@bmoney We aren't able to provide a timeline for this feature at the moment but it's not on our current roadmap. We appreciate all the discussion going on in this thread to provide visibility and feedback so that our Product teams can reference this when they do look for new features to build out.
@TDuvall Love this workaround! Would love to hear back from other users on this workaround or the ways they have adapted this to suit their workflow.
We also have multiple investment properties. My accountant is trying to have me switch over to another program away from Wave because of all of the different accounts makes running reports a headache. Programs like Quickbooks and Stessa allow for sub-categories. Please add this feature. Working around it the problem is terrible.
I know your canned answer is run each property as a different business, but that means 10 credit cards, and 20 bank accounts to keep track of for us. That is nuts.
Just the ability to create subaccounts would be massive. As is, really impossible to effectively account for any business of moderate complexity, due to the chart of accounts and resulting financials being too burdensome to digest. But do love the software.
@scifijock Appreciate your honesty about your frustration. As we've said, we don't have any immediate plans on creating this but understanding how one feature can improve your accounting does make a difference when we look at what features to build out. Can you elaborate a bit more on how the multiple businesses method doesn't work for you? This makes understanding your workflow easier which gives our Product team a better idea on what you are looking for from Wave. @DavidSB We hear you and I would love to hear more about what type of business you operate where sub-accounts will be handy. Wave was designed and built by small business owners but we understand the need for affordable accounting software extends to anyone. Learning more about your business will help us create products that can empower even more business owners than we currently do.
Please add job costing, sub-accounts, or tags. I use Wave for my companies and it would be really helpful. Clearly many Wave users need this based on how long this thread is. Listen to your customer feedback or you will loose customers. I really don't want to have to go back to Quickbooks.
Thanks for the suggestions and thoughts here. While there isn't a built in feature job costing, what you could do is set up different products/services and income/expense accounts for each job/project. Then, when you create bills, invoices, etc. for a particular job, you would select the products/services that are specific to that job. Doing so would allow you to track the income/expenses specific to projects on the Profit & Loss statement.
In order to set this up, you'd head to the Accounting > Chart of Accounts and create an income account for every project's products/services. Then, you’ll want to head to the Sales > Products and Services to ‘Add a Product or Service’. Here you can associate your project's products or services with the specific income account you created for it.
For example, let's say you offer 3 services and have 2 projects on the go. You would set up the products and services like so:
Project 1 — Service 1
Project 1 — Service 2
Project 1 — Service 3
Project 2 — Service 1
Project 2 — Service 2
Project 3 — Service 3
Then, when you create invoices for a project, you would select the project specific product or service as a line item. When you receive payment for the invoice, the amount earned will be added to the project specific product/service account. The balances of these accounts would be visible/trackable in your Reports section too.
I understand that this is a pretty labour intensive work around, but doing so would allow you to track income/expenses of specific projects.
I would like to +1 the request for transaction tags that would enable project accounting. I run a few projects that repeat annually, so it would be great to be able to tag transactions by project and report transactions by project tag. Sub-categories in the Chart of Accounts would not exactly fulfill the same need because if I had each project as an upper-level category and each expense category as a lower-level category, I'd still be repeating expense categories in the COA.
I'm new to Wave, but I have 2 divisions of my company as both my son and I run our consulting businesses from the same corporation. We have separate bank accounts and separate customers. I consider subcategories in the chart of accounts to be a minimum for me to use Wave. I could create a separate account of each type for each division and group them to get a consolidated total. As I understand from reading this long series on this topic, Wave does not even support grouping and sub-accounts in the Chart of Accounts? I use Simply Accounting now, but don't want to upgrade to the new Sage stuff and pay a fortune. The Sage pricing model and plans no longer suit my small business. The idea of tags/classes should be in addition to sub-categories and would allow much more flexible uses than just sub-categories but it sounds like that is not currently on the roadmap at all.
Sub-categories was mentioned as something being considered in 2H 2019 but presumably got delayed. Is there any update on plans for just sub-categories in the Chart of Accounts?
Hey @DieterDorin , first off we appreciate you taking your time to write out how your business works so we can gain a better understanding of what time of businesses would be able to use this feature.
At the moment, we don't have any plans on our short-term roadmap to add sub-categories to the Chart of Accounts.
@NicoletteB I do primarily bookkeeping for individuals. For instance, an individual who has a few rental properties - grouping maintenance costs by property or all property costs by property would be a huge win. As it is, since there are no secondary dimensions we can add to a G/L account (sub-account, tag, class, what have you) we have to create a different account for every type of expense we wish to track and there is no way to group them for reporting purposes, which significantly limits the quality of reporting.
Our Tax guy has instructed us to "tag" all expenses that have to deal with the covid pandemic as he expects some kind of tax deferral or waiver on those expenses. How can I notate and pull a report on all of these expenses without taking them out of their current categories? A tagging system seems like it would be the easiest but it sounds like Wave doesn't have that.
@Orlo you are correct in saying that Wave doesn't have a tagging system! Are you able to articulate the reason why this sort of reporting is needed? This would be helpful so that I could suggest another way to complete this, but also if this is something that many accountants will need, then I would like to see if it is on our Accounting Product Team's radar!
@JordanD
Wow! I find your reply on this a bit frustrating and naive. Just look at the top of the this page 8 on this topic for the most recent couple of posts from your fellow administrator who says this in NOT currently on the product road map. I skimmed the whole 8 pages to see the whole history of this discussion, and don't understand how this topic could get ignored on the product road map as it has been a hotly desired area for improvement for several years. At one point it appeared sub accounts were on the road map in 2019, but apparently no longer. There are certainly lots of ideas about ways of filtering or grouping accounts for reporting. If anything in this subject area is being considered it would be nice to know that and how long as a minimum that process could take. As an IT consultant working on software, (both Agile and waterfall processes) I understand that there is no way to make commitments things like this, but understanding its priority and the process and release schedule would be helpful so users can take their own actions accordingly
@DieterDorin I appreciate your honesty in your last post and apologies on any confusion our previous post may have created. Right now, this is not on the Accounting team's roadmap for releases; however, there is always discussion on what should be added next which is what Jordan was referring to. I understand the want for more transparency on when releases are happening and we will be passing on this feedback to all our Product teams so that they can look to offer more context about any feature release to give you a look inside our workflow, just as we ask for an insight into yours.
Now i can only craeate acategory for expenses. please add subcategory feature
Example;
Category name : Vehicle Expenses under this
Subcategory : add vehicles eg. vehicle 1, vehicle 2 contd,
under added vehicles
Subcategory ->Fuel
->Spare-parts
-> Road tickets
Please please please add class tracking to your system. It's the only reason I can't move over from Quickbooks. It's a must when you have rental properties.... desperately needed in WAVE.
I've merged your post into the existing thread surrounding the idea of sub-accounts. As you'll note in this thread it's not something on our current roadmap but we appreciate your input!
Hi, I am using Wave for last 4 years and it has served me really well thus far. Unfortunately, now that business is growing I want to tag each transaction based on the dimension (in my case it's a property). But unfortunately, there is no way to do any Dimension based accounting in Wave. Do you have this feature on your road map yet? I am also willing to pay for such feature.
Hi. We are a design and construction company and we really need to tag our expenses so we can link them to specific projects, much like any other person in this thread. I've read through the comments and the proposed workarounds. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just about creating an expense account for each project but it doesn't end there. I'd still have to create a service/item for each and then things would get a little bit crazy. Sad to hear this is not in your roadmap. Even a simple optional field in invoices/bills would do.
Thanks so much for posting this in our community. We appreciate you giving us some additional context as to why this would be essential to your business. As it stands we have not seen or heard of this feature coming down the road map yet. So I do apologize for being the bearer of bad news. If we do implement this feature we will definitely be making some in-app announcements about it as well!
Hi @happykitty , thanks for getting back. This feature is not currently on the road map because Wave is focused on continuing to improve the existing features we already have. Thank you for contributing your feedback here!
I am interested in using tags to track where my business is spending money. Specifically, I'd like to tag expenses as black owned / woman owned / in-state, etc. Adding this comment in the hopes that it helps contribute to the rest of the requests to get it on the road map. Thank you!
@Orlo said:
Our Tax guy has instructed us to "tag" all expenses that have to deal with the covid pandemic as he expects some kind of tax deferral or waiver on those expenses. How can I notate and pull a report on all of these expenses without taking them out of their current categories? A tagging system seems like it would be the easiest but it sounds like Wave doesn't have that.
I would add the text ";Covid" to the notes section. Then simply export your data as a csv and import into Google Sheets. Then you can filter and report at will using the TAG. I am doing this as an alternative to classes and tags as a built in feature.
**By adding in the ; (semi-colon) before the TAG you can use the "Split text to Columns" option in the data menu (GoogleSheet) to create individual column headers for each tag used in a single transaction.
This is a work around and is quite easy if you need greater reporting on a less frequent basis.
I would also like to support this feature. This is one of the reason we left wave a couple of years ago. I can’t believe the massive need for this feature from users and the lack of response for wave.
Our use case is similar to everyone’s: tagging will help with projects and sub-categories to tidy our chart of accounts, have aggregated reports, etc.
I think the question at this point is why is this not on your roadmap? Why don't you have plans to develop this feature? Thousands of people are asking for it (and have been asking for it for years). It exists at your major competitors, but for some reason it's not a priority for Wave. The majority of US small businesses are service businesses, many of which drive their business model via sub-categories and locations. It's ridiculous to state that your mission is to: "We're changing the way millions of small businesses make money, spend money and TRACK MONEY. Wave delivers innovative financial services and award-winning free software to small- and micro-businesses around the world." when you're offering the bare minimum in at least one of these categories. You're tagline is "small businesses have a right to great software". I agree, and hope challenge yourselves to make your software great instead of "well, it's free".
Yikes. I've been doing some groundwork on moving over from QB and I just assumed this feature was here. In another thread I was trying to figure out how to track more granular information on my payroll liabilities, and it was suggested that I do journal entries. Not an ideal solution (time consuming), but okay. Now, I can't create subaccounts within payroll liabilities to track the individual items with the journal entries? This is getting more difficult.
Edit: is this just a technically difficult thing to add at this point?
There is no update on this. This would require a major overhaul of our system which may also require another migration of accounting due to the current way our chart of accounts are setup. Although it's not on our immediate roadmap, that is not to say it's never a possibility. I do apologize about the unfortunate news.
Comments
@bmoney We aren't able to provide a timeline for this feature at the moment but it's not on our current roadmap. We appreciate all the discussion going on in this thread to provide visibility and feedback so that our Product teams can reference this when they do look for new features to build out.
@TDuvall Love this workaround! Would love to hear back from other users on this workaround or the ways they have adapted this to suit their workflow.
We also have multiple investment properties. My accountant is trying to have me switch over to another program away from Wave because of all of the different accounts makes running reports a headache. Programs like Quickbooks and Stessa allow for sub-categories. Please add this feature. Working around it the problem is terrible.
I know your canned answer is run each property as a different business, but that means 10 credit cards, and 20 bank accounts to keep track of for us. That is nuts.
Just the ability to create subaccounts would be massive. As is, really impossible to effectively account for any business of moderate complexity, due to the chart of accounts and resulting financials being too burdensome to digest. But do love the software.
@scifijock Appreciate your honesty about your frustration. As we've said, we don't have any immediate plans on creating this but understanding how one feature can improve your accounting does make a difference when we look at what features to build out. Can you elaborate a bit more on how the multiple businesses method doesn't work for you? This makes understanding your workflow easier which gives our Product team a better idea on what you are looking for from Wave.
@DavidSB We hear you and I would love to hear more about what type of business you operate where sub-accounts will be handy. Wave was designed and built by small business owners but we understand the need for affordable accounting software extends to anyone. Learning more about your business will help us create products that can empower even more business owners than we currently do.
Please add job costing, sub-accounts, or tags. I use Wave for my companies and it would be really helpful. Clearly many Wave users need this based on how long this thread is. Listen to your customer feedback or you will loose customers. I really don't want to have to go back to Quickbooks.
Hey @Brendon!
Thanks for the suggestions and thoughts here. While there isn't a built in feature job costing, what you could do is set up different products/services and income/expense accounts for each job/project. Then, when you create bills, invoices, etc. for a particular job, you would select the products/services that are specific to that job. Doing so would allow you to track the income/expenses specific to projects on the Profit & Loss statement.
In order to set this up, you'd head to the Accounting > Chart of Accounts and create an income account for every project's products/services. Then, you’ll want to head to the Sales > Products and Services to ‘Add a Product or Service’. Here you can associate your project's products or services with the specific income account you created for it.
For example, let's say you offer 3 services and have 2 projects on the go. You would set up the products and services like so:
Then, when you create invoices for a project, you would select the project specific product or service as a line item. When you receive payment for the invoice, the amount earned will be added to the project specific product/service account. The balances of these accounts would be visible/trackable in your Reports section too.
I understand that this is a pretty labour intensive work around, but doing so would allow you to track income/expenses of specific projects.
I would like to +1 the request for transaction tags that would enable project accounting. I run a few projects that repeat annually, so it would be great to be able to tag transactions by project and report transactions by project tag. Sub-categories in the Chart of Accounts would not exactly fulfill the same need because if I had each project as an upper-level category and each expense category as a lower-level category, I'd still be repeating expense categories in the COA.
I'm new to Wave, but I have 2 divisions of my company as both my son and I run our consulting businesses from the same corporation. We have separate bank accounts and separate customers. I consider subcategories in the chart of accounts to be a minimum for me to use Wave. I could create a separate account of each type for each division and group them to get a consolidated total. As I understand from reading this long series on this topic, Wave does not even support grouping and sub-accounts in the Chart of Accounts? I use Simply Accounting now, but don't want to upgrade to the new Sage stuff and pay a fortune. The Sage pricing model and plans no longer suit my small business. The idea of tags/classes should be in addition to sub-categories and would allow much more flexible uses than just sub-categories but it sounds like that is not currently on the roadmap at all.
Sub-categories was mentioned as something being considered in 2H 2019 but presumably got delayed. Is there any update on plans for just sub-categories in the Chart of Accounts?
Hey @DieterDorin , first off we appreciate you taking your time to write out how your business works so we can gain a better understanding of what time of businesses would be able to use this feature.
At the moment, we don't have any plans on our short-term roadmap to add sub-categories to the Chart of Accounts.
@NicoletteB I do primarily bookkeeping for individuals. For instance, an individual who has a few rental properties - grouping maintenance costs by property or all property costs by property would be a huge win. As it is, since there are no secondary dimensions we can add to a G/L account (sub-account, tag, class, what have you) we have to create a different account for every type of expense we wish to track and there is no way to group them for reporting purposes, which significantly limits the quality of reporting.
Our Tax guy has instructed us to "tag" all expenses that have to deal with the covid pandemic as he expects some kind of tax deferral or waiver on those expenses. How can I notate and pull a report on all of these expenses without taking them out of their current categories? A tagging system seems like it would be the easiest but it sounds like Wave doesn't have that.
@Orlo you are correct in saying that Wave doesn't have a tagging system! Are you able to articulate the reason why this sort of reporting is needed? This would be helpful so that I could suggest another way to complete this, but also if this is something that many accountants will need, then I would like to see if it is on our Accounting Product Team's radar!
@JordanD
Wow! I find your reply on this a bit frustrating and naive. Just look at the top of the this page 8 on this topic for the most recent couple of posts from your fellow administrator who says this in NOT currently on the product road map. I skimmed the whole 8 pages to see the whole history of this discussion, and don't understand how this topic could get ignored on the product road map as it has been a hotly desired area for improvement for several years. At one point it appeared sub accounts were on the road map in 2019, but apparently no longer. There are certainly lots of ideas about ways of filtering or grouping accounts for reporting. If anything in this subject area is being considered it would be nice to know that and how long as a minimum that process could take. As an IT consultant working on software, (both Agile and waterfall processes) I understand that there is no way to make commitments things like this, but understanding its priority and the process and release schedule would be helpful so users can take their own actions accordingly
@DieterDorin I appreciate your honesty in your last post and apologies on any confusion our previous post may have created. Right now, this is not on the Accounting team's roadmap for releases; however, there is always discussion on what should be added next which is what Jordan was referring to. I understand the want for more transparency on when releases are happening and we will be passing on this feedback to all our Product teams so that they can look to offer more context about any feature release to give you a look inside our workflow, just as we ask for an insight into yours.
Now i can only craeate acategory for expenses. please add subcategory feature
Example;
Category name : Vehicle Expenses under this
Subcategory : add vehicles eg. vehicle 1, vehicle 2 contd,
under added vehicles
Subcategory ->Fuel
->Spare-parts
-> Road tickets
Please please please add class tracking to your system. It's the only reason I can't move over from Quickbooks. It's a must when you have rental properties.... desperately needed in WAVE.
Hey there @Razakh
I've merged your post into the existing thread surrounding the idea of sub-accounts. As you'll note in this thread it's not something on our current roadmap but we appreciate your input!
Hi, I am using Wave for last 4 years and it has served me really well thus far. Unfortunately, now that business is growing I want to tag each transaction based on the dimension (in my case it's a property). But unfortunately, there is no way to do any Dimension based accounting in Wave. Do you have this feature on your road map yet? I am also willing to pay for such feature.
Hi. We are a design and construction company and we really need to tag our expenses so we can link them to specific projects, much like any other person in this thread. I've read through the comments and the proposed workarounds. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just about creating an expense account for each project but it doesn't end there. I'd still have to create a service/item for each and then things would get a little bit crazy. Sad to hear this is not in your roadmap. Even a simple optional field in invoices/bills would do.
Hey there @maumad @JPessolani
Thanks so much for posting this in our community. We appreciate you giving us some additional context as to why this would be essential to your business. As it stands we have not seen or heard of this feature coming down the road map yet. So I do apologize for being the bearer of bad news. If we do implement this feature we will definitely be making some in-app announcements about it as well!
@BarsinA why would this not be on the roadmap... this thread is 8 pages long.. clearly its needed. its a big pain point for me also
Hi @happykitty , thanks for getting back. This feature is not currently on the road map because Wave is focused on continuing to improve the existing features we already have. Thank you for contributing your feedback here!
I am interested in using tags to track where my business is spending money. Specifically, I'd like to tag expenses as black owned / woman owned / in-state, etc. Adding this comment in the hopes that it helps contribute to the rest of the requests to get it on the road map. Thank you!
Just found this thread after I posted a new request with details here: https://community.waveapps.com/discussion/8906/measuring-client-profitability-and-costs/p1?new=1. This isn't quite the same, but it is related. Tags would be helpful toward my needs as well.
I would add the text ";Covid" to the notes section. Then simply export your data as a csv and import into Google Sheets. Then you can filter and report at will using the TAG. I am doing this as an alternative to classes and tags as a built in feature.
**By adding in the ; (semi-colon) before the TAG you can use the "Split text to Columns" option in the data menu (GoogleSheet) to create individual column headers for each tag used in a single transaction.
This is a work around and is quite easy if you need greater reporting on a less frequent basis.
Our use case is similar to everyone’s: tagging will help with projects and sub-categories to tidy our chart of accounts, have aggregated reports, etc.
Thanks
I think the question at this point is why is this not on your roadmap? Why don't you have plans to develop this feature? Thousands of people are asking for it (and have been asking for it for years). It exists at your major competitors, but for some reason it's not a priority for Wave. The majority of US small businesses are service businesses, many of which drive their business model via sub-categories and locations. It's ridiculous to state that your mission is to: "We're changing the way millions of small businesses make money, spend money and TRACK MONEY. Wave delivers innovative financial services and award-winning free software to small- and micro-businesses around the world." when you're offering the bare minimum in at least one of these categories. You're tagline is "small businesses have a right to great software". I agree, and hope challenge yourselves to make your software great instead of "well, it's free".
Yikes. I've been doing some groundwork on moving over from QB and I just assumed this feature was here. In another thread I was trying to figure out how to track more granular information on my payroll liabilities, and it was suggested that I do journal entries. Not an ideal solution (time consuming), but okay. Now, I can't create subaccounts within payroll liabilities to track the individual items with the journal entries? This is getting more difficult.
Edit: is this just a technically difficult thing to add at this point?
Any updates on this feature? Is it on the road-map? What would it take?
PS. I notice that your community forum posts can be labeled/tagged. Seems pretty handy...
Hey there @Orlo
There is no update on this. This would require a major overhaul of our system which may also require another migration of accounting due to the current way our chart of accounts are setup. Although it's not on our immediate roadmap, that is not to say it's never a possibility. I do apologize about the unfortunate news.