HI @sabbirrazin_28 . Thanks for the feedback on this. Can you give me some further insight into how you think this would benefit your business and make your workflow easier for you?
@matt3006 Thanks for taking your time to clearly articulate your position in terms of the need for tags/classes. I personally hear you and all of the other users that are sounding off in this thread. To be fully transparent, I hear the need for the feature.
I'm sure in your search for another software that offers the classes/tags, you have likely found that there is a lack of software in general able to support the feature. In the simplest of terms, it's a complex build and before we can commit the resources into creating it, we want to ensure that we can launch a feature that we are proud of, and that works without a hitch. Knowing that so many users are dependent on a workflow that demands this capability means that the feature needs to be perfect because if not, there's a real chance that it can do more damage than good. I've touched base with the Product Team on this topic specifically, and they continue to reassess this sort of functionality at least twice a year, but have not yet found a way to implement it in a meaningful way.
I know that this is likely not the answer that you want to hear, but I feel as though you deserve to have as much insight as I can provide as to why the feature is has not yet been available on Wave. Your feedback, and the feedback of the other's in this thread, are appreciated and referred to frequently when making decisions, and I thank you for being as open as you have been to this point.
I think you might have understood the spirit in which I wrote. It was not to "dump" on Wave at all. However, I did find this thread through a Google search and found this very important discussion that is accessible to the wider online audience that goes beyond Wave. There has to be "someone" on this globe that can deliver a solid alternative to the ongoing death-grip of QB. QB is well-hated and their ongoing victimization of their users is profound.
I suspected that developmental challenges and resources is why so few accounting software developers can take this tough project on. Here is a totally insane idea. Because Intuit is so big and so well-resourced, no singular smaller developer firm can take that on, what if Wave reached out to its friendly rivals and see if there is a way to collaborate resources into a shared technology project to implement this feature? Perhaps what I am proposing is overly simplistic but I am very certain rivals to Wave are also on the same boat. Having clients who only have simplistic accounting needs or a very singular business to track might already be a huge niche for Wave and its rivals to compete for.
However, if those same rivals were all able to collaborate and team up to develop shared technology and incorporate tag/classes into its feature offerings, it could be a huge game changer for your industry. I have seen so many accounting features and all the comparison boxes. However, all of that stuff means very little because there are many of us looking for that one feature that keeps all QB users hostage.
Regardless of the outcome, thank you for keeping this thread alive and acknowledging the significance of the class feature request. This issue is much larger than Wave. It is an in issue within the accounting software industry where the behemoth QB seems to be setting standards and pricing for which everyone follows or compares.
@JordanD said:
I'm sure in your search for another software that offers the classes/tags, you have likely found that there is a lack of software in general able to support the feature. In the simplest of terms, it's a complex build and before we can commit the resources into creating it, we want to ensure that we can launch a feature that we are proud of, and that works without a hitch. Knowing that so many users are dependent on a workflow that demands this capability means that the feature needs to be perfect because if not, there's a real chance that it can do more damage than good. I've touched base with the Product Team on this topic specifically, and they continue to reassess this sort of functionality at least twice a year, but have not yet found a way to implement it in a meaningful way.
I know that this is likely not the answer that you want to hear, but I feel as though you deserve to have as much insight as I can provide as to why the feature is has not yet been available on Wave. Your feedback, and the feedback of the other's in this thread, are appreciated and referred to frequently when making decisions, and I thank you for being as open as you have been to this point.
Hey Wave team. Thanks as always for actively listening and responding to your client base. It seems like having use cases is the easiest way to bring forward feature requests to the team.
I run one of those “creative businesses” that have been referenced as using Wave to do their accounting and as I scale bigger this is one area that I’m going to need to track in greater detail. I’m an event florist so I am paid per job and I need ways to be able to track expenses against those jobs so I can accurately asses not only my overall profit and expenses but also how much I should be paying myself at the completion of each project. Literally: just give me the ability to choose or assign a job tag, job number, or something like that so I can tag expenses and income against specific events.
So, for instance: - Couple A pays me a $1000 deposit tomorrow and then $1000 in 11 months to do their wedding flowers in 12 months. The things I need to do: ... Track the flowers/materials that I buy specifically to their event ... Assign their project a percentage of my total overhead costs (so that I know how much of their total should be set aside in the interim) ... Pay myself accurately both at the time of their deposit and on completion of their event, because I can see how much I spent on their event materials and how much I’ve deducted to pay for the cost of running my business
At the end of the day I’m asking for this feature because right now all my expenses are a black box, I digitize them all and then whether an individual job was profitable or not, and how much I should pay myself from it, is kind of a crapshoot. I receive income based on event (perhaps up to 20-30/year), and manually rehashing how much I spend on each is onerous and kind of wasteful of my time. Using a category for inventory has been suggested but doesn’t slice it properly.
If I could ask for a specific feature, it would be to be able to assign an expense (in full or percentage or something like this) against an invoice number, or a tagging system, while retaining the Category system (which only allows one assignment).
That way I could assign three separate floral wholesaler bills to Invoice #CoupleA, 10% of my phone bill/studio rent to Invoice #CoupleA, and so on, and after a year total all expenses for their event, and pay myself properly. I could also continue to pull category reports to see everything that I’ve spent on flowers, etc for the year.
This is such a fundamental part of understanding the financial ins and outs of my company and I am not sure how or why it’s not a feature that is on the roadmap yet. How does any business get the kind of clarity they need without this feature? I’m having a hard time thinking of a business where you don’t need to understand expenses and profitability against a discrete project. Maybe that’s just me and the short sightedness of only knowing my business but it’s kind of surprising.
As a side note: Do you guys have a standing panel of small business owners that you speak to so that you understand how they run their businesses and keep track of their financial well-being? So that they walk through how they run their business and the kind of stuff they need to know? I’m talking less about self reporting individual issues the way that people are able to do on the forums, and more like an end to end customer journey that helps you see where and how a customer uses your product and where in the future you could better support them.
PLEASE, Don't give users free range tools like classes/projects/ tags.
Whatever you decide to do, please don't do it the way quickbooks, xero and everyone else does it.
Do it like you did the reconciliation page (even though it doesn't work well) because you will learn over time how to do it right, and then it will be perfect.
Concretely, this is what I mean. Entrepreneurs need to see their business from multiple perspectives, and don't necessarily need the BI systems that slow down day to day activity but give great bird's eye views for efficient decision making. The ideal is to build that in to the accounting.
I think it would like like the following (just freeflowing here, so definitely a work in progress!)
Essentially, classes, projects, and tags are just a way to link transactions across multiple accounts and to generate mini P&L's and to track budgets.
The underlying need here is adjusting current operations for the future, and being able to look into it.
If you make a dedicated interface similar to reconciliation, called, let's say, Management, you could come up with simple wizards to get more out of the accounting data.
Examples:
1) Reports geared towards helping owners reach their 15% EBITDA.
2) Creating Projects and have transactions auto-tagged per a date range or per vendors, and allowing the user to select multiple transactions for a general ledger for quick project making.
3) Cashflow Forecasting Management, (simple things like how much has to be created in revenue based on average expenses to reach a certain goal.)
Anyways, the list would go on, and it definitely would set you apart from everyone else.
Hi
I just want to add my voice to what everyone is writing here.
We are using the software for training courses that we provide in several categories, and in order to track and report the P&L based on the specific courses we must be able to tag or class them
Ahh...I am so disappointed that projects cant be created...I thought Wave was going to be the solution I have been looking for but this is a show stopper. Plus the fact that people have been asking for this for years now and Wave has not implemented does not look good for them actually listening to customers.
Hey @RachelKn . Thank you so much for putting the time and effort into writing out a detailed feature request explaining both the use case and how you'd be able to utilize it best. I'll let the team know we have a good post here to take a look at when doing future planning.
To answer your very last question, we definitely speak to business owners regularly about their journey, where they come from as well as where they're headed. We love to hear about how our users use Wave, how changes in the software has helped them, as well as what they need moving forward. I can't comment directly on how large of a scale we track these users' journey or how long we do so for, but I do know that our teams are constantly having personal conversations with users as to how their experience with Wave has been, as well as in what direction it's going.
Thanks for reaching out and we apologize that our app doesn't fit your businesses needs. Wave's intent is and has been for quite some time focused on single transaction accounting for small businesses. It's clear that your business has outgrown Wave, and as much as we care about customer retention, it's difficult to accommodate for all of our users, big and small. I apologize that this feature is not something on our current roadmap. Take care and don't hesitate to reach out if you need anything else!
I really really like Wave and plan to stick with it. However, like some of the others who have written here, I desperately need job costing. All of my work is on a per job basis and it's really tough figuring out how a job is doing without some sort of feature. So my question is a quick one:
Will this ever be added? I understand its not coming in 2019 but is it in the pipeline or still up for consideration or is this something that just isn't gonna happen?
Thanks again for all your hard work.
PS: One idea: in lieu of job costing would tags be a possibility? Something users could input on any transaction and then run a report for everything with that tag? Could be useful in general, for instance you could tag any transactions you wanted to recheck later or maybe tag everything you spent on the company Christmas party. Something similar to the tag system for blog posts. Just a thought.
I made a similar suggestion a while back in it doesn't seem like they are really motivated to add that feature. I agree with you. A wordpress type tagging system would not be hard to implement.
Hey @yetiprojects, thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback here! We really appreciate it and I'm glad to hear you are enjoying Wave so far. At the moment, I do not have any further detail about features that are being developed beyond 2019. I like the idea you put forward and the context you provided! It is really helpful for our team to have this insight.
@americanriver your continued input and ideas on the topic are appreciated, and not going unnoticed!
Please bump up the priority for implementing tags/classes. Kindly speed up the releases increase the bandwidth if needed. Tags/classes is the immediate next we would like to see in wave.
I have been using wave on and off for several years on a personal level and for my bookkeeping service. I ended up having to move to Quickbooks because of this classifying need. I work for an Orthodontist who owns 5 locations. Classifying is what is used to separate each office for reporting, yet keep everyone in one profile to have overall reporting on profitability and costs as a full organization. With all the people I do books for, I know they would LOVE wave way more than QB online...it's just easier and cleaner. This option, as well as the ability to deeply reporting on classifications/tags, would put you guys lightyears down the road. Hope to see it soon
guys, give it up. its never coming. ive gone rounds and rounds with their developers in discussions on twitter and email even to the point of sending them excel spreadsheets to show how im doing project tracking, job costing, and direct expense reconciliation. I. Need. A. Way. To. Ensure. I. Dont. Have. Budget. Overruns. In. Real. Time. and every time i open up a new dialog with them i get the same answer... "this looks great but at this time we have no plans to add those features to wave as most of our customers dont require such features." AKA your business is of too little relevance to us so we cant build a section based on a spreadsheet template that already does all the math for you and all you have to do is plug the equations into a database to get variable values. Im a software developer. this isnt hard. and if i understood more about accounting id just write my own accounting software but i unfortunately dont. and for 3 years ive been asking for this. its not coming and so i'm giving quickbooks and sage online a try. i hate to move to another platform after years of history here but you dont do what i need and you refuse to even consider it so.... what choice do i have?
+1 as yet another person in favor of this important feature and to simplify, I would call this feature "Account tagging",
Feature Definition: Ability to create tags to associate with transactions which allows the customer to segment transactions. Tags should also be able to be used in all existing reports (where relevant).
My Use Case:
I am fairly new to using Wave and have previously tracked my rental property accounting information in Quicken Rental Property Manager, which is really just a glorified version of quicken with a couple basic extra features. I am not the property manager, but I do have independent accounting needs in addition to what the management company does, so I need to merge information t get a full P&L. For this purpose, I also like to see my per unit income and expenses to get a feel for how each unit it doing.
I read a lot on the forums about using a prefix and adding my own categories, but this is clumsy at best since my numbers don't roll up to the real category. For instance, if I track each unit income as "Rental Income: Unit X", I can't roll up my income to "Rental Income". The same is true for unit specific expenses. I have tried this and find it awkward.
However, I have noticed there is a customer field associated to each transaction that I can add. I don't know if this was added recently and as a whole, the label customer doesn't make any sense for this purpose and using it as a method to track by unit forgoes my ability to have actual customers/tenants, but that may work for my needs since my property management tracks the tenants. Has anyone tried this?
I don't think this should limit the need for a real product feature, but maybe this could work for my specific use case? The biggest problem I see with it is there is no way to segment reporting and include the customer field.
As many I am certain, we would love to know that this feature is coming as workarounds are not really great.
Currently, we can categorize transactions by a vendor and by a customer. It would be awesome if we could also create custom "project" field or some other similar field so that I could pull up all of the transactions related to an individual project/job (of which I have multiple jobs/projects for many of my customers).
Hello,
I'm finding it difficult to make this app work for me..
I have 1 company and multiple divisions under that company. I want to share my cash and bank accounts across divisions. However, would like to track income and expense, P&L by divisions also..
Unable to find any way to do that here...
regards,
Anindya
Hey @recresults . I merged your post into this thread so you could take a look at the conversation going on around this. Thanks for the feedback on this. Although not currently on our roadmap, we try to keep all requests located in the same thread so our product team can keep an eye on how many users we have reaching out about a particular feature idea.
Introduction
I would also I like to add my vote for a tagging/class feature in Wave. I think this feature would be very useful to users to help them understand their business. Having read through several posts in this community on this subject I want to add how I see this feature working, which will hopefully be of use to Wave developers.
First, I think there are 3 parts to the whole tagging feature: (1) tag management, (2) tag application, and (3) reporting which I describe below. (1) Tag Management
I see this part working in the same way as the Chart of Accounts ("CoA") works today. The CoA contains all the accounts set up in Wave along with their name, description and a "last transaction on date [X]" field. Wave could add a "Chart of Tags" view so the user can set up whatever tags are useful to their business.
I assume that over a number of years the types and volume of tags that a user creates would grow, so being able to see all tags along with their description and a "last used on date [X]" would be very useful to the user. In addition, a business can grow and change, and some tags may no longer be useful to the user so a feature to archive (or "set as read-only") tags would also be needed.
(2) Tag Application
I see this feature being implemented in the "Transactions" view of Wave (under Accounting > Transactions) as I think the benefit of tagging really comes from its granular applicability at the individual transaction level because there are different businesses out there with different needs. For example, a non-profit entity that receives cash donations into one bank account but that needs to earmark (i.e. tag) the cash for different uses would be focused on tracking these different pools of cash in their one bank account (which is a business focus on the balance sheet). However, a property management business may want to tag income/expense transactions so that it has the ability to segregate their income statement by property (which is a business focus on the income statement).
Based on the examples above, I imagine this feature to work as follows: A single deposit comes in through a linked bank account into Wave and currently the auto-filled fields are Date, Description and Amount. The user then can assign an account to this transaction, mark it reviewed and (with this tagging feature) pick a tag from a dropdown list similar to the account picker (The tags would have already been created in the "Chart of Tags" I describe above).
Given that the Transactions view in Wave can already sort/search/filter transactions in various ways I imagine this existing functionality can be integrated with the tagging feature. Assuming this is done and even if the feature implementation ends here the user can still hugely benefit from the added tagging functionality. The user can use the aforementioned sort/search/filter in the Transactions view to obtain valuable insights into their business by just viewing the various tagged transactions as is.
One wrinkle that must be considered is whether to allow multiples tags for a transaction. This could be very useful where a user wants to track, for example, sales by salesperson (tags: salesperson 1, salesperson 2, etc.) and by product line (tags: product 1, product 2, etc.). The nature of these particular tags would result in overlapping tags where a single deposit is associated with a single revenue account and possibly two tags such as “salesperson 1” and “product 2”. This situation becomes even more complex when split transactions are added to the mix. That is, do you program Wave to track multiple tags for different split portions of a single deposit? From a user’s point of view, I would argue this is also needed since the user is splitting the transaction into different accounts for a good reason related to how their business works but from a feature implementation point of view this increases the complexity of the feature even more.
(3) Reporting
I want to focus on just the Income Statement here as I think it would be the most frequently used by users, but my thoughts apply to all of the Reporting functions in Wave. I imagine opening up the Income Statement in Wave and in addition to having the currently ability to see Summary/Details, adjust dates and add prior year figures, I would be able to filter by tags that I have used to just see those tags instead of the whole income statement or to see several tags in individual columns ("mini income statements") that then add horizontally to the total untagged income statement.
I think the Reporting part of the tagging feature is what would make it wildly valuable to users, however it seems to me to be the part most filled with ambiguity that must somehow be programmed into Wave.
What I mean is in the Tag Management and Tag Application steps the user clearly initiates the creation/deletion/application of a tag to which Wave must respond as described above or the user does not perform the triggering action and Wave continues to behave as it does currently without tagging.
However, in the Reporting step Wave must be set up to consider various options that I doubt the user would have considered at the creation of their first tag. For example: (1) if some transactions are tagged and some are not how are those displayed in the Income Statement – does Wave show them as a collective “untagged transactions” group or not show them at all. (2) How does Wave deal with tags that only exist in certain years when the user displays the Income Statement for current and prior year and wants to filter/sort/group by tags. (3) How does Wave handle the presentation of overlapping tags if they exist as I describe part (2) above. Conclusion
From the point of view of a user and a long-time accountant, I think this would be a wildly valuable feature to implement in Wave. I hope that this post has conveyed some useful thoughts that the Wave developers can consider if/when moving forward on this.
I am also running a small theatre organization and we desperately need to be able to report by production. We can't afford the cost of QuickBooks with the class functionality.
Hey Anindya @iamanindya! Hmm, it sounds because you have different divisions under one company it sounds like you might require job or project based accounting, I'm afraid Wave does not currently offer this. Our Product Team is always looking for ways to make Wave better and this is a highly requested feature. Wave does offer the ability to categorize transactions. You can learn about those HERE but I understand it won't accomplish the same thing.
You also have the option to Open Multiple Businesses within the same Wave account treating each one like a different project (or division). This is another common workaround some of our users do, so you can switch between them with just a few clicks. You could then run reports for each business/division as needed and manually add the totals but again, Wave is not explicitly designed for this.
Hey @Tom1115! First and foremost, thank you so much for this explicitly detailed response to this thread, as well as several use cases, and valuable input. I can absolutely see the value in the framework you've suggested, and can assure you that insight of this nature does not go forgotten whilst planning the roadmap for the future of Wave. The development team will be made aware of this input, and, if implemented, you can expect to find a post about it within the Wave network, for sure!
@i_am_hazel Thank you as well for your input here. At present, we do not have a workaround that I could suggest, but I'd love to hear from any other community members if they've found a method that works for them!
I have a software consulting corp and 3 different LLC that own various properties, each with a separate Wave Accounts. I am a big believer in separation of concerns.
I have thus far opted for appending a property tag to accounts (####AAAA) where #s are the first four of numerics and As are the first 4 letters of the street name. You may need a 3rd indicator for multi-units, but currently, all my props are single-family. This is a pain in that I have a lot of duplication of accounts and can't do any real roll-up reporting. But, I did not like the Multi-Business as a solution. While it provides for a cleaner individual report, I felt it messier in terms of duplicate entries when importing from the same bank account(s).
Additionally, since I do so much of my own management, I have started a property management company and am currently "trying" to set up my new wave account to facility managing other properties, for other customers. This is proving an even greater challenge to find good work-arounds
While we can always find "work arounds", it seems this has been requested by a lot of your clients and for a long time. I get that functionality seems easy until you dive into existing acthitecture, data model and code base ... and that there are a finite amount of resources to build an infinite amount of requested features, but 2 years is a long time for a repeatedly requested feature by many not few of your customers to be, ignored, on the radar, in the roadmap, depending on who's answer we read...
This here is what we are wanting to do like in Quick Books :
They do this by classes
Assign Divisions to Classes
Step 1
Click the "Edit" menu and select "Preferences."
Step 2
Click the "Accounting" list, and then click the "Company Preferences" tab.
Step 3
Select the "Use Class Tracking" check box and click "OK."
Step 4
Click the "Lists" menu; then click "Class List."
Step 5
Click the "Class" drop-down button. Select "New."
Step 6
Enter a division name, or select the "Subclass Of" check box and enter the parent division or your company name.
Step 7
Click "OK" to record the class and close the window, or click "Next" to enter additional divisions.
Profit and Loss by Class Report
Step 1
Click the "Reports" menu in QuickBooks.
Step 2
Select "Company & Financials."
Step 3
Select "Profit & Loss By Class."
Step 4
Click the "Dates" drop-down list and select a date range for the report, or select "All."
Step 5
Click "Print" to print your report.
It would be great to see something like this in WaveApps
I can add my divisions under the main company, as by clicking add a business.
But to link the same bank account as the original, you have to reconcile bank account transactions twice, therefore defeating the purpose of having a division.
Wave apps appears to just be a one and done business, not for those that may have a marketing department, which bills the invoice for that brand, a support department which bills for that brand or similar.
Quickbooks Desktop is the only version that really allows this to flow correctly. Their online model doesn't do this very well. You create seperate invoices and have to upload your template for each subdivision there. time consuming and inefficient. I havent found an online model that comes close yet than wave apps. But it's an incomplete product.
You can add the multiple business's sure
but no way to compile as stated earlier without double accounting.
As a side note, it would be great to know when the client has opened the invoice, maybe a notification or email ? JoistApp does this service well.
Hey @AlaskanNightWolf . Looks like our spam queue flagged your post, so thanks for being extra vigilant and reposting here so we can address it.
In regards to having business divisions, we do see this request from time-to-time but it's not something that's currently on our roadmap. I do thank you for the in-depth real world flow for us to better understand how you'd use this feature, it helps our product team prioritize features in the future.
Other than hovering over the invoice to see if it has been open yet, this isn't a feature in Wave (as you already know). I'm interested in knowing how you'd find this feature helpful (other than the obvious). Do you find that your customers are not honest about whether they've seen/opened your sent invoices?
Please also add me as a +1 to the feature request. This feature is vitally important for tax season when it is necessary to tax-deductible and non-tax-deductible transactions. To use Socrates example case, a transaction in the "work through meal" category would not be tax deductible, whereas a transaction in the "meals with customers" category would. Come tax season they are already separated so my deductible expenses is much easier to calculate and find.
If sub-accounts are too hard a feature to add (which I don't think they should be) then another option is the ability to tag transactions and search for transactions by tag. At least this way we could have more flexibility.
As 2019 is drawing to a close I wanted to see if there is any update on adding the sub account feature? It appears Mani has said "we will be revisiting the priority of this feature in the second half of 2019". Just wanted to see where the priority is. I continue to use Wave Accounts and really like the product besides the fact that this one feature is missing.
Comments
Totally agree with @matt3006 above.
Heartily sick of Wave patronising it's clientele with stock excuses regarding this missing core feature.
I've now moved to Pandle, for which I pay a small annual fee for but has the minimum functionality I need.
Wave really needs to wake up & smell the coffee on this, or risk becoming a zero-cost, increasingly irrelevant accounting solution...
HI @sabbirrazin_28 . Thanks for the feedback on this. Can you give me some further insight into how you think this would benefit your business and make your workflow easier for you?
Let us know.
@matt3006 Thanks for taking your time to clearly articulate your position in terms of the need for tags/classes. I personally hear you and all of the other users that are sounding off in this thread. To be fully transparent, I hear the need for the feature.
I'm sure in your search for another software that offers the classes/tags, you have likely found that there is a lack of software in general able to support the feature. In the simplest of terms, it's a complex build and before we can commit the resources into creating it, we want to ensure that we can launch a feature that we are proud of, and that works without a hitch. Knowing that so many users are dependent on a workflow that demands this capability means that the feature needs to be perfect because if not, there's a real chance that it can do more damage than good. I've touched base with the Product Team on this topic specifically, and they continue to reassess this sort of functionality at least twice a year, but have not yet found a way to implement it in a meaningful way.
I know that this is likely not the answer that you want to hear, but I feel as though you deserve to have as much insight as I can provide as to why the feature is has not yet been available on Wave. Your feedback, and the feedback of the other's in this thread, are appreciated and referred to frequently when making decisions, and I thank you for being as open as you have been to this point.
@JordanD
I think you might have understood the spirit in which I wrote. It was not to "dump" on Wave at all. However, I did find this thread through a Google search and found this very important discussion that is accessible to the wider online audience that goes beyond Wave. There has to be "someone" on this globe that can deliver a solid alternative to the ongoing death-grip of QB. QB is well-hated and their ongoing victimization of their users is profound.
I suspected that developmental challenges and resources is why so few accounting software developers can take this tough project on. Here is a totally insane idea. Because Intuit is so big and so well-resourced, no singular smaller developer firm can take that on, what if Wave reached out to its friendly rivals and see if there is a way to collaborate resources into a shared technology project to implement this feature? Perhaps what I am proposing is overly simplistic but I am very certain rivals to Wave are also on the same boat. Having clients who only have simplistic accounting needs or a very singular business to track might already be a huge niche for Wave and its rivals to compete for.
However, if those same rivals were all able to collaborate and team up to develop shared technology and incorporate tag/classes into its feature offerings, it could be a huge game changer for your industry. I have seen so many accounting features and all the comparison boxes. However, all of that stuff means very little because there are many of us looking for that one feature that keeps all QB users hostage.
Regardless of the outcome, thank you for keeping this thread alive and acknowledging the significance of the class feature request. This issue is much larger than Wave. It is an in issue within the accounting software industry where the behemoth QB seems to be setting standards and pricing for which everyone follows or compares.
I run one of those “creative businesses” that have been referenced as using Wave to do their accounting and as I scale bigger this is one area that I’m going to need to track in greater detail. I’m an event florist so I am paid per job and I need ways to be able to track expenses against those jobs so I can accurately asses not only my overall profit and expenses but also how much I should be paying myself at the completion of each project. Literally: just give me the ability to choose or assign a job tag, job number, or something like that so I can tag expenses and income against specific events.
So, for instance:
- Couple A pays me a $1000 deposit tomorrow and then $1000 in 11 months to do their wedding flowers in 12 months. The things I need to do:
... Track the flowers/materials that I buy specifically to their event
... Assign their project a percentage of my total overhead costs (so that I know how much of their total should be set aside in the interim)
... Pay myself accurately both at the time of their deposit and on completion of their event, because I can see how much I spent on their event materials and how much I’ve deducted to pay for the cost of running my business
At the end of the day I’m asking for this feature because right now all my expenses are a black box, I digitize them all and then whether an individual job was profitable or not, and how much I should pay myself from it, is kind of a crapshoot. I receive income based on event (perhaps up to 20-30/year), and manually rehashing how much I spend on each is onerous and kind of wasteful of my time. Using a category for inventory has been suggested but doesn’t slice it properly.
If I could ask for a specific feature, it would be to be able to assign an expense (in full or percentage or something like this) against an invoice number, or a tagging system, while retaining the Category system (which only allows one assignment).
That way I could assign three separate floral wholesaler bills to Invoice #CoupleA, 10% of my phone bill/studio rent to Invoice #CoupleA, and so on, and after a year total all expenses for their event, and pay myself properly. I could also continue to pull category reports to see everything that I’ve spent on flowers, etc for the year.
This is such a fundamental part of understanding the financial ins and outs of my company and I am not sure how or why it’s not a feature that is on the roadmap yet. How does any business get the kind of clarity they need without this feature? I’m having a hard time thinking of a business where you don’t need to understand expenses and profitability against a discrete project. Maybe that’s just me and the short sightedness of only knowing my business but it’s kind of surprising.
As a side note: Do you guys have a standing panel of small business owners that you speak to so that you understand how they run their businesses and keep track of their financial well-being? So that they walk through how they run their business and the kind of stuff they need to know? I’m talking less about self reporting individual issues the way that people are able to do on the forums, and more like an end to end customer journey that helps you see where and how a customer uses your product and where in the future you could better support them.
PLEASE, Don't give users free range tools like classes/projects/ tags.
Whatever you decide to do, please don't do it the way quickbooks, xero and everyone else does it.
Do it like you did the reconciliation page (even though it doesn't work well) because you will learn over time how to do it right, and then it will be perfect.
Concretely, this is what I mean. Entrepreneurs need to see their business from multiple perspectives, and don't necessarily need the BI systems that slow down day to day activity but give great bird's eye views for efficient decision making. The ideal is to build that in to the accounting.
I think it would like like the following (just freeflowing here, so definitely a work in progress!)
Essentially, classes, projects, and tags are just a way to link transactions across multiple accounts and to generate mini P&L's and to track budgets.
The underlying need here is adjusting current operations for the future, and being able to look into it.
If you make a dedicated interface similar to reconciliation, called, let's say, Management, you could come up with simple wizards to get more out of the accounting data.
Examples:
1) Reports geared towards helping owners reach their 15% EBITDA.
2) Creating Projects and have transactions auto-tagged per a date range or per vendors, and allowing the user to select multiple transactions for a general ledger for quick project making.
3) Cashflow Forecasting Management, (simple things like how much has to be created in revenue based on average expenses to reach a certain goal.)
Anyways, the list would go on, and it definitely would set you apart from everyone else.
Hi
I just want to add my voice to what everyone is writing here.
We are using the software for training courses that we provide in several categories, and in order to track and report the P&L based on the specific courses we must be able to tag or class them
Ahh...I am so disappointed that projects cant be created...I thought Wave was going to be the solution I have been looking for but this is a show stopper. Plus the fact that people have been asking for this for years now and Wave has not implemented does not look good for them actually listening to customers.
Maybe a different solution is better.
Hey @RachelKn . Thank you so much for putting the time and effort into writing out a detailed feature request explaining both the use case and how you'd be able to utilize it best. I'll let the team know we have a good post here to take a look at when doing future planning.
To answer your very last question, we definitely speak to business owners regularly about their journey, where they come from as well as where they're headed. We love to hear about how our users use Wave, how changes in the software has helped them, as well as what they need moving forward. I can't comment directly on how large of a scale we track these users' journey or how long we do so for, but I do know that our teams are constantly having personal conversations with users as to how their experience with Wave has been, as well as in what direction it's going.
Hi @Wadewoody
Thanks for reaching out and we apologize that our app doesn't fit your businesses needs. Wave's intent is and has been for quite some time focused on single transaction accounting for small businesses. It's clear that your business has outgrown Wave, and as much as we care about customer retention, it's difficult to accommodate for all of our users, big and small. I apologize that this feature is not something on our current roadmap. Take care and don't hesitate to reach out if you need anything else!
I really really like Wave and plan to stick with it. However, like some of the others who have written here, I desperately need job costing. All of my work is on a per job basis and it's really tough figuring out how a job is doing without some sort of feature. So my question is a quick one:
Will this ever be added? I understand its not coming in 2019 but is it in the pipeline or still up for consideration or is this something that just isn't gonna happen?
Thanks again for all your hard work.
PS: One idea: in lieu of job costing would tags be a possibility? Something users could input on any transaction and then run a report for everything with that tag? Could be useful in general, for instance you could tag any transactions you wanted to recheck later or maybe tag everything you spent on the company Christmas party. Something similar to the tag system for blog posts. Just a thought.
I made a similar suggestion a while back in it doesn't seem like they are really motivated to add that feature. I agree with you. A wordpress type tagging system would not be hard to implement.
Hey @yetiprojects, thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback here! We really appreciate it and I'm glad to hear you are enjoying Wave so far. At the moment, I do not have any further detail about features that are being developed beyond 2019. I like the idea you put forward and the context you provided! It is really helpful for our team to have this insight.
@americanriver your continued input and ideas on the topic are appreciated, and not going unnoticed!
Please bump up the priority for implementing tags/classes. Kindly speed up the releases increase the bandwidth if needed. Tags/classes is the immediate next we would like to see in wave.
I have been using wave on and off for several years on a personal level and for my bookkeeping service. I ended up having to move to Quickbooks because of this classifying need. I work for an Orthodontist who owns 5 locations. Classifying is what is used to separate each office for reporting, yet keep everyone in one profile to have overall reporting on profitability and costs as a full organization. With all the people I do books for, I know they would LOVE wave way more than QB online...it's just easier and cleaner. This option, as well as the ability to deeply reporting on classifications/tags, would put you guys lightyears down the road. Hope to see it soon
guys, give it up. its never coming. ive gone rounds and rounds with their developers in discussions on twitter and email even to the point of sending them excel spreadsheets to show how im doing project tracking, job costing, and direct expense reconciliation. I. Need. A. Way. To. Ensure. I. Dont. Have. Budget. Overruns. In. Real. Time. and every time i open up a new dialog with them i get the same answer... "this looks great but at this time we have no plans to add those features to wave as most of our customers dont require such features." AKA your business is of too little relevance to us so we cant build a section based on a spreadsheet template that already does all the math for you and all you have to do is plug the equations into a database to get variable values. Im a software developer. this isnt hard. and if i understood more about accounting id just write my own accounting software but i unfortunately dont. and for 3 years ive been asking for this. its not coming and so i'm giving quickbooks and sage online a try. i hate to move to another platform after years of history here but you dont do what i need and you refuse to even consider it so.... what choice do i have?
+1 as yet another person in favor of this important feature and to simplify, I would call this feature "Account tagging",
Feature Definition: Ability to create tags to associate with transactions which allows the customer to segment transactions. Tags should also be able to be used in all existing reports (where relevant).
My Use Case:
I am fairly new to using Wave and have previously tracked my rental property accounting information in Quicken Rental Property Manager, which is really just a glorified version of quicken with a couple basic extra features. I am not the property manager, but I do have independent accounting needs in addition to what the management company does, so I need to merge information t get a full P&L. For this purpose, I also like to see my per unit income and expenses to get a feel for how each unit it doing.
I read a lot on the forums about using a prefix and adding my own categories, but this is clumsy at best since my numbers don't roll up to the real category. For instance, if I track each unit income as "Rental Income: Unit X", I can't roll up my income to "Rental Income". The same is true for unit specific expenses. I have tried this and find it awkward.
However, I have noticed there is a customer field associated to each transaction that I can add. I don't know if this was added recently and as a whole, the label customer doesn't make any sense for this purpose and using it as a method to track by unit forgoes my ability to have actual customers/tenants, but that may work for my needs since my property management tracks the tenants. Has anyone tried this?
I don't think this should limit the need for a real product feature, but maybe this could work for my specific use case? The biggest problem I see with it is there is no way to segment reporting and include the customer field.
As many I am certain, we would love to know that this feature is coming as workarounds are not really great.
Currently, we can categorize transactions by a vendor and by a customer. It would be awesome if we could also create custom "project" field or some other similar field so that I could pull up all of the transactions related to an individual project/job (of which I have multiple jobs/projects for many of my customers).
Hello,
I'm finding it difficult to make this app work for me..
I have 1 company and multiple divisions under that company. I want to share my cash and bank accounts across divisions. However, would like to track income and expense, P&L by divisions also..
Unable to find any way to do that here...
regards,
Anindya
Hey @recresults . I merged your post into this thread so you could take a look at the conversation going on around this. Thanks for the feedback on this. Although not currently on our roadmap, we try to keep all requests located in the same thread so our product team can keep an eye on how many users we have reaching out about a particular feature idea.
Introduction
I would also I like to add my vote for a tagging/class feature in Wave. I think this feature would be very useful to users to help them understand their business. Having read through several posts in this community on this subject I want to add how I see this feature working, which will hopefully be of use to Wave developers.
First, I think there are 3 parts to the whole tagging feature: (1) tag management, (2) tag application, and (3) reporting which I describe below.
(1) Tag Management
I see this part working in the same way as the Chart of Accounts ("CoA") works today. The CoA contains all the accounts set up in Wave along with their name, description and a "last transaction on date [X]" field. Wave could add a "Chart of Tags" view so the user can set up whatever tags are useful to their business.
I assume that over a number of years the types and volume of tags that a user creates would grow, so being able to see all tags along with their description and a "last used on date [X]" would be very useful to the user. In addition, a business can grow and change, and some tags may no longer be useful to the user so a feature to archive (or "set as read-only") tags would also be needed.
(2) Tag Application
I see this feature being implemented in the "Transactions" view of Wave (under Accounting > Transactions) as I think the benefit of tagging really comes from its granular applicability at the individual transaction level because there are different businesses out there with different needs. For example, a non-profit entity that receives cash donations into one bank account but that needs to earmark (i.e. tag) the cash for different uses would be focused on tracking these different pools of cash in their one bank account (which is a business focus on the balance sheet). However, a property management business may want to tag income/expense transactions so that it has the ability to segregate their income statement by property (which is a business focus on the income statement).
Based on the examples above, I imagine this feature to work as follows: A single deposit comes in through a linked bank account into Wave and currently the auto-filled fields are Date, Description and Amount. The user then can assign an account to this transaction, mark it reviewed and (with this tagging feature) pick a tag from a dropdown list similar to the account picker (The tags would have already been created in the "Chart of Tags" I describe above).
Given that the Transactions view in Wave can already sort/search/filter transactions in various ways I imagine this existing functionality can be integrated with the tagging feature. Assuming this is done and even if the feature implementation ends here the user can still hugely benefit from the added tagging functionality. The user can use the aforementioned sort/search/filter in the Transactions view to obtain valuable insights into their business by just viewing the various tagged transactions as is.
One wrinkle that must be considered is whether to allow multiples tags for a transaction. This could be very useful where a user wants to track, for example, sales by salesperson (tags: salesperson 1, salesperson 2, etc.) and by product line (tags: product 1, product 2, etc.). The nature of these particular tags would result in overlapping tags where a single deposit is associated with a single revenue account and possibly two tags such as “salesperson 1” and “product 2”. This situation becomes even more complex when split transactions are added to the mix. That is, do you program Wave to track multiple tags for different split portions of a single deposit? From a user’s point of view, I would argue this is also needed since the user is splitting the transaction into different accounts for a good reason related to how their business works but from a feature implementation point of view this increases the complexity of the feature even more.
(3) Reporting
I want to focus on just the Income Statement here as I think it would be the most frequently used by users, but my thoughts apply to all of the Reporting functions in Wave. I imagine opening up the Income Statement in Wave and in addition to having the currently ability to see Summary/Details, adjust dates and add prior year figures, I would be able to filter by tags that I have used to just see those tags instead of the whole income statement or to see several tags in individual columns ("mini income statements") that then add horizontally to the total untagged income statement.
I think the Reporting part of the tagging feature is what would make it wildly valuable to users, however it seems to me to be the part most filled with ambiguity that must somehow be programmed into Wave.
What I mean is in the Tag Management and Tag Application steps the user clearly initiates the creation/deletion/application of a tag to which Wave must respond as described above or the user does not perform the triggering action and Wave continues to behave as it does currently without tagging.
However, in the Reporting step Wave must be set up to consider various options that I doubt the user would have considered at the creation of their first tag. For example: (1) if some transactions are tagged and some are not how are those displayed in the Income Statement – does Wave show them as a collective “untagged transactions” group or not show them at all. (2) How does Wave deal with tags that only exist in certain years when the user displays the Income Statement for current and prior year and wants to filter/sort/group by tags. (3) How does Wave handle the presentation of overlapping tags if they exist as I describe part (2) above.
Conclusion
From the point of view of a user and a long-time accountant, I think this would be a wildly valuable feature to implement in Wave. I hope that this post has conveyed some useful thoughts that the Wave developers can consider if/when moving forward on this.
Hi, are there any workarounds for this?
I am also running a small theatre organization and we desperately need to be able to report by production. We can't afford the cost of QuickBooks with the class functionality.
Hey Anindya @iamanindya! Hmm, it sounds because you have different divisions under one company it sounds like you might require job or project based accounting, I'm afraid Wave does not currently offer this. Our Product Team is always looking for ways to make Wave better and this is a highly requested feature. Wave does offer the ability to categorize transactions. You can learn about those HERE but I understand it won't accomplish the same thing.
You also have the option to Open Multiple Businesses within the same Wave account treating each one like a different project (or division). This is another common workaround some of our users do, so you can switch between them with just a few clicks. You could then run reports for each business/division as needed and manually add the totals but again, Wave is not explicitly designed for this.
Hey @Tom1115! First and foremost, thank you so much for this explicitly detailed response to this thread, as well as several use cases, and valuable input. I can absolutely see the value in the framework you've suggested, and can assure you that insight of this nature does not go forgotten whilst planning the roadmap for the future of Wave. The development team will be made aware of this input, and, if implemented, you can expect to find a post about it within the Wave network, for sure!
@i_am_hazel Thank you as well for your input here. At present, we do not have a workaround that I could suggest, but I'd love to hear from any other community members if they've found a method that works for them!
This would be immensely helpful.
I have a software consulting corp and 3 different LLC that own various properties, each with a separate Wave Accounts. I am a big believer in separation of concerns.
I have thus far opted for appending a property tag to accounts (####AAAA) where #s are the first four of numerics and As are the first 4 letters of the street name. You may need a 3rd indicator for multi-units, but currently, all my props are single-family. This is a pain in that I have a lot of duplication of accounts and can't do any real roll-up reporting. But, I did not like the Multi-Business as a solution. While it provides for a cleaner individual report, I felt it messier in terms of duplicate entries when importing from the same bank account(s).
Additionally, since I do so much of my own management, I have started a property management company and am currently "trying" to set up my new wave account to facility managing other properties, for other customers. This is proving an even greater challenge to find good work-arounds
While we can always find "work arounds", it seems this has been requested by a lot of your clients and for a long time. I get that functionality seems easy until you dive into existing acthitecture, data model and code base ... and that there are a finite amount of resources to build an infinite amount of requested features, but 2 years is a long time for a repeatedly requested feature by many not few of your customers to be, ignored, on the radar, in the roadmap, depending on who's answer we read...
I made a comment here and it's been removed do you know why?
This here is what we are wanting to do like in Quick Books :
They do this by classes
Assign Divisions to Classes
Step 1
Click the "Edit" menu and select "Preferences."
Step 2
Click the "Accounting" list, and then click the "Company Preferences" tab.
Step 3
Select the "Use Class Tracking" check box and click "OK."
Step 4
Click the "Lists" menu; then click "Class List."
Step 5
Click the "Class" drop-down button. Select "New."
Step 6
Enter a division name, or select the "Subclass Of" check box and enter the parent division or your company name.
Step 7
Click "OK" to record the class and close the window, or click "Next" to enter additional divisions.
Profit and Loss by Class Report
Step 1
Click the "Reports" menu in QuickBooks.
Step 2
Select "Company & Financials."
Step 3
Select "Profit & Loss By Class."
Step 4
Click the "Dates" drop-down list and select a date range for the report, or select "All."
Step 5
Click "Print" to print your report.
It would be great to see something like this in WaveApps
I can add my divisions under the main company, as by clicking add a business.
But to link the same bank account as the original, you have to reconcile bank account transactions twice, therefore defeating the purpose of having a division.
Wave apps appears to just be a one and done business, not for those that may have a marketing department, which bills the invoice for that brand, a support department which bills for that brand or similar.
Quickbooks Desktop is the only version that really allows this to flow correctly. Their online model doesn't do this very well. You create seperate invoices and have to upload your template for each subdivision there. time consuming and inefficient. I havent found an online model that comes close yet than wave apps. But it's an incomplete product.
You can add the multiple business's sure
but no way to compile as stated earlier without double accounting.
As a side note, it would be great to know when the client has opened the invoice, maybe a notification or email ? JoistApp does this service well.
Hey @AlaskanNightWolf . Looks like our spam queue flagged your post, so thanks for being extra vigilant and reposting here so we can address it.
In regards to having business divisions, we do see this request from time-to-time but it's not something that's currently on our roadmap. I do thank you for the in-depth real world flow for us to better understand how you'd use this feature, it helps our product team prioritize features in the future.
Other than hovering over the invoice to see if it has been open yet, this isn't a feature in Wave (as you already know). I'm interested in knowing how you'd find this feature helpful (other than the obvious). Do you find that your customers are not honest about whether they've seen/opened your sent invoices?
Hi JamieD
Please also add me as a +1 to the feature request. This feature is vitally important for tax season when it is necessary to tax-deductible and non-tax-deductible transactions. To use Socrates example case, a transaction in the "work through meal" category would not be tax deductible, whereas a transaction in the "meals with customers" category would. Come tax season they are already separated so my deductible expenses is much easier to calculate and find.
If sub-accounts are too hard a feature to add (which I don't think they should be) then another option is the ability to tag transactions and search for transactions by tag. At least this way we could have more flexibility.
As 2019 is drawing to a close I wanted to see if there is any update on adding the sub account feature? It appears Mani has said "we will be revisiting the priority of this feature in the second half of 2019". Just wanted to see where the priority is. I continue to use Wave Accounts and really like the product besides the fact that this one feature is missing.