@AlexL I'm in agreement with @RJ_Admin . There needs to be a feature to detect duplicates and then allow the user to merge. Doing this all manually is very frustrating. The reason for this is for audit protection. If someone is ever audited, having the receipts is extremely helpful in support to the bank transaction...
Really really really want to be able to search via amount within wave... having to export transactions and search in excel is such a bore. I agree with @Equanimous. Autodetect for duplicates would be amazing
This is my number one reason for not using this software. I am on the search, and will likely choose a paid platform, because I see no point in uploading hundreds of receipts that I then have to merge manually. I am big on keeping receipts as they show what I purchased and can therefore validate the expense. There is a high difference between my personal wine and steak walmart purchases and my office supplies walmart purchases.
Still on the search for a program that will do this
The fact that you can't just attach receipts to a transacation, and instead have to deal with this annoyance, it makes me this much closer to saying to hell with it and going back to Quickbooks Self-Employed. You need to fix this issue. Every basic accounting software should not have this problem. Disappointed.
Can you please, please add the ability to upload a receipt to an existing transaction? Uploading the receipt, creating duplicate transactions, and then either merging them or deleting one is cumbersome. This feature has been asked for for years. Thanks!
@Equanimous@Nomad42@drewj2017@neffel thanks for your feedback on this. This isn't on our current roadmap but we appreciate your insight into this and we hope to build it out in the future.
@RichardM Can you elaborate on what you mean by searching for amount? If the receipt has been uploaded to Accounting, it should create a transaction on our Transactions page which you can search for the amount. Here's a screenshot from my test account showing this:
I just ran into this myself testing out the receipt feature. My bank is already connected and importing transactions automatically. So it doesn't make sense for uploaded receipts to basically become duplicate transactions that then need to be dealt with. I think "adding a receipt to an existing transaction" would solve the problem.
This could be a merge feature. For example: If I upload 10 receipts, and the corresponding transactions already exist because of a bank connection import, allow the receipt image to be merged in, rather than become a duplicate transaction.
These are both really great suggestions, and I agree with you both in that it would make the workflow a bit simpler, compared to having to merge receipts transactions with your bank imported transactions.
While I don't think there are any solid plans to implement such a feature soon/in the near future, I will definitely bring it up to the relevant teams and put it on their radar. The reason why such plans aren't in place right now, is due to the fact that a lot of our resources are focused on some larger scale projects, as well as juggling a lot of unforeseen circumstances related to the current climate. Not trying to make excuses with either of those statements, but rather, just trying to help illuminate why some of these feature requests can take a while to get started/prioritized.
Anyways, thanks as always for adding to the discussion and contributing some great ideas!
Has anyone noticed that you cannot merge more than two transactions any more? Why did you mutilate that feature? I have regularly a receipt for purchased items and a separate slip for the electronic payment. That and the bank import make it three transactions. I was able to merge them before, not any more.
Waveapps becomes more disappointing by the month.
Hey @SchlauFuchs , thanks for bringing this up. Can I ask why you add both the receipt and electronic payment slip? Is there a reason that you need to have both listed in your accounting?
The reason mostly is because the EFTPOS receipt links the expense with a bank transaction. The shop receipt only says 'paid by [method]'. The EFTPOS receipt tells me which card was used at what time. The bank transaction might be off by a couple of days if there was a weekend or bank holidays.
Other cases are Invoices that are paid by card. The Invoice document does not prove that is is paid, sometimes a person wil stamp it as paid or sign it as paid. The EFTPOS machine slip gives the necessary information on paid when by what.
The point I want to make is that it was perfectly working before for me as a feature and it got scrapped for no obvious reason.
Thanks for this additional context. Our team has recognized some flaws with the current state of receipts and we are most definitely hoping to make improvements in the future.
Hi, I have recently been experiencing a problem with uploading receipts. I use my OCR on my phone to take a photo of the receipt, then sync it on my computer into Wave. It all seems to work and the receipt data is saved. Then when I do a screen refresh, the receipt data is gone, only the receipt date remains and if you click on the Actions/View Details, I can see the original receipt photo, but there is no data. Can you please help? A couple of weeks ago it was all working perfectly. Thanks.
It would be nice if we could simply attach a receipt to a transaction that has been pulled in from the bank feed, rather than have to create a separate transaction.
I have a serious question regarding account feeds and receipts. What legitimate reasons would someone have to use the feeds if they upload a receipt of every transaction? Given the current inability to add a receipt to a feed transaction, and the merge process involving multiple additional steps, I am genuinely trying to figure out why using the feed provides any advantage?
I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're experiencing with our App! As a start, we can go through some initial troubleshooting to see if we can help you resolve the problem.
Try closing and re-launching the app.
Log out and back into the app.
Check to make sure that you're connected to a cellular data or WiFi network.
Ensure that you've turned on permissions from the settings menu of your device.
Good question, a lot of our users spend the time doing the merging process to be honest. Otherwise they are capturing receipts and deleting the duplicate transactions when they doing their daily/weekly/monthly reconciliation. Each person has their own way of doing their accounting and I totally understand the idea of making it super intuitive and automated. These are things we are looking to achieve in the near future. Thanks for your question!
Reconciliation takes me 20 minutes, finding these duplicates between receipt-scanning-upload transaction generated by the app takes 19 minutes! This is possible the MOST annoying deficiency of this otherwise amazing software. Recently upgraded features are very encouraging, I trust the smart people working behind the scenes realize the urgency to improve this.
With my software development experience, I'd offer a 2-min quick (and temporary fix" before a more solid solution is coded:
Mark the uploaded translation (generated by receipt upload) simply with a distinct icon(disappears after merging), so we at least know we MUST merge that thing.
Furthermore, a simple feature of the ability to sort by dollar amount may help us to merge faster (though it feels like working like a caveman.)
Hey @abcde , thanks for your message! Thanks for all of this specific feedback, and especially mentioning how this impacts your workflow - that's really crucial information for our product teams when considering feature ideas. This is not a feature improvement we're currently working on right now, but thank you for sharing these details for us to consider in future.
Hi Wave Team. First and foremost, I recognize that this is a free service and am thankful for the features that Wave provides to my business. That said, I, like many other users, have become really frustrated with the receipt tracking feature and the amount of time it takes to merge or delete duplicate transactions. Like others have said, having the option to add a receipt from a "receipt bank" to an existing transaction would make a whole lot of sense, vs trying to merge transactions. I hope this is something that can be added to Wave in the future, however, until then, I'm afraid I have to look for alternate solution.
I will join with my business friends here and say some serious attention needs to be paid to the fact that your workflow for receipts and bank connections is predicated on requiring extra work from the humans. This is the issue: " To do this, locate both in your Transactions page," When i have a hundred transactions and most are duplicates from the bank connected accounts with the dates it hit the bank, and receipts uploaded (like the annoying Amazon ones that have 2-6 payments on each one) with a variety of dates pulled from the bills, there is no good sort or marking infrastructure to be able to easily find the transactions that match. It's a database. Sort functioning should be so simple to press into and add. Sort by amount, sort by name, anything more than just Sort by Date as the only option. Software that I had 20 years ago has the capability of showing "duplicate possibility", and Wave has nothing of the sort even though its very structure of workflow creates duplicates at the very heart.
Please make the bots do it so that us humans can get on with things that bots can't do, like connect with our customers, build our businesses, find creative new ideas to grow and serve. We don't need to spend our time doing things that bots can do.
I wanted to learn how to add a reference number to each expense line, so that this will show in a separate column on the transactions list. The reference number will help me trace each expense to it’s supporting document.
Hi Salma. It is progress to see this article. It did not exist some few months ago yet. To start using the receipt app again I want to clarify: I am assuming that you have a feature that detects duplicates on request. Where is that feature? Otherwise are you saying that I need to go in manually and scan each individual entry for a duplicate? If, yes, then the receipts app is completely useless at this point because it causes dozens and dozens of hours of manual labor. I will have to keep my receipts in a box - the good old way until this feature has been finally developed enough to be usable. I appreciate the effort to improve it though
Hi @Bennartey_1 , I'm afraid that there's no way to add a reference number to each individual expense line. You could do so for the entire expense by adding it to the Notes, but not each line.
Hi @Stefanf , we don't have a feature which detects duplicate receipts. I'd suggest that once you've uploaded one into Wave, you add it to a pile so you know it's been dealt with already.
PLEASE ADD SORT BY AMOUNT or DESCRIPTION to make finding these duplicate transactions between bank and receipts easier!
Also, ALLOW SPLITS to be entered during receipt processing. I've had to create a category under my COA for items that need split so I can go back and enter them.
@GA_Ranch said:
PLEASE ADD SORT BY AMOUNT or DESCRIPTION to make finding these duplicate transactions between bank and receipts easier!
Also, ALLOW SPLITS to be entered during receipt processing. I've had to create a category under my COA for items that need split so I can go back and enter them.
This certainly is a shortcoming on wave accounting part. I should not be made to do extra work. Scanning receipt once should be enough for wave to match it to bank transaction. Very disappointing and unfortunate. Please make this a priority for your future updates.
Please add the ability to create rules for reviewing receipts. For example. Any time a transaction/receipt is uploaded from Sherwin Williams, I would like the ability to have it automatically get assigned a category I preset and be approved automatically
Hey there, I'm not seeing the option to merge 2 transactions. I have a receipt and a bill that are the exact same, I want to merge since these are duplicates. How do I do this?
Comments
@AlexL I'm in agreement with @RJ_Admin . There needs to be a feature to detect duplicates and then allow the user to merge. Doing this all manually is very frustrating. The reason for this is for audit protection. If someone is ever audited, having the receipts is extremely helpful in support to the bank transaction...
Really really really want to be able to search via amount within wave... having to export transactions and search in excel is such a bore. I agree with @Equanimous. Autodetect for duplicates would be amazing
This is my number one reason for not using this software. I am on the search, and will likely choose a paid platform, because I see no point in uploading hundreds of receipts that I then have to merge manually. I am big on keeping receipts as they show what I purchased and can therefore validate the expense. There is a high difference between my personal wine and steak walmart purchases and my office supplies walmart purchases.
Still on the search for a program that will do this
The fact that you can't just attach receipts to a transacation, and instead have to deal with this annoyance, it makes me this much closer to saying to hell with it and going back to Quickbooks Self-Employed. You need to fix this issue. Every basic accounting software should not have this problem. Disappointed.
Can you please, please add the ability to upload a receipt to an existing transaction? Uploading the receipt, creating duplicate transactions, and then either merging them or deleting one is cumbersome. This feature has been asked for for years. Thanks!
@Equanimous @Nomad42 @drewj2017 @neffel thanks for your feedback on this. This isn't on our current roadmap but we appreciate your insight into this and we hope to build it out in the future.
@RichardM Can you elaborate on what you mean by searching for amount? If the receipt has been uploaded to Accounting, it should create a transaction on our Transactions page which you can search for the amount. Here's a screenshot from my test account showing this:
Can you please add the ability to upload a receipt to an existing transaction? This would be much easier and less tedious. Thanks!
I just ran into this myself testing out the receipt feature. My bank is already connected and importing transactions automatically. So it doesn't make sense for uploaded receipts to basically become duplicate transactions that then need to be dealt with. I think "adding a receipt to an existing transaction" would solve the problem.
This could be a merge feature. For example: If I upload 10 receipts, and the corresponding transactions already exist because of a bank connection import, allow the receipt image to be merged in, rather than become a duplicate transaction.
Is there not a way for the Wave software to match receipt information to an existing transaction?
Hey @Linksandcharms @TLCINC_18!
These are both really great suggestions, and I agree with you both in that it would make the workflow a bit simpler, compared to having to merge receipts transactions with your bank imported transactions.
While I don't think there are any solid plans to implement such a feature soon/in the near future, I will definitely bring it up to the relevant teams and put it on their radar. The reason why such plans aren't in place right now, is due to the fact that a lot of our resources are focused on some larger scale projects, as well as juggling a lot of unforeseen circumstances related to the current climate. Not trying to make excuses with either of those statements, but rather, just trying to help illuminate why some of these feature requests can take a while to get started/prioritized.
Anyways, thanks as always for adding to the discussion and contributing some great ideas!
Has anyone noticed that you cannot merge more than two transactions any more? Why did you mutilate that feature? I have regularly a receipt for purchased items and a separate slip for the electronic payment. That and the bank import make it three transactions. I was able to merge them before, not any more.
Waveapps becomes more disappointing by the month.
Hey @SchlauFuchs , thanks for bringing this up. Can I ask why you add both the receipt and electronic payment slip? Is there a reason that you need to have both listed in your accounting?
The reason mostly is because the EFTPOS receipt links the expense with a bank transaction. The shop receipt only says 'paid by [method]'. The EFTPOS receipt tells me which card was used at what time. The bank transaction might be off by a couple of days if there was a weekend or bank holidays.
Other cases are Invoices that are paid by card. The Invoice document does not prove that is is paid, sometimes a person wil stamp it as paid or sign it as paid. The EFTPOS machine slip gives the necessary information on paid when by what.
The point I want to make is that it was perfectly working before for me as a feature and it got scrapped for no obvious reason.
Hey there @SchlauFuchs
Thanks for this additional context. Our team has recognized some flaws with the current state of receipts and we are most definitely hoping to make improvements in the future.
Hi, I have recently been experiencing a problem with uploading receipts. I use my OCR on my phone to take a photo of the receipt, then sync it on my computer into Wave. It all seems to work and the receipt data is saved. Then when I do a screen refresh, the receipt data is gone, only the receipt date remains and if you click on the Actions/View Details, I can see the original receipt photo, but there is no data. Can you please help? A couple of weeks ago it was all working perfectly. Thanks.
It would be nice if we could simply attach a receipt to a transaction that has been pulled in from the bank feed, rather than have to create a separate transaction.
I have a serious question regarding account feeds and receipts. What legitimate reasons would someone have to use the feeds if they upload a receipt of every transaction? Given the current inability to add a receipt to a feed transaction, and the merge process involving multiple additional steps, I am genuinely trying to figure out why using the feed provides any advantage?
Hey there @Ginette
I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're experiencing with our App! As a start, we can go through some initial troubleshooting to see if we can help you resolve the problem.
Hi @mcalilly
This is something our team is looking into! Thanks for the feature idea!
Hey @RedDoor
Good question, a lot of our users spend the time doing the merging process to be honest. Otherwise they are capturing receipts and deleting the duplicate transactions when they doing their daily/weekly/monthly reconciliation. Each person has their own way of doing their accounting and I totally understand the idea of making it super intuitive and automated. These are things we are looking to achieve in the near future. Thanks for your question!
Reconciliation takes me 20 minutes, finding these duplicates between receipt-scanning-upload transaction generated by the app takes 19 minutes! This is possible the MOST annoying deficiency of this otherwise amazing software. Recently upgraded features are very encouraging, I trust the smart people working behind the scenes realize the urgency to improve this.
With my software development experience, I'd offer a 2-min quick (and temporary fix" before a more solid solution is coded:
Mark the uploaded translation (generated by receipt upload) simply with a distinct icon(disappears after merging), so we at least know we MUST merge that thing.
Furthermore, a simple feature of the ability to sort by dollar amount may help us to merge faster (though it feels like working like a caveman.)
Hey @abcde , thanks for your message! Thanks for all of this specific feedback, and especially mentioning how this impacts your workflow - that's really crucial information for our product teams when considering feature ideas. This is not a feature improvement we're currently working on right now, but thank you for sharing these details for us to consider in future.
Hi Wave Team. First and foremost, I recognize that this is a free service and am thankful for the features that Wave provides to my business. That said, I, like many other users, have become really frustrated with the receipt tracking feature and the amount of time it takes to merge or delete duplicate transactions. Like others have said, having the option to add a receipt from a "receipt bank" to an existing transaction would make a whole lot of sense, vs trying to merge transactions. I hope this is something that can be added to Wave in the future, however, until then, I'm afraid I have to look for alternate solution.
I will join with my business friends here and say some serious attention needs to be paid to the fact that your workflow for receipts and bank connections is predicated on requiring extra work from the humans. This is the issue: " To do this, locate both in your Transactions page," When i have a hundred transactions and most are duplicates from the bank connected accounts with the dates it hit the bank, and receipts uploaded (like the annoying Amazon ones that have 2-6 payments on each one) with a variety of dates pulled from the bills, there is no good sort or marking infrastructure to be able to easily find the transactions that match. It's a database. Sort functioning should be so simple to press into and add. Sort by amount, sort by name, anything more than just Sort by Date as the only option. Software that I had 20 years ago has the capability of showing "duplicate possibility", and Wave has nothing of the sort even though its very structure of workflow creates duplicates at the very heart.
Please make the bots do it so that us humans can get on with things that bots can't do, like connect with our customers, build our businesses, find creative new ideas to grow and serve. We don't need to spend our time doing things that bots can do.
Hi Salma. It is progress to see this article. It did not exist some few months ago yet. To start using the receipt app again I want to clarify: I am assuming that you have a feature that detects duplicates on request. Where is that feature? Otherwise are you saying that I need to go in manually and scan each individual entry for a duplicate? If, yes, then the receipts app is completely useless at this point because it causes dozens and dozens of hours of manual labor. I will have to keep my receipts in a box - the good old way until this feature has been finally developed enough to be usable. I appreciate the effort to improve it though
Hi @Bennartey_1 , I'm afraid that there's no way to add a reference number to each individual expense line. You could do so for the entire expense by adding it to the Notes, but not each line.
Hi @Stefanf , we don't have a feature which detects duplicate receipts. I'd suggest that once you've uploaded one into Wave, you add it to a pile so you know it's been dealt with already.
PLEASE ADD SORT BY AMOUNT or DESCRIPTION to make finding these duplicate transactions between bank and receipts easier!
Also, ALLOW SPLITS to be entered during receipt processing. I've had to create a category under my COA for items that need split so I can go back and enter them.
Another vote for this
Thanks!
This certainly is a shortcoming on wave accounting part. I should not be made to do extra work. Scanning receipt once should be enough for wave to match it to bank transaction. Very disappointing and unfortunate. Please make this a priority for your future updates.
Hey there, I'm not seeing the option to merge 2 transactions. I have a receipt and a bill that are the exact same, I want to merge since these are duplicates. How do I do this?