Rename Bank Accounts

gtewks

I have a dozen bank accounts listed in my dropdown and they all say "checking, savings, or visa"..... How am I supposed to know which one is which? The dropdown menu when viewing transactions does not even break them down by bank. Is there not some way to rename or "nickname" accounts to something meaningful like "bank x - family savings" and "bank y - personal savings" and "bank z - college savings" instead of just three accounts that all say "savings"?

zuza

Hey @gtewks! Thanks for reaching out. You can edit the names of your bank accounts by going to your "Chart of Accounts" nestled under "Accounting" in the side navigation. By clicking the little pen icon next to each account name, you'll be able to change how its named there. Those name changes should then reflect in your transactions list. If you can't distinguish which account is which to begin with, just add a number to each of your "savings" accounts, filter your transactions by account, determine which account is which that way and then rename the account to reflect what it actually represents.

We are currently working on improving default names for connected bank accounts, and just making the whole experience easier to consume and understand. Please let me know if that doesn't work or if there is anything else we can help with.

gtewks

thanks for the info,,, but wow.. you don't make it easy. I don't think you should be working on making better default names, you should just allow us to assign a name to the account right then, when we add it to Wave.

Also, FYI after changing the names as you described, they still do not display the new names on the dashboard NOR in the list of bank connections... only in transactions. So now the accounts have different names in different places... even more confusing.

This should be a priority fix as it's not so much a feature request as a bug.

JordanD

Hi @gtewks,

The bank accounts that are listed on your dashboard (under Bank Accounts and Credit Cards) are the names of the bank connections themselves, as opposed to the account names of the accounts within the Chart of Accounts. For further clarity, the bank connection feature is hosted by a third party data aggregator, so there is limited amounts of changes that can be made on the Wave end in terms of the way that the bank connection works. The default name on the bank account is created by the financial institution itself, which means that we cannot make an edit to this.

I understand that this can make things confusing and will be sure to pass this information along to the appropriate avenues.

PattyJ

I can find no way whatsoever to remove one bank account from my Chart of Accounts, after 3 separate support chats in which I was told 3 completely different things.

Samd

Hey @PattyJ - you won't be able to fully remove an account from your chart of accounts unless there are no transactions associated with it. This means you'd need to re-categorize anything that remained in the account. Otherwise, you can click to edit the account, and mark it so that it is no longer used going forward (this will preserve the historical data in the account but prevent items from being accidentally added to it). If you were hoping to have this account fully removed from the account list on the transactions page, at the moment those accounts will continue to show, even with a 0 balance. We are looking into being able to have this removed so that we can help clean up account lists.

PattyJ

Thank you, Samd. All very confusing, since nothing I've been told about this has worked the way it's supposed to. Part of the issue is that "the Account" and "the Business" are apparently two separate things and there are lists of ways to delete each of them.

ramatsu

@JordanD said:
Hi @gtewks,

The bank accounts that are listed on your dashboard (under Bank Accounts and Credit Cards) are the names of the bank connections themselves, as opposed to the account names of the accounts within the Chart of Accounts. For further clarity, the bank connection feature is hosted by a third party data aggregator, so there is limited amounts of changes that can be made on the Wave end in terms of the way that the bank connection works. The default name on the bank account is created by the financial institution itself, which means that we cannot make an edit to this.

I understand that this can make things confusing and will be sure to pass this information along to the appropriate avenues.

@JordanD - I agree 100% with the @gtewks and though what you say is true, there's a relatively easy way for Wave to provide the UX that we really need within the limitations of your connection partner. You could just add a user-editable name, and populate it by default with the aggregator provided name.

In the data model, this new user-editable field would be in Wave's datastore and associated to the aggregator data for that account, so it doesn't require you to touch the aggregator's store of record. In the UI, you could display this user-editable field in the locations that you currently display the relatively useless aggregator's name.

Details: You could populate this user-editable field by default with the aggregator's label, and display the non-editable aggregator's label below it in small gray type, or not at all.

I said "easy" and I know all that is a feature that actually is non-trivial. But it is entirely within your dev team's ability to execute without changing anything about your aggregator data connection, agreements, or data. That's stuff I would consider "very hard or impossible," so left off the table when thinking about the OP's request.

So I hope you will consider the feature, and please, if you don't feel it provides enough value for the effort, share that calculation with your users, but don't put it off on external limitations that don't actually prevent you from making the improvement. That way you'll get a fair hearing from your users as to how much value they feel it has, which is good info for your team.

The titles of these accounts are a really prominent aspect of the UX, and making them friendlier for users to deal with is something I believe deserves the effort.

Thanks!