Thanks for your response. I have recently been around the block with extensive deep dives into Wave, Kashoo tsb, Freshbooks, Xero, and QBO as I try to settle on a platform to manage my 2 businesses. They all have plusses and minuses but overall, I would give Wave very high marks for its ease of use, flexibility, and extensibility (Bills built in for instance). A solid community platform is also one of Wave's assets.
Having said that, I don't think Wave should be considering the random miscalculation of totals as a minor "bug".
This is one of the software's core purposes. I haven't encountered summation errors on any other platform, or heard of such in their forums. It's pretty disheartening to hear from Wave that it is what it is, bugs and all.
You mentioned that users can somehow detect the error through our own reconciliation efforts. If this is true, then we may have a path forward here, and if so, could you please explain more about what needs to get reconciled for us to detect the error. My fear is that you meant we should know what the totals should be by using an offboard tool - like an accounting platform, but my hope is that you meant that there is a way for users to detect the error using a process (even manual) within Wave. Could you please explain?
Finally, does Wave have any advice on how avoid causing this bug?
PS. In my case, I have been able to deduce that Wave has posted an invisible -55.20 credit to the account in error on either 2/10/18 or 2/11/18.
Update on the above.
I may have determined a process to detect the occurrence of the bug, but I would like Wave's guidance.
1. Go to reports\account balances
2. Set the starting date far in the past, eg 1/1/2000 to ensure the report captures all transactions
3. For each account (and there might be dozens):
4. Note the ending balance
5. Click on the account link
6. Confirm the Balance Change in the popup tab is the same value as #4
7. Repeat for all accounts.
8. If a discrepancy is found, do something (what?)
9. Repeat this check periodically (monthly?)
Hey @paulpat , I really applaud your grit in trying to work out how this can happen and how you can determine when there's a similar issue if it re-appears in the future.
The issue with any of these problems is that it's essentially a misbalanced account or additional transaction (as you've noticed), which can really appear anywhere.
With that being said, your workflow above should help, but if there's another issue and it's not appearing in the balance of an account itself, then you may not be able to see it in the account balance.
As mentioned previously, I recommend using the reconciliation tool on a regular basis to determine if balances are off, or if you're missing/seeing extra transactions. If you're reconciling regularly anyways, you shouldn't have to do any extra work.
We tend to see these issues with accounts that do more complex accounting, but it is really difficult to say exactly how and when these bugs appear. We do track them however so that we can continue to iterate on improvements so that these issues appear less and less.
I do really want to emphasize here that this isn't common by any means. I do understand that you see a couple of threads with users mentioning that they're running across a similar issue, and it looks like this it's rampant. The truth is that across all our hundreds of thousands of users, this issue comes up maybe a couple of times a week, and again, we know that it's definitely a very real problem for the users that encounter it, but the chances of you facing it again are incredibly low.
Let me know if there's any other info that you're looking for and I'd be happy to help provide more help!
Thanks for this. I guess I am a little cautious since the bug did hit me, while I was in early days of a trial. I was doing a lot of stuff though, as I try to backfill my accounting history into Wave. I was using temporary accounts to process batches of transactions and then moving them into proper accounts later. So, I was doing a lot of stuff.
Anyway, I wanted to ask about the "reconciliation tool" you mentioned that should assist with this. Could you please clarify, because I'm not aware of the reconciliation tool being available outside of normal bank accounts. As such, you can only use it to reconcile against a known balance (like an external bank account), but not against an unknown balance, like an expense account (which is where I had the bug).
That's correct, the Reconciliation tool can only be used to reconcile against an account with a known balance, i.e. a bank account.
To clarify, transactions under an expense account will appear with the expense account as the Category on the Transactions page, with the bank/funding account as the account.
That being said, I believe the what Alex meant by his statement was that, if you are regularly reconciling your bank statements, you should be able to monitor your bank/funding account balances in general. This way, you can see if there are any missing or extra transactions categorised to an expense account, which is affecting the expense account's balance
What I meant was, I was using a "credit card type liability account" to log all the business expenses that were paid for personally. Thus, there is no external reference to reconcile against. I did propose a solution up on April 5 above to try to confirm or exclude the presence of the bug, but it sounds like my process isn't foolproof (according to @AlexL ).
I am going to roll the dice on this an hope that the bug doesn't reappear, or if it does, I'll detect it using my proposed workflow.
I am also having the same issues reported above with the balances in my account. I appreciate the debug recipe provided by @paulpat and stumbled upon something similar myself. I found that the ending balance provided in the summary of account balances does not match the ending balance provided in the detailed account balances.
The ending balance provided on the account summary page is $5978.89 (which is incorrect):
The ending balance provided when I "click through" to the account details with the same timeframe is $2014.13 (which is the correct amount):
I verified that every transaction in the account matches with my statements but it's difficult (impossible?) to reconcile the account because Wave is trying to reconcile against the incorrect summary balance.
Help please!?
@AlexL, you seem to have fixed this for others. Any ideas?
Comments
Thanks @AlexL the issue has been resolved from my side. The reconciliation is now up to date. Thank you for the support.
Hi @AlexL,
Thanks for your response. I have recently been around the block with extensive deep dives into Wave, Kashoo tsb, Freshbooks, Xero, and QBO as I try to settle on a platform to manage my 2 businesses. They all have plusses and minuses but overall, I would give Wave very high marks for its ease of use, flexibility, and extensibility (Bills built in for instance). A solid community platform is also one of Wave's assets.
Having said that, I don't think Wave should be considering the random miscalculation of totals as a minor "bug".
This is one of the software's core purposes. I haven't encountered summation errors on any other platform, or heard of such in their forums. It's pretty disheartening to hear from Wave that it is what it is, bugs and all.
You mentioned that users can somehow detect the error through our own reconciliation efforts. If this is true, then we may have a path forward here, and if so, could you please explain more about what needs to get reconciled for us to detect the error. My fear is that you meant we should know what the totals should be by using an offboard tool - like an accounting platform, but my hope is that you meant that there is a way for users to detect the error using a process (even manual) within Wave. Could you please explain?
Finally, does Wave have any advice on how avoid causing this bug?
PS. In my case, I have been able to deduce that Wave has posted an invisible -55.20 credit to the account in error on either 2/10/18 or 2/11/18.
Update on the above.
I may have determined a process to detect the occurrence of the bug, but I would like Wave's guidance.
1. Go to reports\account balances
2. Set the starting date far in the past, eg 1/1/2000 to ensure the report captures all transactions
3. For each account (and there might be dozens):
4. Note the ending balance
5. Click on the account link
6. Confirm the Balance Change in the popup tab is the same value as #4
7. Repeat for all accounts.
8. If a discrepancy is found, do something (what?)
9. Repeat this check periodically (monthly?)
Hey @paulpat , I really applaud your grit in trying to work out how this can happen and how you can determine when there's a similar issue if it re-appears in the future.
The issue with any of these problems is that it's essentially a misbalanced account or additional transaction (as you've noticed), which can really appear anywhere.
With that being said, your workflow above should help, but if there's another issue and it's not appearing in the balance of an account itself, then you may not be able to see it in the account balance.
As mentioned previously, I recommend using the reconciliation tool on a regular basis to determine if balances are off, or if you're missing/seeing extra transactions. If you're reconciling regularly anyways, you shouldn't have to do any extra work.
We tend to see these issues with accounts that do more complex accounting, but it is really difficult to say exactly how and when these bugs appear. We do track them however so that we can continue to iterate on improvements so that these issues appear less and less.
I do really want to emphasize here that this isn't common by any means. I do understand that you see a couple of threads with users mentioning that they're running across a similar issue, and it looks like this it's rampant. The truth is that across all our hundreds of thousands of users, this issue comes up maybe a couple of times a week, and again, we know that it's definitely a very real problem for the users that encounter it, but the chances of you facing it again are incredibly low.
Let me know if there's any other info that you're looking for and I'd be happy to help provide more help!
Hi @AlexL ,
Thanks for this. I guess I am a little cautious since the bug did hit me, while I was in early days of a trial. I was doing a lot of stuff though, as I try to backfill my accounting history into Wave. I was using temporary accounts to process batches of transactions and then moving them into proper accounts later. So, I was doing a lot of stuff.
Anyway, I wanted to ask about the "reconciliation tool" you mentioned that should assist with this. Could you please clarify, because I'm not aware of the reconciliation tool being available outside of normal bank accounts. As such, you can only use it to reconcile against a known balance (like an external bank account), but not against an unknown balance, like an expense account (which is where I had the bug).
Hi @paulpat!
That's correct, the Reconciliation tool can only be used to reconcile against an account with a known balance, i.e. a bank account.
To clarify, transactions under an expense account will appear with the expense account as the Category on the Transactions page, with the bank/funding account as the account.
That being said, I believe the what Alex meant by his statement was that, if you are regularly reconciling your bank statements, you should be able to monitor your bank/funding account balances in general. This way, you can see if there are any missing or extra transactions categorised to an expense account, which is affecting the expense account's balance
Hi @KiahD
What I meant was, I was using a "credit card type liability account" to log all the business expenses that were paid for personally. Thus, there is no external reference to reconcile against. I did propose a solution up on April 5 above to try to confirm or exclude the presence of the bug, but it sounds like my process isn't foolproof (according to @AlexL ).
I am going to roll the dice on this an hope that the bug doesn't reappear, or if it does, I'll detect it using my proposed workflow.
I am also having the same issues reported above with the balances in my account. I appreciate the debug recipe provided by @paulpat and stumbled upon something similar myself. I found that the ending balance provided in the summary of account balances does not match the ending balance provided in the detailed account balances.
The ending balance provided on the account summary page is $5978.89 (which is incorrect):
The ending balance provided when I "click through" to the account details with the same timeframe is $2014.13 (which is the correct amount):
I verified that every transaction in the account matches with my statements but it's difficult (impossible?) to reconcile the account because Wave is trying to reconcile against the incorrect summary balance.
Help please!?
@AlexL, you seem to have fixed this for others. Any ideas?