I appreciate the FREE cloud-based system, coming from a very small non-profit teacher's union. We don't have a need for the fancy business features, as we basically collect dues and don't have much overhead, nor do we have payroll as all of us are performing our roles on a voluntary basis. I had been looking for a low cost/free accounting software. WAVE won me over with the mobile app ability to submit receipts and connect them to transactions, along with downloading transactions from the bank.
With that said, for everyone who is complaining about not having check printing ability and you reiterating that WAVE's revenue is generated through electronic processing, have you considered adding it on as a premium feature? Many of us don't have a need for printing that many checks, that we can still do these by hand as they occur, but maybe consider making the check printing feature a premium one. I am sure people who have been happy with WAVE except for the ability to print checks for their vendors would pay a small monthly fee to be able to have access to that feature. It certainly would be cheaper to pay a small fee to WAVE monthly than a large monthly subscription to QuickBooks that does have the feature. I know I have other small suggestions to improve the software just from using it over the last week or so (like I'm still figuring out how to edit the G/L account names to add the existing accounts or how to delete them). That's my two cents. Thank you for the free service. As a very small teacher's union, we have a small budget, so opting for a software like QuickBooks was not an option for us.
@PattiO Great suggestion and I love the detail that you've provided us here. I definitely see where you're coming from, paying a fee each time you wanted to print a check using our software, etc, it's just not something that our product focuses are currently aligned with at the moment I'm afraid. Potentially, we will shift gears and look into considering this in the future, but we don't have an ETA as to when that would be. Once again, I appreciate the feedback that you've given us, and should we have an update regarding this feature in Wave, we will certain update everyone in this thread.
Wow, Illuminating thread. I just opened a Wave account yesterday. Reading this thread really has made me doubt going forward with Wave. So many repeated requests over a years timeframe, and no signs of hope at all that from the company that they will take this on to fill customers needs.
Printing checks can't be that hard. Quickbooks even does it, and I consider them a Clown-Car-Carnival when it comes to customer service.
I would even hazard a guess that most everyone on this thread would pay a small amount to have check printing ability. I'm now looking elsewhere for my QB alternate. So sad. Wave seemed very promising. I don't get it.
Hey! Same story, different day. I unfortunately went so far as to purchase checks with Wave's affiliate company Check Print Solutions under the assumption that if Wave was recommending checks, I would have a way to print them within this platform. Now I have a bunch of checks with no way to print on them. I guess I will have to hunt to find another platform that will work with my already pre-formatted checks or use the antique, archaic Sage platform and buy all new checks.
I guess that's what I get for assuming! Please consider adding this feature. I love everything else about Wave.
See below:
From: mike mike@usckprint.net
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2019 11:35 AM
To:
Subject: Re: Fwd: Order 19096 Logo
ShowMeSleep,
Yes format is for Wave. Your order ships today, will forward tracking. Let me know if you have any issues with the envelopes, we can make adjustments on the reorder.
For all those who are on this thread making requests for printing checks for payables other than payroll: we understand this need. We hear this need. To date, this has been a less pressing need than others that come our way. We fully appreciate how it's a deal breaker for some potential users. We are not ignoring it but assigning it relative priority. As always, we will not be looking to build "paid features" in our Accounting system. It will remain 100% free and we'll only charge for financial services.
When doing 2020 roadmapping we will have a serious look at how we could bring this to life.
The component parts include:
1. Check tracking with number, amount, and date -- you'd need a place to see these, know their status, and void them
2. Bookkeeping to set aside the funds and clear them when they're deposited by the recipient
3. Allowing you to print checks on stock paper using vendor details
4. Ensuring our new reconciliation capabilities allow you to deal with checks
5. Ensuring our existing reports allow you the right visibility into outstanding checks
Feedback is welcome if the above doesn't cover your expectations of check tracking, reconciliation, and printing.
I was so excited to find Wave but, I don't understand on how one of the cornerstones of bookkeeping is not included in the program - EVERY company need to write checks.
Comment from Mani on August 27: These features would make my live a lot easier. I hope you will be able to implement this soon! Printing checks is unfortunately still something that many of us have to do.
While I understand that Wave must make money, how about the ability to print Vender checks as a premium service. I for one would not be opposed to paying a couple of dollars a month for this ability.
Hey @Shineman . I appreciate the feedback on this. I know at the moment we'd much rather offer a free check printing option at some point in the future, but it doesn't look like this will be coming in the near future. I'll gladly pass your request on to the team so they know we have a user who has floated this feature idea.
Although check printing may be a deal-breaker for some, it's not for me. I ditched my Fax machine over ten years ago. I haven't purchased checks in years. All three of the banks I use, have some sort of online bill pay service. This saves me from purchasing check stock and postage. I occasionally have my bank print me a page of checks (4) and handwrite an occasional check. Perhaps I'm the target audience for WAVE. I appreciate all the features that are provided for free. I'm so appreciative, that I have enabled payments via wave so they can sustain the free tier.
Wave has payment fees similar to PayPal, but I feel Wave gives me so much more.
To be fair, I did land on this thread because I was curious if I could print checks. I'm kind of glad I can't as it will save me the cost of purchasing fancy, one-page check stock, envelopes and the postage that goes along with it.
You can please some people some of the time, but you can't please everyone!
Reading the nasty comments makes me chuckle, because I know I'm not alone when I say I enjoy the service provided by WAVE. I know it's not perfect, but It is a great value.
I was planning to bring a new client to Wave, but this is a deal-breaker for her as well. I'm really surprised at this. Glad for the thread, though, and to see it before I began the process of convincing her to go online.
This is an important feature. Since it seems that all you need to do is create a PDF of the data that is printed on the checks, I am not certain why this is not a simple addition. It would use pre-printed Check stock, then print on top of that.
It is indeed very essential. I have a new business and I recommended WaveApps, then we found out about this missing feature and will be going elsewhere. @AlexL, any ideas for 2020?
One feature that would help solve the check printing easily would be to add download of bills to Google Sheets integration. My plan was to add the bills to a Sheet and have another Sheet for printing that data in the check format. Unfortunately currently only Products, Customers and Invoices are available.
I'm new to Wave. I'm impressed by all the great features, the ease of use and the simple accounting terminology.
What I can't believe is that you can't print a supplier cheque! This seems to be an essential need for this type of software. Most manufacturing and industrial businesses I deal with won't accept e-transfers, paypal, credit cards, etc. They will accept bank transfers and cheques.
MY SOLUTION:
I created an excel sheet that will print cheques for me and record the cheque number, date, amount, supplier name, etc. The unfortunate part about this solution is that I have to enter the information in two different places (Wave + Excel) and make certain they match. This is risky and inefficient.
Please add a cheque writing feature to this ALMOST perfect app.
Hi @osimaleki, @Project251 and @AndrewH! Thank you so much for your feedback here! I appreciate you taking the time to offer your solutions to this as well. This helps our team gain insight into the way you would like this type of feature to work!
@EmmaP and everyone, I created our own solution for now. What we have decided to do is to try to move as many payments as possible to online payments but for ones that are cheques, we will have to do the following process.
If anyone is interested in the above Excel sheet, I can share it here. Here is what we did:
Created an alignment sheet to align our cheques with the page
Created a form with reference to bills and ability to type in which bill to print
Coded a Macro to convert numbers to text for the amount text (Ten Thousand Two Hundred...)
Left a blank tab to copy the bills from the export from Wave
When you want to print a cheque, you need to export the bills and copy and paste into the bills tab. Then on the cheque form enter the line number of the bill(s) you want to print and print!
Hope this helps people!
As a software company, I really appreciate the quality of Wave and their pricing model. We are GLADLY switching to Wave from Quickbooks.
Not a fan of comments that imply 'add this or I am leaving..' As an entrepreneur, you need to show flexibility and hustle to find solutions not demand other people to solve all problems. Any ways, my opinion as a fellow small business entrepreneur.
Looking forward to more awesome features from Wave!
Hey @osimaleki! Thanks so much for sharing this with everyone. We know you would rather have this as a feature in Wave but this is a great workaround for now. We really appreciate your support and I'm sure others will benefit from this
@EmmaP As of today is there an option to generate vendor checks other than the above work around? Development of this feature has been discussed for over a year and this is an essential part of doing business.
Hey @CoverageResources , there isn't currently an option to generate vendor checks and in full transparency this isn't something that we're looking at implementing in the near future. Thanks for checking in though!
@AlexL, it's a shame that Wave will not be implementing this feature. Like many I had believed this to be am integral part of any accounting system, and although I can appreciate that Wave is looking more towards the future and electronic type payments, the good old check is far from dead. I guess I will need to either write checks manually and enter bills manually, or find another solution. Since you have check printing for Payroll I would have thought Wave could have leveraged from that and thus cut down on a lot of the development effort.
Comments
I appreciate the FREE cloud-based system, coming from a very small non-profit teacher's union. We don't have a need for the fancy business features, as we basically collect dues and don't have much overhead, nor do we have payroll as all of us are performing our roles on a voluntary basis. I had been looking for a low cost/free accounting software. WAVE won me over with the mobile app ability to submit receipts and connect them to transactions, along with downloading transactions from the bank.
With that said, for everyone who is complaining about not having check printing ability and you reiterating that WAVE's revenue is generated through electronic processing, have you considered adding it on as a premium feature? Many of us don't have a need for printing that many checks, that we can still do these by hand as they occur, but maybe consider making the check printing feature a premium one. I am sure people who have been happy with WAVE except for the ability to print checks for their vendors would pay a small monthly fee to be able to have access to that feature. It certainly would be cheaper to pay a small fee to WAVE monthly than a large monthly subscription to QuickBooks that does have the feature. I know I have other small suggestions to improve the software just from using it over the last week or so (like I'm still figuring out how to edit the G/L account names to add the existing accounts or how to delete them). That's my two cents. Thank you for the free service. As a very small teacher's union, we have a small budget, so opting for a software like QuickBooks was not an option for us.
@PattiO Great suggestion and I love the detail that you've provided us here. I definitely see where you're coming from, paying a fee each time you wanted to print a check using our software, etc, it's just not something that our product focuses are currently aligned with at the moment I'm afraid. Potentially, we will shift gears and look into considering this in the future, but we don't have an ETA as to when that would be. Once again, I appreciate the feedback that you've given us, and should we have an update regarding this feature in Wave, we will certain update everyone in this thread.
Wow, Illuminating thread. I just opened a Wave account yesterday. Reading this thread really has made me doubt going forward with Wave. So many repeated requests over a years timeframe, and no signs of hope at all that from the company that they will take this on to fill customers needs.
Printing checks can't be that hard. Quickbooks even does it, and I consider them a Clown-Car-Carnival when it comes to customer service.
I would even hazard a guess that most everyone on this thread would pay a small amount to have check printing ability. I'm now looking elsewhere for my QB alternate. So sad. Wave seemed very promising. I don't get it.
Please just add this feature. Everyone else has already explained the needs.
Hey! Same story, different day. I unfortunately went so far as to purchase checks with Wave's affiliate company Check Print Solutions under the assumption that if Wave was recommending checks, I would have a way to print them within this platform. Now I have a bunch of checks with no way to print on them. I guess I will have to hunt to find another platform that will work with my already pre-formatted checks or use the antique, archaic Sage platform and buy all new checks.
I guess that's what I get for assuming! Please consider adding this feature. I love everything else about Wave.
See below:
From: mike mike@usckprint.net
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2019 11:35 AM
To:
Subject: Re: Fwd: Order 19096 Logo
ShowMeSleep,
Yes format is for Wave. Your order ships today, will forward tracking. Let me know if you have any issues with the envelopes, we can make adjustments on the reorder.
Thank you,
Mike
Hey @ShowMeSleep. CheckPrint is an affiliate specifically for our Payroll feature (paying your employees), not for the accounting aspect of our software. Just for future reference, this help centre article provides a bit more detail of this: https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/208623236--US-What-kind-of-checks-do-you-need-to-print-your-payroll-
For all those who are on this thread making requests for printing checks for payables other than payroll: we understand this need. We hear this need. To date, this has been a less pressing need than others that come our way. We fully appreciate how it's a deal breaker for some potential users. We are not ignoring it but assigning it relative priority. As always, we will not be looking to build "paid features" in our Accounting system. It will remain 100% free and we'll only charge for financial services.
When doing 2020 roadmapping we will have a serious look at how we could bring this to life.
The component parts include:
1. Check tracking with number, amount, and date -- you'd need a place to see these, know their status, and void them
2. Bookkeeping to set aside the funds and clear them when they're deposited by the recipient
3. Allowing you to print checks on stock paper using vendor details
4. Ensuring our new reconciliation capabilities allow you to deal with checks
5. Ensuring our existing reports allow you the right visibility into outstanding checks
Feedback is welcome if the above doesn't cover your expectations of check tracking, reconciliation, and printing.
I was so excited to find Wave but, I don't understand on how one of the cornerstones of bookkeeping is not included in the program - EVERY company need to write checks.
@Mani
Very happy to hear. A check printing feature can't come fast enough.
Yes please please please expedite check printing!
Comment from Mani on August 27: These features would make my live a lot easier. I hope you will be able to implement this soon! Printing checks is unfortunately still something that many of us have to do.
While I understand that Wave must make money, how about the ability to print Vender checks as a premium service. I for one would not be opposed to paying a couple of dollars a month for this ability.
Hey @Shineman . I appreciate the feedback on this. I know at the moment we'd much rather offer a free check printing option at some point in the future, but it doesn't look like this will be coming in the near future. I'll gladly pass your request on to the team so they know we have a user who has floated this feature idea.
Is Wave doing check printing yet? Is there a place for check number if I add handwritten to transactions?
Hey @Wavefarmer . No printable checks at the moment. You can always add your check number to the notes of the transaction itself.
Although check printing may be a deal-breaker for some, it's not for me. I ditched my Fax machine over ten years ago. I haven't purchased checks in years. All three of the banks I use, have some sort of online bill pay service. This saves me from purchasing check stock and postage. I occasionally have my bank print me a page of checks (4) and handwrite an occasional check. Perhaps I'm the target audience for WAVE. I appreciate all the features that are provided for free. I'm so appreciative, that I have enabled payments via wave so they can sustain the free tier.
Wave has payment fees similar to PayPal, but I feel Wave gives me so much more.
To be fair, I did land on this thread because I was curious if I could print checks. I'm kind of glad I can't as it will save me the cost of purchasing fancy, one-page check stock, envelopes and the postage that goes along with it.
You can please some people some of the time, but you can't please everyone!
Reading the nasty comments makes me chuckle, because I know I'm not alone when I say I enjoy the service provided by WAVE. I know it's not perfect, but It is a great value.
I was planning to bring a new client to Wave, but this is a deal-breaker for her as well. I'm really surprised at this. Glad for the thread, though, and to see it before I began the process of convincing her to go online.
I really want to switch to wave but just can't go without check printing. It is very essential. When will this be added?
Looking for recommendation of check writing tool that integrates well with Wave.
This is an important feature. Since it seems that all you need to do is create a PDF of the data that is printed on the checks, I am not certain why this is not a simple addition. It would use pre-printed Check stock, then print on top of that.
It is indeed very essential. I have a new business and I recommended WaveApps, then we found out about this missing feature and will be going elsewhere.
@AlexL, any ideas for 2020?
Hey @BillC
I've merged your question into our check writing thread for more information if you want to read through here.
Hi,
One feature that would help solve the check printing easily would be to add download of bills to Google Sheets integration. My plan was to add the bills to a Sheet and have another Sheet for printing that data in the check format. Unfortunately currently only Products, Customers and Invoices are available.
That would be my feedback.
I'm new to Wave. I'm impressed by all the great features, the ease of use and the simple accounting terminology.
What I can't believe is that you can't print a supplier cheque! This seems to be an essential need for this type of software. Most manufacturing and industrial businesses I deal with won't accept e-transfers, paypal, credit cards, etc. They will accept bank transfers and cheques.
MY SOLUTION:
I created an excel sheet that will print cheques for me and record the cheque number, date, amount, supplier name, etc. The unfortunate part about this solution is that I have to enter the information in two different places (Wave + Excel) and make certain they match. This is risky and inefficient.
Please add a cheque writing feature to this ALMOST perfect app.
Hi @osimaleki, @Project251 and @AndrewH! Thank you so much for your feedback here! I appreciate you taking the time to offer your solutions to this as well. This helps our team gain insight into the way you would like this type of feature to work!
@EmmaP and everyone, I created our own solution for now. What we have decided to do is to try to move as many payments as possible to online payments but for ones that are cheques, we will have to do the following process.
Recording:
https://recordit.co/5Rbh3cJd9w
If anyone is interested in the above Excel sheet, I can share it here. Here is what we did:
When you want to print a cheque, you need to export the bills and copy and paste into the bills tab. Then on the cheque form enter the line number of the bill(s) you want to print and print!
Hope this helps people!
As a software company, I really appreciate the quality of Wave and their pricing model. We are GLADLY switching to Wave from Quickbooks.
Not a fan of comments that imply 'add this or I am leaving..' As an entrepreneur, you need to show flexibility and hustle to find solutions not demand other people to solve all problems. Any ways, my opinion as a fellow small business entrepreneur.
Looking forward to more awesome features from Wave!
Hey @osimaleki! Thanks so much for sharing this with everyone. We know you would rather have this as a feature in Wave but this is a great workaround for now. We really appreciate your support and I'm sure others will benefit from this
@EmmaP As of today is there an option to generate vendor checks other than the above work around? Development of this feature has been discussed for over a year and this is an essential part of doing business.
Hey @CoverageResources , there isn't currently an option to generate vendor checks and in full transparency this isn't something that we're looking at implementing in the near future. Thanks for checking in though!
@AlexL, it's a shame that Wave will not be implementing this feature. Like many I had believed this to be am integral part of any accounting system, and although I can appreciate that Wave is looking more towards the future and electronic type payments, the good old check is far from dead. I guess I will need to either write checks manually and enter bills manually, or find another solution. Since you have check printing for Payroll I would have thought Wave could have leveraged from that and thus cut down on a lot of the development effort.