@RMenschel Thanks for providing that further context. In Wave, it may make more sense to create these as separate Sales Taxes altogether. The reason that I say this is because the Sales Tax Report will track only Sales Taxes that are created as individual Sales Taxes through Settings > Accounting > Sales Tax. If you plan on using this report, then having the sub-accounts may not be fully necessary.
Thank you. Yes, we've created separate sales tax accounts through the Settings > Accounting > Sales Tax process. Currently building balances in 5 accounts. All five are in California, and will be totalled into one tax filing to the State. The issue is that when we do a report that includes Liabilities, these five sales tax accounts are mixed in with the other Liabilities accounts, and we cannot readily separate sales tax from credit cards from business loans from accounts payable.
@RMenschel Can you let me know which specific report you are looking at when you see all the liabilities grouped into one? I'm curious if this is expected behaviour and also looking to see if I can direct you in the way of a better report than the one you may be looking at
Just joined Wave and instantly searched for the ability to use tags. Please add this important feature. We run an events company and need to monitor net profit per event to effectively run our business. It's not practical to setup a new chart of account for each event. It would make the profit and loss far less effective.
Classes (known as categories with options in Xero) would be an awesome addition to Wave.
Real life uses?
1. A store can generate sales reports by salesman, or by location
2. P&L can by generated by project
This would be especially good if we could ceate several classes with many options, and even better if reports could facilitate a filter by several classes
eg. For each project, different salesmen at several locations contributed to sales.....
What was the value of sales by Roger toward Project Nefario?
Hi everyone. Thanks for all of the different feedback and workflows added to the thread. This helps us gather good insight into why tags/classes would be beneficial to your business for the future!
+1 for some sort of tags/classes - this is a big feature missing in Wave. For our use case as a small non-profit, we need to track income and expenses by project, e.g. a special concert, versus regular operating expenses. For reporting, we do want to see all like categories reported together (e.g., performer fees), but also need to be able to report on only those belonging to a specific project.
I'll add a +1 to this though my use case is slightly different and probably not as important as other use cases shown above.
I run a martial arts school with numerous classes in different areas. For me, a simple "tagging" option would suffice - as long as that tagging option was available across all parts (invoicing, customers, billing, etc.)
It would make it a lot easier to track how each class is doing individually as well as being able to track the business overall.
As I said, my case is a little different, but it would be a very handy feature for my business
+1 on my end. I think the ideal solution is arbitrary tags on each transaction, which would afford maximum flexibility. Then also allow grouping/scoping by tags in reports and you would have a tremendously powerful tool that would have us immediately switch from QBO. This is one feature that our venture can't live without.
Hi @djflorian, thanks for commenting and sharing your thoughts, we really appreciate it! Sharing your feedback in the Wave Community provides our Product Team with real world use cases for specific feature requests.
+1 for classes/tags/categories. I love wave and use it for a tiny side business, but I am not able to use it for any of my larger businesses or recommend it to clients because of the lack of this feature.
+1
We're a small non-profit that is growing rapidly, and we like Wave but its inability for budgeting (another thread, I know) and tags that allow us to track individually-budgeted programs makes it hard for us to use Wave through this stage of growth. Please help!
I really can't understand the delay in implementing this...it's such a useful & requested feature. I'd use Wave on a much more daily basis, rather than the infrequent basis I do now if this were available...
Yes, my business is all about projects and keeping those projects on budget. I feel that tags would allow me to better keep tabs on what has been spent on those budgets. Having multiple tags would be even better as I could have projects broken down into the smaller budgets for each project to see where I am overspending or need to trim the budgets.
Appreciate your feedback here @Wes_TopHomes. While this feature currently isn't on an immediate roadmap, it's definitely something to consider when looking at the improvement of our Chart of Accounts section.
Hi is there any progress on the project based accounting enhancement to Wave. I think Wave is an excellent product but would be in a different league if you could add this extra dimension. My business is a property development and letting business and so the project accounting facet is really important. Even if we could use excel to break out this information perhaps by using the Vendor field as a project identifier for expenses. Any tips or cheats would really help.
Hi @Colin_W , welcome to the Wave community! I'm afraid that I do not have an update for you on the project based accounting front. A tip for managing individual projects in Wave is to create a separate business in Wave for each project you wish to account for. To create a new business in Wave, click the menu button in the top left hand corner of Wave and click the "Create a new business" button. Having individual business profiles in Wave for each project lets you track each separately.
I want to cast my vote on approval of tags and classes! Check out our use case below!
My wife and I have an S-Corp which we use to funnel all of our business income and expenses through (we use 3 DBAs all connecting to our S-Corp)
We have one checking account for or S-Corp that we receive income from all DBAs and pay some expenses from and use a 1 credit card to cover all the other expenses for all 3 DBAs.
To have Wave allow us to classify or tag each transaction from these accounts to a specific DBA so we can run report a profit and loss for each DBA to see how each "business" is doing would be AWESOME
@Myron said:
Hi @Colin_W , welcome to the Wave community! I'm afraid that I do not have an update for you on the project based accounting front. A tip for managing individual projects in Wave is to create a separate business in Wave for each project you wish to account for. To create a new business in Wave, click the menu button in the top left hand corner of Wave and click the "Create a new business" button. Having individual business profiles in Wave for each project lets you track each separately.
Sorry but how can we manage the bank balance&expense for the whole company if we separate business in wave ?
we buy material from one merchant for 4~5 project and some items is shareable.
so the i agree with djflorian that a simple "tagging" option is a nice option for this.
Btw, do waves have any better idea for this ?
Hi @nappe , thanks for the response! I'm afraid that the limitation to that solution I proposed is that there would be no way in Wave to get an overhead view of the whole company. The data for each business profile will have to be exported and consolidated manually. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this. Our Product Teams look over posts in the community when they plan and build new features in Wave.
Hi. I am still getting to know Wave, and there are a few core user journeys that appear to be missing which would enhance the usability of the platform to the non-hardcore accountants.
When running through all transactions from the bank, we want to ensure that they can all be justified, with receipts added, and notes updated. Merging receipts to transactions is brilliant, but identifying which transactions need to have a receipt added, or need to be revisited, or need to be somehow cross-checked is a feature that I believe is best addressed by adding in 'tags'. It is a common feature on many applications, and I hope is a useful reference for what I mean, I use this feature on an application called Trello for tracking 'to-do cards', and if there was a search too, this would make it a really valuable feature.
Naturally, any features needs to be quantified to see how it can help bring more people onto the platform, or convert more people towards utilising the paid services offered. If it were to make no difference to the numbers, there would be no justifiable business case for adding the feature.
I do, however, believe that the ability to add tags/reminders in an easy to see, filter, and search manner, is something that would make the platform more user friendly, and in a way that anyone can use to their own purposes (of which there are many many listed above).
Personally, I would use them on Account transactions or Receipts to put reminder notes of what I need to do, e.g. marking a transaction with a tag such as "pending receipt upload", or "to cross-check", or "To claim within EXP1" or "confirm receipt has a VAT number", or a vast number of other comments that could be personalised, especially if easy to see, ideally with the use of colours (or colors to those in the USA).
Hopefully the sizing, testing and implementation overheads of this feature would not be too large that it would be seen as a worthwhile activity to add to a development sprint, and could even be a stepping stone to further identifying how other tagging and reporting user journeys (including an associated search, filter, and sort feature) could (as a KPI) be used to correlate with successes of client onboarding, retention, and the associated uptake of Wave's financial service products.
Love the detailed feedback that you've provided us here @AuroraRetail. It's insights like these that we really want to get out of the community when it comes to product feature planning, so I do appreciate and value your opinion here.
@solobrosllc We still don't have a specific timeline for this (for implementing to our roadmap). In terms of having a public facing roadmap/product plan for our users, this just isn't something that's viable for us. Things often change, and we wouldn't want to have a product idea in mind that we completely remove from the backlog, or even slightly alter (basically not wanting to overpromise and under deliver).
Hello,
I'm using Wave from 2014 till now, and my main problem was also the same as the rest,
first of all, I'm a computer science background, and let me tell you already have a great system with good features,
it is not that much complicated to implement, and I advise to keep it simple as you usually do,
my Business now is in Advertising and Marketing, we offer a lot of customized products and we relly in need to link the bills to the invoices in a way that we can generate some reports to check the direct costs of an Invoice, this is the simplest level of it.
In my case its rental properties. Since the bank linking feature seems to work very well for downloading transactions - here's the problem:
Within that bank account there are, lets say 8 individual rental properties. Each with income and expenses. A nuance here is that ideally this would be sort-of hierarchal in nature, because there might be something like a property with multiple units - and it would be great to be able to run reports for the entire property or drill down into a unit.
The classification system, which I can't quite figure out how it makes its decisions, would need to be able to associate the transactions with one of these tags/classes in a very deterministic way. This may be specific to my use case - but in 90% of the bank transaction there's something very concrete and deterministic in the description or memo line that can remove human error from making this association and a prime candidate for automation.
The tag/class would ideally have an option to be required before allowing the transaction to be accepted. In other words: there should be some sort of option to ensure that there is never a categorized transaction that is not associated with a tag or class.
The reporting system allowing one to select one (or preferably more) classes/tags to include in the report
This is a really important feature, for me. Its the first thing I was searching for after signing up.
@devnul Hey Greg, and thanks for adding your voice in to the thread on tags and classes. We totally acknowledge that for businesses like yours who are managing properties that this sort of feature is one that is a must have. Providing the specifics on how you would like to see the feature work is valuable information for us to pass along to our Product Team for them to consider developing a feature that hits the needs of your business and likely others as well.
If anyone else has anything that Greg has left out in terms of what the feature would need to have, we are all ears!
You know if you guys can add an option such as, ability to choose multiple accounts ledgers of different kinds in "Reports" sections "Accounts Transactions(General Ledger)" and update report, then we can make specifically named accounts ledgers for different projects and just manually select them and generate report. That would get us basic reports for different projects and we can manege multiple projects.
Or even better, make an immediate addable sub category to Asset, Equity, Liability, Income, Expense and let those sub categorized accounts have add new accounts option to add new accounts under them. The immediate sub category accounts can bare the name of the project. Also give those immediate sub categories option to generate independent reports of their own.
Let me be direct. Quickbooks has a stranglehold in the U.S. and its users. There are many haters of QB not because their software is not good. They are hated because they use their size and position to constantly extract ever more fees from its user base or forcing upgrades through deactivation or feature cripple even when there have been minimal updates.
I have seen QB Online and QB Desktop users continue to be unhappily "victimized" because many feel like they cannot go anywhere else. They are just stuck and held hostage to the needs of their business, not because they have any love towards QB.
As this thread shows, there is a GREAT demand for someone to implement the class concept. Some people have called it "tags". Whatever terminology wishes to use, there is a HUGE base of accounting users looking for an solid alternative to QB. But the dealbreaker is having "classes". Any talk of creating "special categories" in the Chart of Accounts instantly blows credibility out of the water. Experienced users will automatically tune it out because that is an "amateurish" and overly simplistic and not practical suggestion.
I am sympathetic to Wave that you cannot be all things to all people. You might have a nice user niche and I don't begrudge you for it. But like others, I have been looking for 10 YEARS for a QB alternative. But there has to be some mechanism for "classes". Whether it be to track small business units, business divisions, individual properties, different projects, etc. it is a NECESSARY and dealbreaker feature. Even FREE is not compelling enough for me or my other business friends/clients to move.
And until some accounting developer is willing to take the classes/tagging issue on, QB will continue to have a lock on its users. The love/hate relationship with QB will continue. Again, there is nothing wrong with Wave owning and being profitable in its niche but there are MANY who are looking for something else.
I come from 3 lines of businesses. Property Management where each property needs to have its own P/L statement. Publishing where each project needs to have its own P/L. Consulting where we need to see which specialty generates the best overall profitability.
Comments
@RMenschel Thanks for providing that further context. In Wave, it may make more sense to create these as separate Sales Taxes altogether. The reason that I say this is because the Sales Tax Report will track only Sales Taxes that are created as individual Sales Taxes through Settings > Accounting > Sales Tax. If you plan on using this report, then having the sub-accounts may not be fully necessary.
Thank you. Yes, we've created separate sales tax accounts through the Settings > Accounting > Sales Tax process. Currently building balances in 5 accounts. All five are in California, and will be totalled into one tax filing to the State. The issue is that when we do a report that includes Liabilities, these five sales tax accounts are mixed in with the other Liabilities accounts, and we cannot readily separate sales tax from credit cards from business loans from accounts payable.
@RMenschel Can you let me know which specific report you are looking at when you see all the liabilities grouped into one? I'm curious if this is expected behaviour and also looking to see if I can direct you in the way of a better report than the one you may be looking at
Just joined Wave and instantly searched for the ability to use tags. Please add this important feature. We run an events company and need to monitor net profit per event to effectively run our business. It's not practical to setup a new chart of account for each event. It would make the profit and loss far less effective.
Classes (known as categories with options in Xero) would be an awesome addition to Wave.
Real life uses?
1. A store can generate sales reports by salesman, or by location
2. P&L can by generated by project
This would be especially good if we could ceate several classes with many options, and even better if reports could facilitate a filter by several classes
eg. For each project, different salesmen at several locations contributed to sales.....
What was the value of sales by Roger toward Project Nefario?
Hi everyone. Thanks for all of the different feedback and workflows added to the thread. This helps us gather good insight into why tags/classes would be beneficial to your business for the future!
+1 for some sort of tags/classes - this is a big feature missing in Wave. For our use case as a small non-profit, we need to track income and expenses by project, e.g. a special concert, versus regular operating expenses. For reporting, we do want to see all like categories reported together (e.g., performer fees), but also need to be able to report on only those belonging to a specific project.
I'll add a +1 to this though my use case is slightly different and probably not as important as other use cases shown above.
I run a martial arts school with numerous classes in different areas. For me, a simple "tagging" option would suffice - as long as that tagging option was available across all parts (invoicing, customers, billing, etc.)
It would make it a lot easier to track how each class is doing individually as well as being able to track the business overall.
As I said, my case is a little different, but it would be a very handy feature for my business
+1 on my end. I think the ideal solution is arbitrary tags on each transaction, which would afford maximum flexibility. Then also allow grouping/scoping by tags in reports and you would have a tremendously powerful tool that would have us immediately switch from QBO. This is one feature that our venture can't live without.
Hi @djflorian, thanks for commenting and sharing your thoughts, we really appreciate it! Sharing your feedback in the Wave Community provides our Product Team with real world use cases for specific feature requests.
+1 for classes/tags/categories. I love wave and use it for a tiny side business, but I am not able to use it for any of my larger businesses or recommend it to clients because of the lack of this feature.
+1
We're a small non-profit that is growing rapidly, and we like Wave but its inability for budgeting (another thread, I know) and tags that allow us to track individually-budgeted programs makes it hard for us to use Wave through this stage of growth. Please help!
I really can't understand the delay in implementing this...it's such a useful & requested feature. I'd use Wave on a much more daily basis, rather than the infrequent basis I do now if this were available...
Hi everyone! Thanks again for weighing in and sharing why this feature would be important for you!
Yes, my business is all about projects and keeping those projects on budget. I feel that tags would allow me to better keep tabs on what has been spent on those budgets. Having multiple tags would be even better as I could have projects broken down into the smaller budgets for each project to see where I am overspending or need to trim the budgets.
Appreciate your feedback here @Wes_TopHomes. While this feature currently isn't on an immediate roadmap, it's definitely something to consider when looking at the improvement of our Chart of Accounts section.
Hi is there any progress on the project based accounting enhancement to Wave. I think Wave is an excellent product but would be in a different league if you could add this extra dimension. My business is a property development and letting business and so the project accounting facet is really important. Even if we could use excel to break out this information perhaps by using the Vendor field as a project identifier for expenses. Any tips or cheats would really help.
Hi @Colin_W , welcome to the Wave community! I'm afraid that I do not have an update for you on the project based accounting front. A tip for managing individual projects in Wave is to create a separate business in Wave for each project you wish to account for. To create a new business in Wave, click the menu button in the top left hand corner of Wave and click the "Create a new business" button. Having individual business profiles in Wave for each project lets you track each separately.
I want to cast my vote on approval of tags and classes! Check out our use case below!
My wife and I have an S-Corp which we use to funnel all of our business income and expenses through (we use 3 DBAs all connecting to our S-Corp)
We have one checking account for or S-Corp that we receive income from all DBAs and pay some expenses from and use a 1 credit card to cover all the other expenses for all 3 DBAs.
To have Wave allow us to classify or tag each transaction from these accounts to a specific DBA so we can run report a profit and loss for each DBA to see how each "business" is doing would be AWESOME
Sorry but how can we manage the bank balance&expense for the whole company if we separate business in wave ?
we buy material from one merchant for 4~5 project and some items is shareable.
so the i agree with djflorian that a simple "tagging" option is a nice option for this.
Btw, do waves have any better idea for this ?
Hi @jbrandi , welcome to the Wave community! Thank you for sharing your personal use case for this feature request!
Hi @nappe , thanks for the response! I'm afraid that the limitation to that solution I proposed is that there would be no way in Wave to get an overhead view of the whole company. The data for each business profile will have to be exported and consolidated manually. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this. Our Product Teams look over posts in the community when they plan and build new features in Wave.
Hi. I am still getting to know Wave, and there are a few core user journeys that appear to be missing which would enhance the usability of the platform to the non-hardcore accountants.
When running through all transactions from the bank, we want to ensure that they can all be justified, with receipts added, and notes updated. Merging receipts to transactions is brilliant, but identifying which transactions need to have a receipt added, or need to be revisited, or need to be somehow cross-checked is a feature that I believe is best addressed by adding in 'tags'. It is a common feature on many applications, and I hope is a useful reference for what I mean, I use this feature on an application called Trello for tracking 'to-do cards', and if there was a search too, this would make it a really valuable feature.
Naturally, any features needs to be quantified to see how it can help bring more people onto the platform, or convert more people towards utilising the paid services offered. If it were to make no difference to the numbers, there would be no justifiable business case for adding the feature.
I do, however, believe that the ability to add tags/reminders in an easy to see, filter, and search manner, is something that would make the platform more user friendly, and in a way that anyone can use to their own purposes (of which there are many many listed above).
Personally, I would use them on Account transactions or Receipts to put reminder notes of what I need to do, e.g. marking a transaction with a tag such as "pending receipt upload", or "to cross-check", or "To claim within EXP1" or "confirm receipt has a VAT number", or a vast number of other comments that could be personalised, especially if easy to see, ideally with the use of colours (or colors to those in the USA).
Hopefully the sizing, testing and implementation overheads of this feature would not be too large that it would be seen as a worthwhile activity to add to a development sprint, and could even be a stepping stone to further identifying how other tagging and reporting user journeys (including an associated search, filter, and sort feature) could (as a KPI) be used to correlate with successes of client onboarding, retention, and the associated uptake of Wave's financial service products.
Love the detailed feedback that you've provided us here @AuroraRetail. It's insights like these that we really want to get out of the community when it comes to product feature planning, so I do appreciate and value your opinion here.
@solobrosllc We still don't have a specific timeline for this (for implementing to our roadmap). In terms of having a public facing roadmap/product plan for our users, this just isn't something that's viable for us. Things often change, and we wouldn't want to have a product idea in mind that we completely remove from the backlog, or even slightly alter (basically not wanting to overpromise and under deliver).
Hello,
I'm using Wave from 2014 till now, and my main problem was also the same as the rest,
first of all, I'm a computer science background, and let me tell you already have a great system with good features,
it is not that much complicated to implement, and I advise to keep it simple as you usually do,
my Business now is in Advertising and Marketing, we offer a lot of customized products and we relly in need to link the bills to the invoices in a way that we can generate some reports to check the direct costs of an Invoice, this is the simplest level of it.
I hope we can see this feature ASAP,
Thank you
I'd like to add my voice for this as well.
In my case its rental properties. Since the bank linking feature seems to work very well for downloading transactions - here's the problem:
This is a really important feature, for me. Its the first thing I was searching for after signing up.
@devnul Hey Greg, and thanks for adding your voice in to the thread on tags and classes. We totally acknowledge that for businesses like yours who are managing properties that this sort of feature is one that is a must have. Providing the specifics on how you would like to see the feature work is valuable information for us to pass along to our Product Team for them to consider developing a feature that hits the needs of your business and likely others as well.
If anyone else has anything that Greg has left out in terms of what the feature would need to have, we are all ears!
You know if you guys can add an option such as, ability to choose multiple accounts ledgers of different kinds in "Reports" sections "Accounts Transactions(General Ledger)" and update report, then we can make specifically named accounts ledgers for different projects and just manually select them and generate report. That would get us basic reports for different projects and we can manege multiple projects.
Or even better, make an immediate addable sub category to Asset, Equity, Liability, Income, Expense and let those sub categorized accounts have add new accounts option to add new accounts under them. The immediate sub category accounts can bare the name of the project. Also give those immediate sub categories option to generate independent reports of their own.
Let me be direct. Quickbooks has a stranglehold in the U.S. and its users. There are many haters of QB not because their software is not good. They are hated because they use their size and position to constantly extract ever more fees from its user base or forcing upgrades through deactivation or feature cripple even when there have been minimal updates.
I have seen QB Online and QB Desktop users continue to be unhappily "victimized" because many feel like they cannot go anywhere else. They are just stuck and held hostage to the needs of their business, not because they have any love towards QB.
As this thread shows, there is a GREAT demand for someone to implement the class concept. Some people have called it "tags". Whatever terminology wishes to use, there is a HUGE base of accounting users looking for an solid alternative to QB. But the dealbreaker is having "classes". Any talk of creating "special categories" in the Chart of Accounts instantly blows credibility out of the water. Experienced users will automatically tune it out because that is an "amateurish" and overly simplistic and not practical suggestion.
I am sympathetic to Wave that you cannot be all things to all people. You might have a nice user niche and I don't begrudge you for it. But like others, I have been looking for 10 YEARS for a QB alternative. But there has to be some mechanism for "classes". Whether it be to track small business units, business divisions, individual properties, different projects, etc. it is a NECESSARY and dealbreaker feature. Even FREE is not compelling enough for me or my other business friends/clients to move.
And until some accounting developer is willing to take the classes/tagging issue on, QB will continue to have a lock on its users. The love/hate relationship with QB will continue. Again, there is nothing wrong with Wave owning and being profitable in its niche but there are MANY who are looking for something else.
I come from 3 lines of businesses. Property Management where each property needs to have its own P/L statement. Publishing where each project needs to have its own P/L. Consulting where we need to see which specialty generates the best overall profitability.