Hello folks. Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to chime in on this thread.
First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge your frustrations and your call to action: we know you need functionality that is critical for your success with Wave to be available for you as soon as possible. We undertook research before implementing these changes and took care to map crucial systems onto the new platform, but it’s true that the new platform is not yet a fit for every use case. We recognize most of you are now in tax season and change is rarely welcomed when you have work to be done and little time to do it, so thanks for bearing with us.
Second, let me dive in and explain a bit about these types of categorizations. We realize that many small business owners and sole proprietors blend their two worlds of finance. What most probably don't realize at first are the bookkeeping implications of behaving this way, so let's have a look at that.
We have every intention to allow personal transactions to be categorized against a business bank / credit card account, and business transactions against a personal bank / credit card account on our new Accounting platform. We're not all the way there yet. We only support the former of the two right now, where we assume that you've connected a business bank account to your business. That's why the only thing you can tell the system is "this was a personal withdrawal or deposit" -- we'll then bookkeep money either being owed by the person to the business or vice versa, respectively. Today, we do this all through Owner's Investment / Drawing (an equity account).
Automating the bookkeeping here can be more nuanced. When we fully roll out this feature on the new platform, it will go beyond our older one and help sole proprietors and corporations correctly differentiate their bookkeeping without needing to learn about the differences between owner equity and shareholder loan pathways for deposits and withdrawals. We'll likely do this by confirming whether you're a sole prop, S Corp, LLC or Corp, if we don't already have that info about your business.
We'll also be asking whether the type of a bank / credit card account you're connecting is personal or business. This will help us better handle and educate on why personal accounts being used for business purposes is delicate and requires careful automated bookkeeping. For example, if you have a business credit card connected to your business, and you make a business purchase, the bookkeeping is different than if you have a personal credit card connected to your business and you make a business purchase. There are yet other permutations that have similar bookkeeping implications if you connect your personal credit card to your personal Wave account and then "move" the transaction to a business (something we're considering bringing back in a lean way). If this feels like a lot to consider, we agree and that's why we're committed to making it all elegantly simple in the next 3 months or so. If not all at once, we'll roll out many of these improvements as quickly as possible. More to come soon.
While this will all help you perform the small business accounting you need more easily, Wave won’t be focused on personal financial management. We are not planning to expand into the world of personal finance management, so you’ll see these features gradually removed as we focus on improvements, optimizations, and new features in the small business toolset.
Maybe I am in the minority here because much of the dialogue seems to be more focused on personal vs business. I don't care about anything personal within Wave, just trying to run accurate P&Ls for business. I run an S Corp as a real estate professional. I also run currently one rental house as a separate business within Wave. I often have a charge on a CC linked to my primary business account that I need to allocate to my rental home.
Trying to get P&Ls done for last year has been a disaster and I'm pretty much doing it all manually thanks to the change. I don't know any great alternatives but man your old software worked fantastic for this setup albeit a little slow and cumbersome to move things between businesses. Wondering if this is going to be doable with the updates you plan on rolling out (too late for this tax season) or if I should just begin to reinvent the wheel as to how I track my rental and not plan on Wave being able to run both "businesses."
I legitimately love the improvements in the UI, but man to make so many changes to functionality mid-calendar year has really left a bad taste in my mouth. I do say that understanding I do not pay for the software but still seemed a bit shortsighted.
There are yet other permutations that have similar bookkeeping implications if you connect your personal credit card to your personal Wave account and then "move" the transaction to a business (something we're considering bringing back in a lean way)
Yes, please do this ASAP! (expand the quotes above)
I'm due for a BAS return to the tax office, as I'm sure are many other users, and half my transactions listed have been "moved" and now the remainder have to be done some other way that I now have to learn, and have probably mucked up my books as a result. I'm not an accountant and that is why I loved using Wave, it was simple. Now I have to learn something even though i have no time to do it, in order to complete this BAS return.
You should have both platforms running at the same time so users can continue to use the old, but switch to the new at their own pace to learn the new processes accordingly. Just have an option on login "Do you want to continue with the old platform or switch to the new platform". My stock trading online platform did that and it was a great way to transition, users could make suggestions and they tuned the new platform to be better than the old.
There are yet other permutations that have similar bookkeeping implications if you connect your personal credit card to your personal Wave account and then "move" the transaction to a business (something we're considering bringing back in a lean way)
YES! Please do this ASAP so that people can finish off their financial year the same way they started. We have all managed our processes according to the previous functionality of moving personal account transactions to the business account.
I would suggest running the old platform and the new platform at the same time. I have an online investing account and they recently launched a new trading platform. On login you get to choose if you want to go to the old platform or the new platform. It's great because when I need to do something quickly, I can do it on the old platform that I know well. I am interested in learning their new platform as it does have better usability, but in my own time. It gives their customers the opportunity to ween off the old platform before it's decommissioned.
Hi guys, thanks for your valuable input on this. Our migrations to the new software have been happening on an on-going basis for some time now. With the future updates, our goal here is to get you back to a spot that will allow you to run your business successfully and easily. Stay tuned, as we will have more info on this coming in the future.
Alex I was with a friend of mine last night and we started talking about accounting software. I know exciting Friday night stuff. He is similar to me running a couple businesses via wave and I asked how he has dealt with the inability to moves transactions linked to one account to the other businesses because I know he functions similarly to me. He told me he had no idea what I was talking about. I was so frustrated I showed up at his house to do a side by side comparison this morning.
He literally still has the drop down arrow on the far right of his transaction page to move transactions between businesses?!?!?!?!?!
So we are exploring further and under his accounting menu on the left side he does not have reconciliation. He's envious of the reconciliation, and I am losing my mind about not being able to move transactions.
Can you please shed some light on what is going on in the differences we are seeing between our accounts. I am looking for some kind of solution preparing taxes and it seems like he has exactly what I need. Please tell me there is some way to accomplish this.
@alexlewiszarkos said:
Hi guys, thanks for your valuable input on this. Our migrations to the new software have been happening on an on-going basis for some time now. With the future updates, our goal here is to get you back to a spot that will allow you to run your business successfully and easily. Stay tuned, as we will have more info on this coming in the future.
Alex do you have an ETA for being able to move transactions between accounts? Obviously we are getting to crunch time for taxes and this is a very big problem as of now.
@alexlewiszarkos said:
Hi guys, thanks for your valuable input on this. Our migrations to the new software have been happening on an on-going basis for some time now. With the future updates, our goal here is to get you back to a spot that will allow you to run your business successfully and easily. Stay tuned, as we will have more info on this coming in the future.
@joethill81 , your friend is still on the old version of Wave, which they'll be migrated off of in the near future; meanwhile, you have the new version which they'll be moving to. We're currently looking at ways to make the business > personal movement more intuitive (as well as refining reconciliation, for what that's worth), so I hope that clears up the confusion!
To me and my buddy personal is not the concern. I have two and he has four businesses running in wave and need to be able to move between my businesses. Personal would be great because I might have a travel credit card which could be for either of my businesses or personal travel if I happen to get away for a vacation.
Such a crazy change to make. Let alone mid-year.
> @Ryan_W said: > @joethill81 , your friend is still on the old version of Wave, which they'll be migrated off of in the near future; meanwhile, you have the new version which they'll be moving to. We're currently looking at ways to make the business > personal movement more intuitive (as well as refining reconciliation, for what that's worth), so I hope that clears up the confusion!
I too was set up as 3 businesses, 1 for my courier work , 2 for my real estate rentals and 3 for my personal transactions. I found it to be extremely handy to move transactions around from the one bank account and one credit card, to different businesses, that being said I do find a lot of the new procedures introduced are great, so hopefully you can bring back movement from one business to another keeping the new improvements! I am pleased with this program and do recommend it!
I second the above concerns regarding an easier or a more automated way to move transactions from personal to business and from business to personal accounts. It is very common for small business owners to do this. It would be helpful if someone from the company either outlined the future plans and an ETA or advised that things will stay the way they currently are now.
Thank you.
@alexlewiszarkos said:
Hi guys, thanks for your valuable input on this. Our migrations to the new software have been happening on an on-going basis for some time now. With the future updates, our goal here is to get you back to a spot that will allow you to run your business successfully and easily. Stay tuned, as we will have more info on this coming in the future.
Alex, can you let us know whether this is going to be done in time for the tax deadline? I run a sole proprietorship out of my personal checking account and I've been using Wave for years to keep my business expenses straight. I need to know if I need to find another app before tax day — or try to do this by hand!
This is a complete disaster for me. I have left it very late for my corporation tax. I wasn't too worried as I know Wave pretty well, but I was rather startle to discover many transactions seemed to have changed since I put them in last year. But that's OK I can cope with that,
But I have put a large number (hundreds) of transactions provisionally into my company account, with the aim of going through and resorting many of them into my personal or sole trader account.This used to be a simple 2 click process. But now impossible to do sensibly.
To do this without notice is just so unfair. I just don't know what I'm going to do.
Certainly move to another accounting system as soon as possible.
Very angry customer
First and foremost, I want to extend an apology for putting all of you in this situation. I totally appreciate that this has been difficult and poorly timed for you. We’ve discussed the migration in bits and pieces across other posts, but I wanted to take a moment to offer some additional clarity. Our migration - the reason why your accounting platform has changed - wasn’t timed this way on purpose. It has been in progress for over a year. Some customers have taken longer to migrate due to workflows that were possible in our older platform not translating over to the workflows in the updated version of Wave. We recognize that allowing certain workflows in our older platform - ones which were not necessarily the best way to bookkeep - isn’t ideal, especially if we don’t give you a transparent heads up about what we’re changing and why. We stand behind our product and are confident that these changes are an improvement, although we were not fully transparent about these changes and for that, we apologize.
I want to reiterate something we’ve already discussed because this thread is really sprawling: the book-keeping results for this particular workflow haven't changed. The key difference that you’re noticing is the wording (which our Product Team calls a language layer) included when you move a transaction to Personal (or your business) that states ‘Move to Personal’, for example.
In the bookkeeping in our classic software, this transaction is still attributed to Owner Investment/Drawing, which you would see when you generated the Account Transactions report and filtered to Owners Investment/Drawing. However, you would notice these transactions still displayed in both your Personal and in your Business profiles, even though the transactions also appear in the opposing account. This essentially creates double bookkeeping, hidden behind a language layer that isn’t representative of what’s actually happening with the accounting.
On the other hand, in the latest version of the software, we eliminated the language layer by allowing our customers to categorize these transactions directly into Owner Investment/Drawing (since it’s still tracked the same way).
We’re all here to support you. I know our teams are excited to apply the learning opportunities we’ve been afforded by your feedback. Thank you again for joining the conversation. I’ll be closing this thread for comments (at least for now) to ensure this post remains visible.
Comments
Hello folks. Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to chime in on this thread.
First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge your frustrations and your call to action: we know you need functionality that is critical for your success with Wave to be available for you as soon as possible. We undertook research before implementing these changes and took care to map crucial systems onto the new platform, but it’s true that the new platform is not yet a fit for every use case. We recognize most of you are now in tax season and change is rarely welcomed when you have work to be done and little time to do it, so thanks for bearing with us.
Second, let me dive in and explain a bit about these types of categorizations. We realize that many small business owners and sole proprietors blend their two worlds of finance. What most probably don't realize at first are the bookkeeping implications of behaving this way, so let's have a look at that.
We have every intention to allow personal transactions to be categorized against a business bank / credit card account, and business transactions against a personal bank / credit card account on our new Accounting platform. We're not all the way there yet. We only support the former of the two right now, where we assume that you've connected a business bank account to your business. That's why the only thing you can tell the system is "this was a personal withdrawal or deposit" -- we'll then bookkeep money either being owed by the person to the business or vice versa, respectively. Today, we do this all through Owner's Investment / Drawing (an equity account).
Automating the bookkeeping here can be more nuanced. When we fully roll out this feature on the new platform, it will go beyond our older one and help sole proprietors and corporations correctly differentiate their bookkeeping without needing to learn about the differences between owner equity and shareholder loan pathways for deposits and withdrawals. We'll likely do this by confirming whether you're a sole prop, S Corp, LLC or Corp, if we don't already have that info about your business.
We'll also be asking whether the type of a bank / credit card account you're connecting is personal or business. This will help us better handle and educate on why personal accounts being used for business purposes is delicate and requires careful automated bookkeeping. For example, if you have a business credit card connected to your business, and you make a business purchase, the bookkeeping is different than if you have a personal credit card connected to your business and you make a business purchase. There are yet other permutations that have similar bookkeeping implications if you connect your personal credit card to your personal Wave account and then "move" the transaction to a business (something we're considering bringing back in a lean way). If this feels like a lot to consider, we agree and that's why we're committed to making it all elegantly simple in the next 3 months or so. If not all at once, we'll roll out many of these improvements as quickly as possible. More to come soon.
While this will all help you perform the small business accounting you need more easily, Wave won’t be focused on personal financial management. We are not planning to expand into the world of personal finance management, so you’ll see these features gradually removed as we focus on improvements, optimizations, and new features in the small business toolset.
Maybe I am in the minority here because much of the dialogue seems to be more focused on personal vs business. I don't care about anything personal within Wave, just trying to run accurate P&Ls for business. I run an S Corp as a real estate professional. I also run currently one rental house as a separate business within Wave. I often have a charge on a CC linked to my primary business account that I need to allocate to my rental home.
Trying to get P&Ls done for last year has been a disaster and I'm pretty much doing it all manually thanks to the change. I don't know any great alternatives but man your old software worked fantastic for this setup albeit a little slow and cumbersome to move things between businesses. Wondering if this is going to be doable with the updates you plan on rolling out (too late for this tax season) or if I should just begin to reinvent the wheel as to how I track my rental and not plan on Wave being able to run both "businesses."
I legitimately love the improvements in the UI, but man to make so many changes to functionality mid-calendar year has really left a bad taste in my mouth. I do say that understanding I do not pay for the software but still seemed a bit shortsighted.
Yes, please do this ASAP! (expand the quotes above)
I'm due for a BAS return to the tax office, as I'm sure are many other users, and half my transactions listed have been "moved" and now the remainder have to be done some other way that I now have to learn, and have probably mucked up my books as a result. I'm not an accountant and that is why I loved using Wave, it was simple. Now I have to learn something even though i have no time to do it, in order to complete this BAS return.
You should have both platforms running at the same time so users can continue to use the old, but switch to the new at their own pace to learn the new processes accordingly. Just have an option on login "Do you want to continue with the old platform or switch to the new platform". My stock trading online platform did that and it was a great way to transition, users could make suggestions and they tuned the new platform to be better than the old.
YES! Please do this ASAP so that people can finish off their financial year the same way they started. We have all managed our processes according to the previous functionality of moving personal account transactions to the business account.
I would suggest running the old platform and the new platform at the same time. I have an online investing account and they recently launched a new trading platform. On login you get to choose if you want to go to the old platform or the new platform. It's great because when I need to do something quickly, I can do it on the old platform that I know well. I am interested in learning their new platform as it does have better usability, but in my own time. It gives their customers the opportunity to ween off the old platform before it's decommissioned.
Hi guys, thanks for your valuable input on this. Our migrations to the new software have been happening on an on-going basis for some time now. With the future updates, our goal here is to get you back to a spot that will allow you to run your business successfully and easily. Stay tuned, as we will have more info on this coming in the future.
Alex I was with a friend of mine last night and we started talking about accounting software. I know exciting Friday night stuff. He is similar to me running a couple businesses via wave and I asked how he has dealt with the inability to moves transactions linked to one account to the other businesses because I know he functions similarly to me. He told me he had no idea what I was talking about. I was so frustrated I showed up at his house to do a side by side comparison this morning.
He literally still has the drop down arrow on the far right of his transaction page to move transactions between businesses?!?!?!?!?!
So we are exploring further and under his accounting menu on the left side he does not have reconciliation. He's envious of the reconciliation, and I am losing my mind about not being able to move transactions.
Can you please shed some light on what is going on in the differences we are seeing between our accounts. I am looking for some kind of solution preparing taxes and it seems like he has exactly what I need. Please tell me there is some way to accomplish this.
Alex do you have an ETA for being able to move transactions between accounts? Obviously we are getting to crunch time for taxes and this is a very big problem as of now.
@joethill81 , your friend is still on the old version of Wave, which they'll be migrated off of in the near future; meanwhile, you have the new version which they'll be moving to. We're currently looking at ways to make the business > personal movement more intuitive (as well as refining reconciliation, for what that's worth), so I hope that clears up the confusion!
Such a crazy change to make. Let alone mid-year.
> @Ryan_W said:
> @joethill81 , your friend is still on the old version of Wave, which they'll be migrated off of in the near future; meanwhile, you have the new version which they'll be moving to. We're currently looking at ways to make the business > personal movement more intuitive (as well as refining reconciliation, for what that's worth), so I hope that clears up the confusion!
I too was set up as 3 businesses, 1 for my courier work , 2 for my real estate rentals and 3 for my personal transactions. I found it to be extremely handy to move transactions around from the one bank account and one credit card, to different businesses, that being said I do find a lot of the new procedures introduced are great, so hopefully you can bring back movement from one business to another keeping the new improvements! I am pleased with this program and do recommend it!
I second the above concerns regarding an easier or a more automated way to move transactions from personal to business and from business to personal accounts. It is very common for small business owners to do this. It would be helpful if someone from the company either outlined the future plans and an ETA or advised that things will stay the way they currently are now.
Thank you.
Why has wave made this such a complicated process? This is going to force us to go to Quickbooks.
This is a horrible, complicated and time consuming process. you also loose the trace/flow of the transactions
Alex, can you let us know whether this is going to be done in time for the tax deadline? I run a sole proprietorship out of my personal checking account and I've been using Wave for years to keep my business expenses straight. I need to know if I need to find another app before tax day — or try to do this by hand!
A bit complicated method. There has to be a better way to do this.
This is a complete disaster for me. I have left it very late for my corporation tax. I wasn't too worried as I know Wave pretty well, but I was rather startle to discover many transactions seemed to have changed since I put them in last year. But that's OK I can cope with that,
But I have put a large number (hundreds) of transactions provisionally into my company account, with the aim of going through and resorting many of them into my personal or sole trader account.This used to be a simple 2 click process. But now impossible to do sensibly.
To do this without notice is just so unfair. I just don't know what I'm going to do.
Certainly move to another accounting system as soon as possible.
Very angry customer
Hi everyone,
First and foremost, I want to extend an apology for putting all of you in this situation. I totally appreciate that this has been difficult and poorly timed for you. We’ve discussed the migration in bits and pieces across other posts, but I wanted to take a moment to offer some additional clarity. Our migration - the reason why your accounting platform has changed - wasn’t timed this way on purpose. It has been in progress for over a year. Some customers have taken longer to migrate due to workflows that were possible in our older platform not translating over to the workflows in the updated version of Wave. We recognize that allowing certain workflows in our older platform - ones which were not necessarily the best way to bookkeep - isn’t ideal, especially if we don’t give you a transparent heads up about what we’re changing and why. We stand behind our product and are confident that these changes are an improvement, although we were not fully transparent about these changes and for that, we apologize.
I want to reiterate something we’ve already discussed because this thread is really sprawling: the book-keeping results for this particular workflow haven't changed. The key difference that you’re noticing is the wording (which our Product Team calls a language layer) included when you move a transaction to Personal (or your business) that states ‘Move to Personal’, for example.
In the bookkeeping in our classic software, this transaction is still attributed to Owner Investment/Drawing, which you would see when you generated the Account Transactions report and filtered to Owners Investment/Drawing. However, you would notice these transactions still displayed in both your Personal and in your Business profiles, even though the transactions also appear in the opposing account. This essentially creates double bookkeeping, hidden behind a language layer that isn’t representative of what’s actually happening with the accounting.
On the other hand, in the latest version of the software, we eliminated the language layer by allowing our customers to categorize these transactions directly into Owner Investment/Drawing (since it’s still tracked the same way).
We’re all here to support you. I know our teams are excited to apply the learning opportunities we’ve been afforded by your feedback. Thank you again for joining the conversation. I’ll be closing this thread for comments (at least for now) to ensure this post remains visible.