments.
Thank you for taking the time to share yours!
Hi all,
As an self-employed contractor, some form of 'tagging' of transactions to allow a degree of project tracking is, for me, the one crucial feature missing from Wave at the moment.
A few years back I rejected Wave for my accounting needs because it was missing then. It's a real shame to find that's still the case now, but nevertheless since I love Wave's simplicity I've recently decided to give it another go in spite of this. I was just so disappointed to find that tagging hadn't been added in the intervening period.
Incidentally, my partner also has her own small business & loves Wave too. But again, she also would like some method of tracking expenses related to the different projects she runs. I understand it maybe not a core Accounting function, but it does make planning & managing business finances just so much easier to do day to day.
I feel this is now a feature badly needed & long-overdue.
Hi all,
As an self-employed contractor, some form of 'tagging' of transactions to allow a degree of project tracking is, for me, the one crucial feature missing from Wave at the moment.
A few years back I rejected Wave for my accounting needs because it was missing then. It's a real shame to find that's still the case now, but nevertheless since I love Wave's simplicity I've recently decided to give it another go in spite of this. I was just so disappointed to find that tagging hadn't been added in the intervening period.
Incidentally, my partner also has her own small business & loves Wave too. But again, she also would like some method of tracking expenses related to the different projects she runs. I understand it maybe not a core Accounting function, but it does make planning & managing business finances just so much easier to do day to day.
I feel this is now a feature badly needed & long-overdue.
@Alexia,
Can you let me know when "tagging" or "classes" are added to Wave. I love this product, but I'm going to need to use Quick Books until this feature is available. With two rental units and two LLC's on the same checking, I'm going to need this feature in order to make sense of everything. As soon as it's available, I'll make the switcheroo. Thanks!
Need to be able to categorize by project / property / whatever.
The project might be 1234 E Wave St. or ABC Company Project, however the user wants to name it.
Then the expense categories / accounts would all be the same, but the user can see or create charts / reports / statements for each project, as well as charts / reports / statements for the business as a whole (includes all projects), or could select certain projects to combine into a chart or report. Perhaps you wanted to see how all the properties in Cleveland were performing, so you could select just those properties and create a report / graph.
Really need this to edge out QB
I would use tagging to identify different rental properties. I'd like to answer questions like "Is 123 Main profitable?" or "How much HOA am I paying for at 123 Main?" The alternative is to create a duplicate Chart of Accounts for each property/project/account but that's brittle. Imagine HOA:123 Main or 123 Main:HOA and how much work it would be to add/remove/manage that Chart. Instead, I could run a report as "Balance Sheet where the tag = 123 Main". See Gmail/Google Docs as a good implementation of tagging and the accompanying search.
I have the same problem for a voluntary group - once a year or so we attend a foreign dance festival or whatever and we need to identify all the expenses and income arising from that in one ledger. It doesn't have to be in Wave but we must be able to capture the data there for export to say Excel.
I have just become the treasurer of our group and thought I could do it in Wave by putting a special code in square braces eg "[sr]" at the beginning of the description on all the relevant transactions.
I did all that but then found I have to juggle two sheets of exported data "bill items" and "invoice items". I haven't got so far yet as to deal with journal items or simple bank payments and receipts - all of which will be necessary.
It would be so much easier if Wave had a "cost centre" or "project code" field that could be applied to any transaction - billed item, invoice item, journal/bank payment/receipt and then a filter for the P&L and Balance sheets to only include transactions from user selected codes.
Lots of great insight here about how we can make Wave even better. Job-based, contract-based, etc. projects are a highly requested feature (as you can all see) so I am confident we will continue to investigate the feasibility of rolling this out.
There are workarounds as mentioned (i.e. customized Category names, using specifics accounts, etc.) but running things this way can get a bit messy as Wave was not designed to be used that way. We always want a business to be successful and sometimes that means using other tools to supplement the parts of Wave that are presently absent.
I also have this problem to track P/L base on project. It is frustrating to do it on separate Excel.
Very disappointed to see that project tracking (assigning transactions to specific customers or orders) is STILL NOT AVAILABLE AFTER SEEING IT'S BEEN HEAVILY REQUESTED FOR A YEAR NOW. This has seriously made me think twice about moving forward with Wappeapps. If after a year of your clients requesting simple project tracking features there still isn't an ETA I'm very skeptical if this bookkeeping site is the right fit for our business.
Any updates on when this feature will get pushed? Would love to be able to tag or track projects rather than creating a category every time. It's becoming increasing hard to stay organized on Wave.
Hey all,
Apologies that this hasn't been implemented yet despite the popularity of the request, and unfortunately we do not have an ETA at the moment. I can confirm though that this on the radar for our team and they are aware of how frequently it is requested. At Wave we get a lot of feature requests, but are only able to action a few at a time. As such our teams work hard to prioritize actioning new feature requests, which means some updates can take longer than others. That being said, no feature requests ever get ignored and we pass each on so that they can be tracked and considered for implementation. I want to thank everyone for the awesome feedback in this thread so far (and across this Community) and insights you've given our team in this matter! Keep an eye out for updates!
I'm looking for new accounting software but this has put the brakes on Wave for me... it really needs a project tracking feature for anyone in a consulting / agency / service model business.
+1 on this feature. i have a woodworking business. i'll shop supplies for multiple projects on the same order so a split feature is necessary. when i sell a product, i need to review how much material costs went into that item. currently have to use another program to track all the costs i am already putting into wave. i love waveapps, i think you guys are right on with what people want. it's like you are one step ahead of me. but on this item, it seems like a very logical part of accounting that's missing. hopefully a workaround will help
+1 for this feature. I want to be able to track income & expenses at the program/project/department level so that I can monitor & report on the financial the health/performance of each area.
Coming up with a feature that would allow tagging transactions to allow this kind of tracking & reporting would be great! A must have feature.
Please push to the top of your list of features to implement. It is the one thing that I am looking for above all else.
+1 for this. It is a must have feature. Please consider adding this capability at the first opportunity.
Yes! I would love tags as well. I have a company that creates SaaS apps and tags would allow me to track income/expenses by product. Creating separate accounts in the Chart of Accounts would be a pain to manage.
I also want to add a +1 for requesting this feature. Its such a shame that this is requested on multiple threads for near 12 months and still isn't in.
I'm loving wave apps, it really makes most things easy but we provide IT solutions and trying to track the expenses for individual projects is a bit of a nightmare. I would also just be happy for a simple solution like tagging transactions and then pulling a report up on those tags.
@kacit @twestrick @pyba @shawnthompsonllc @Jenny_kitekids @jalop123j @PBrooksMac I'd like to thank you all for participating in this conversation. We're listening very carefully to this feedback. Truth be told, we've explored this in the past but chosen not to move forward, but it seems the time has to come to revisit as a product group and see if it now makes more sense for our users in 2019. No promises, but we hear your need loudly.
@PBrooksMac I also would like to respond to one comment in this thread: "Ideally we would have a class system or project tracking, but I definitely don't expect that in a free product". We're committed to you, and every other Wave user. We will never neglect your collective needs by being the "free product". Free is part of our ethos because we believe in helping every entrepreneurs around the world increase their odds of success by having the right tools to run their business without unnecessary overhead. For North American users, when they need financial services to get paid faster, pay their employees, or smooth out their cash flow, we're there to help should they entrust us with solving those needs. That's how we earn revenue. We'll never use free as an excuse, and you should always hold us to a high standard.
Thanks so much for being such wonderful users. To all new readers: please keep the comments pouring in. We're listening.
+1 This is a definite must have feature, Im also a freelancer and I need this feature to track costs for projects I work on and while I understand some features on the wave roadmap are under the hood and or functional, this feature is basic and critical for users who want to join Wave or those that want to scale on wave. I may be forced to migrate 2 of my 5 businessis on wave to Quick Books et al particularly since the wave team is non comital to an ETA for this feature
I'm not quite sure what 'on the radar' means.
Could Admin please state without prevarication (i.e. clearly) whether or not this feature is planned for inclusion & will be added at some date in the near future, or it's currently being worked upon and will be added sometime soon.
I love Wave, but I need this now. This is a major shortcoming & I will migrate away if this isn't added soon.
Hey everyone! Thanks again for giving a +1 this particular feature request. Our development team is definitely aware of how important it is for our brave entrepreneurs to have a tracking feature available to them in our software. With that being said, it's something that has been discussed heavily, and could be implemented in the future. I don't want to come on here and set a complete expectation of when this will be available to our users, since that wouldn't really be fair if we can't deliver on what we say we can. As far as I can say, the feature being asked about is well known and has been in discussion for future planning on how to improve our software to meet client needs.
Hi,
I am a current Quickbooks desktop user and I am always on the lookout for alternatives. I see Wave as promising but just not suitable yet for the businesses I operate. Given the fact that there is no job costing or even classes available for Wave, I could have probably worked around this with a hierarchical account structure. For example, a top level account could be Property 1 and all the child or subaccounts, i.e. insurance, maintenance, utilities for that property, followed by something identical for Property 2 and so on. In QB, I just create a class for each property and then have one chart of accounts for all 3 properties, filtered by the class when I want to see a report for that property. So hopefully, one day Wave could have this functionality.
As for job costing, in QB, the solution is quite easy. Once a customer is created, that customer also doubles as a "job". If there were multiple projects under that customer, I can simply add another job underneath the customer if I needed to. When categorizing expenses for vendors and payments received, I just select the job that it goes to and then filter job reports when I need to see a P&L for a particular project.
Hey @americanriver,
Thanks for sharing your feedback! You're right that the Chart of Accounts doesn't support sub-accounts, although we're always looking to improve and refine what we offer. We appreciate you taking the time to check us out!
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for responding so quickly. Here are some other ideas to explore: I also use Buxfer and although it is not a robust accounting type software, it does allow subaccounts. The other thing that Buxfer does to help group expenses is they enable the use of tags, kind of like wordpress tags and the tags are integrated them with budget reporting. The tags would be a great addition since that could be used for classes or even job names.
I've never heard of Buxter @americanriver! Good insight for us to hear though - always nice to know what other options are out there. This kind of thing is very much on our radar and as Ryan said, we always want to get better.