Luckily we can use this as advice when moving forward with future. This is currently the way this type of transaction operates, and I understand you're frustrated by this change so I'm happy to bring it up to our team. I agree that some automation here would be nice, but in the present time, this is how you would log these transactions. We do appreciate your feedback and I personally look forward to seeing what our developers will bring to the table in the future with 'moving business to personal transactions'.
I just want to clarify here as the instructions above are a little bit confusing based on what I can see in my account. From what is written, it seems you are first supposed to select "Personal Expense or Withdrawal," and then "Owner Investment/Drawings" (a two step process) in order to categorize a personal expense correctly.
From what i can see, though, there doesn't seem to be anything under the "Personal Expenses or Withdrawal" category other than a note that all personal transactions must be assigned to an equity account. The desired "Owner Investment/Drawings" account is instead under "Business Owner Contribution and Drawing."
It seems just as easy to select Owner Investment from the beginning, unless there's a reason for the preliminary step?
@Carrie_W Yes, you're correct! It's a two-step process in that you need to identify whether or not the transaction is an investment or a drawing (a Deposit from Personal for an income or a Personal Expense). Once the nature of the transaction has been designated you can then categorize it as Owner Investment/Drawings.
In order to do this, you can create your Owner Investment/Drawings account under Accounting > Chart of Accounts > Equity > Business Owner Contribution and Drawing. Once you've selected for 'Personal Expense or Withdrawal (in step 1), then select 'More Options' and find your Owner Investment/Drawings account under your Equity accounts!
@ckeen_1244 thank you. I get your meaning now. I was confused I think because that step is generally taken care of for me automatically as long as the transaction is correctly categorized as a deposit or withdrawal (screenshot attached for reference). I can see the personal expense and withdrawal categories you reference though if I click back in the categories menu for Owner Investments/Drawings.
I am adding transactions into the app for our new business, which to date has been mainly funded by us as directors.
There are two of us and I need to post truncations according to who spent what.
I have setup two categories one for director a and one for b.
I select the account owner investment - withdrawal - office supplies (whatever the expense occurred relates). I seem unable to select direct b for his owner investment contribution.
I want to record an expense that I accidentally paid with personal funds. First, I record the expense and select Account>Owner Investment/Drawings and then the appropriate expense category. Then I want to record the corresponding deposit transaction but when I go to add the transaction and want to record it as an Owner Investment it won't let me select this as a category.
For example, for a deposit transaction I select Account>Owner Investment/Drawings and then I go to category which I also want to categorize as an Owner Investment/Drawings but when I select Category>Deposit from Personal the option of "Owner Investment/Drawings" appears but when I click on it nothing happens, it won't select it. Is this a software error or something I'm not understanding properly?
Sorry for the delay in this response as we are currently dealing with a backlog in our community posts.
Just curious how you set these up? Since owner investment/drawing is an equity movement you can just head to your chart of accounts and set up two equity accounts. Don't forget though an equity account is not an expense incurred on behalf of your business, but money out or in to your account for reasons that are not profit or business expenses.
If this is in fact equity movement, then set up two equity accounts in your chart of accounts and categorize each transaction as such!
You can rename each transactions or add any notes to each of the transactions in order to add more details if this is necessary.
The current changes are a nightmare. I understand that the previous ability to move transactions from one account to another may not have been "the correct way to show movement of equity" - but it was clearly working for an awful lot of us. Unlike many here, my problem isn't moving transactions between business and personal accounts. I have three different business accounts that all use the same bank account. The vast majority of transactions every month are to one of the business accounts, so that's the one that I have the bank account import into. The 3-4 transactions every week that were for the other businesses I simply moved into those accounts - no problem. Now I can't move those transactions into those accounts! In one of the help forums there was a suggestion to import the bank transactions into all three accounts and "simply" delete the transactions that don't apply to the other accounts. REALLY? Instead of simply moving 3-4 transactions a week into the proper accounts, you guys think it's a better solution for me to delete hundreds of transactions from two accounts? In what universe does that make sense? Can you please return the functionality that many of us clearly use? Even if you don't think it's the "right" way to do things?
Ok, so now if I want to show a transaction as being personal I need to categorize it as a "personal expense or withdrawal" so that it documents the transaction as equity/drawings. But what if I want to categorize it as an expense from a different "business"? We used to be able to move the transaction but now it appears that this function is not available in any format. I don't think that I'd be the only one who used the "move transaction" function to move a transaction to a different "business". Why not add it as an option in the "category" section?...... "move to other business" then list the other businesses. Same as for moving personal transactions but for moving business transactions...
Hi. I am having an issue here. I have an Auto business that provides a service (Headlight Restoration). I did a restoration on one of my cars so naturally, that would be considered as drawings. The account I put it to was Owner’s Investment/Drawings as a withdrawal. When I go to category and try to select “Personal Expense or Withdrawal” there is nothing there. Am I missing something here? Was I supposed to create an invoice to myself and then bill it to Drawings? HELP!!!!
DEFINITELY NOT EASIER!!! I'm in the same boat as @JCD - sole trader, selling services, not usually physical products. I have one bank account that everything comes in to and just one tax return to complete each year, so the Personal account solution has been perfect for me because only the stuff that remained in the 'business' bit was relevant for tax. I understand that doing things 'properly' is a good thing, but I also feel that the needs of sole traders have rather been chucked out the window with this change (along with the needs of Euro users who now can no longer auto-import bank statements, but that's another grievance for another day). I understand the instructions that have been posted - but if the 'category' is now 'Owner Drawings', how do I then categorise a personal transaction as, say, non-business travel or groceries? Do I need to recreate every category from my personal account now in my business account under Equity to do this? The new system does seem to have recategorised the Personal account transactions as Equity, and they're still categorised according to what they are in Personal - but new Equity categorisations don't also move them into Personal for categorisation. So Personal now seems to be just an archive of old data, whose only use is to retain those categorisations which I can't actually apply to new transactions to get an overview of how my personal spending is tracking over time. And without categorisation of Personal transactions I can't keep track of my personal spending at all (which used to be super-easy, BTW, with the Budget feature you deleted. Grievances mounting up here...)
@wendigratz Thank you very much for your input and voicing your frustration. We need to stand behind this, in that it's the correct way to be accounting for this, as frustrating as I understand the change is. In the future, we're hoping to move towards a more nuanced system that will allow us to refine this feature, but this isn't on our current roadmap.
@jkidman_101 'Personal expense/withdrawal' actually still functions the same way when you're referring to the any other business, instead of a personal tab. I totally hear you as far as the 'Move to Other Business' option is concerned, and that's a cool feature idea!
@Patrice Can I get more context around the actual movement of funds here? If no funds were moved, then you can likely actually leave this as-is. I don't believe that you should need to create a transaction here. Please let me know if you believe otherwise!
@minim As an accounting software, our first priority is that the accounting parts of our software are as close to correct as possible. This then makes ease of use/usability a second priority.
This is a prime example of accounting principals taking a priority, and now we're looking into ease of use as a secondary element. To be transparent, we completely acknowledge the fact that there is work to be done, and we're up to that challenge, but it will take us some time to come up with the most feasible way to do this, especially considering the programming elements that drive this.
I understand that you want to further categorize these transactions so that you can track your personal finances. The only things you need to categorize are the things that apply to your business.
@ConnorM there is no movement of funds however I performed a service using the products that I would use to conduct my business. What I eventually did, I created an invoice and billed myself and then paid for the invoice from drawings. So there was a debit to my owner investment/drawings account
Hello, thank you for the help. I'm new to Wave and trying to get my accounting in order for the upcoming tax season. I made the mistake of syncing all my bank accounts at the start so my transactions are quite messy, especially since I use the profit first model. With all of the bi-monthly distributions it's tricky to track. I tried deleting my bank connection and starting over only syncing my operating expense account. This did not work, all of the accounts are still syncing. Any suggestions.
On another note, is there any way to sync with my Square account to sync revenue and CC fees as well? If not, I will just have to have my revenue report from Square and expense reports from Wave. Unless someone has a better idea.
Hey @Patrice I'm glad you've found a method that works for you! Thanks for the update.
Hi @MichaelaJC! This is a bit of a tricky one, for sure. All applicable accounts will pull into your Wave account, but you should be able to toggle off any accounts that you do not want to import. Do you not have the ability to do this? Also, we have the ability to integrate Square transactions with Wave transaction accounting, which would be my recommendation as a place to start! Give it a shot to see if that's going to be right for you. You can do so from the 'Integrations' link on the bottom left side of your Wave Business - near 'Settings'!
The same method could be done on your personal account but reversed to be reflected in your business. The key is adding that extra equity transaction in your business account (Equity In) and the transaction from your personal account (Equity out).
Let us know if you need further assistance with this.
Our current update is more in line with international standard practice for bookkeeping. Simply moving a transaction from business to personal was not an ideal practice for bookkeeping. Our current method allows you to account for an investment into the account or drawing from your business account. Moving the transaction is simply doing just that, moving a transaction, not necessarily accounting for a loss or gain of that transaction outside of your businesses expenses/income.
I'll reiterate below how to show this transaction.
To show a payment from business A to business B, you would need to categorize it as an Owners Investment/Drawing depending on the account you're in.
Business A account pays for business B expense:
The transaction should look like this
Make sure your business payment account is selected under account then categorize as Personal > Owner investment/drawing.
On the other side of the transaction, business B, you'll want to format it as such:
The income came from an owners investment and was selected to an expense account. In my example I used office supplies.
We've learned that this is the proper method for showing this transaction, as opposed to the classic version which simply moved two transactions between two businesses, but never actually reconciled for both accounts.
I was on chat with a support rep and found out that the trouble with this is the entries do not show up in my business automatically when I do this. I will have to enter them all manually; double the work, and double the time!
My first reaction to this change was to find it extremely confusing, and also to view this as extremely time-inefficient, creating extra work and confusion. To describe the change as a simplification doesn't seem accurate. My update to this post - my initial reaction is that although I do think it creates more work, I will work with it and am finding ways to work with it that I think will work for me. (See a later comment of mine for what I'm doing so far.)
For my first payment on my business credit card, I had to pay from my personal checking account and not my business checking account. The transaction came in as a payment. How exactly would I track this to show it as an investment on my end?
Hey @frustrated111 . Can you give me your workflow as to what exctly you're trying to accomplish and which way these transactions should be moving? With that, I can point you in the right direction of what steps you should be taking next.
Thank you for your offer of assistance AlexL. I want to move certain transactions from a chequing account used for home/personal expenses (and imported under "personal" in Wave) TO my business in Wave. I have certain business-use-of-home expenses that I move to the business in Wave for accounting/income tax purposes but based on reading Wave's information and this thread, there is no way to do this any more. Based on reading this thread, I don't see how I can record in the business what account the payment was made from, nor is there a way to import these transactions (via moving them over). Based on what I've read, the only option is to MANUALLY enter any and all transactions from a personal account in Wave that apply to the business account. Am I missing something???? This seems incredibly tedious and creates a huge amount of work.
So you're correct in that you will need to manually upload the transaction on both ends. I understand the frustration here, however, this is currently the method we have in place for this type of movement of equity. Our developers are aware of this and we appreciate all feedback as we continue to move forward with updating our software to improve these types of functions.
Thank you for your reply, Barsin. I'm sure we will all adjust and find a way forward. For me, for now, I will probably manually type the transactions in on the business side. (That's what I’ve started to adopt.) And on the home/personal side, I have created an expense category called "Business Related Expense" so that I can assign all of the business-related expenses to that category to be able to find them easily going forward. I am also adopting a system of on the personal side adding a note to myself to verify I have entered this transaction manually on the business side - and I make a note in both places of where the receipt is located (if electronic where it is stored, and if paper where it is stored, or both).
I understand Wave is continuing to try to make improvements and that these changes, ultimately, have to do with trying to make Wave better. Thank you for making that effort.
I've merged your post with this thread on how to account for a business transaction made from a personal account. Because this is a movement of equity between two separate accounts, you'll want to follow the steps in this article:
Hi all,
I'm very new to this, having only started my business a couple of months ago, but here's my take...
The way that makes most sense to me is to upload my personal receipts and record them through a 'Director Expenses' account I created under 'Due to You and Other Business Owners'. That way it is happily recorded as a current liability and when I subsequently make a payment from the business account to reimburse myself, I can make a withdrawal from the bank account which will debit the 'Director Expenses' liability account to balance.
This seems to reflect the real world activities quite well and is easy to manage.
Feel free to point out any gaping flaws in my understanding at this point!
Comments
I think you raise good points here @fas
Luckily we can use this as advice when moving forward with future. This is currently the way this type of transaction operates, and I understand you're frustrated by this change so I'm happy to bring it up to our team. I agree that some automation here would be nice, but in the present time, this is how you would log these transactions. We do appreciate your feedback and I personally look forward to seeing what our developers will bring to the table in the future with 'moving business to personal transactions'.
I just want to clarify here as the instructions above are a little bit confusing based on what I can see in my account. From what is written, it seems you are first supposed to select "Personal Expense or Withdrawal," and then "Owner Investment/Drawings" (a two step process) in order to categorize a personal expense correctly.
From what i can see, though, there doesn't seem to be anything under the "Personal Expenses or Withdrawal" category other than a note that all personal transactions must be assigned to an equity account. The desired "Owner Investment/Drawings" account is instead under "Business Owner Contribution and Drawing."
It seems just as easy to select Owner Investment from the beginning, unless there's a reason for the preliminary step?
@Carrie_W Yes, you're correct! It's a two-step process in that you need to identify whether or not the transaction is an investment or a drawing (a Deposit from Personal for an income or a Personal Expense). Once the nature of the transaction has been designated you can then categorize it as Owner Investment/Drawings.
In order to do this, you can create your Owner Investment/Drawings account under Accounting > Chart of Accounts > Equity > Business Owner Contribution and Drawing. Once you've selected for 'Personal Expense or Withdrawal (in step 1), then select 'More Options' and find your Owner Investment/Drawings account under your Equity accounts!
@ckeen_1244 thank you. I get your meaning now. I was confused I think because that step is generally taken care of for me automatically as long as the transaction is correctly categorized as a deposit or withdrawal (screenshot attached for reference). I can see the personal expense and withdrawal categories you reference though if I click back in the categories menu for Owner Investments/Drawings.
URGENT
Hi
I am adding transactions into the app for our new business, which to date has been mainly funded by us as directors.
There are two of us and I need to post truncations according to who spent what.
I have setup two categories one for director a and one for b.
I select the account owner investment - withdrawal - office supplies (whatever the expense occurred relates). I seem unable to select direct b for his owner investment contribution.
Please help
I want to record an expense that I accidentally paid with personal funds. First, I record the expense and select Account>Owner Investment/Drawings and then the appropriate expense category. Then I want to record the corresponding deposit transaction but when I go to add the transaction and want to record it as an Owner Investment it won't let me select this as a category.
For example, for a deposit transaction I select Account>Owner Investment/Drawings and then I go to category which I also want to categorize as an Owner Investment/Drawings but when I select Category>Deposit from Personal the option of "Owner Investment/Drawings" appears but when I click on it nothing happens, it won't select it. Is this a software error or something I'm not understanding properly?
Hey @BrilDJ
Sorry for the delay in this response as we are currently dealing with a backlog in our community posts.
Just curious how you set these up? Since owner investment/drawing is an equity movement you can just head to your chart of accounts and set up two equity accounts. Don't forget though an equity account is not an expense incurred on behalf of your business, but money out or in to your account for reasons that are not profit or business expenses.
If this is in fact equity movement, then set up two equity accounts in your chart of accounts and categorize each transaction as such!
You can rename each transactions or add any notes to each of the transactions in order to add more details if this is necessary.
Not helpful at all! The steps are convoluted and after multiple attempts, it does not work
The current changes are a nightmare. I understand that the previous ability to move transactions from one account to another may not have been "the correct way to show movement of equity" - but it was clearly working for an awful lot of us. Unlike many here, my problem isn't moving transactions between business and personal accounts. I have three different business accounts that all use the same bank account. The vast majority of transactions every month are to one of the business accounts, so that's the one that I have the bank account import into. The 3-4 transactions every week that were for the other businesses I simply moved into those accounts - no problem. Now I can't move those transactions into those accounts! In one of the help forums there was a suggestion to import the bank transactions into all three accounts and "simply" delete the transactions that don't apply to the other accounts. REALLY? Instead of simply moving 3-4 transactions a week into the proper accounts, you guys think it's a better solution for me to delete hundreds of transactions from two accounts? In what universe does that make sense? Can you please return the functionality that many of us clearly use? Even if you don't think it's the "right" way to do things?
Ok, so now if I want to show a transaction as being personal I need to categorize it as a "personal expense or withdrawal" so that it documents the transaction as equity/drawings. But what if I want to categorize it as an expense from a different "business"? We used to be able to move the transaction but now it appears that this function is not available in any format. I don't think that I'd be the only one who used the "move transaction" function to move a transaction to a different "business". Why not add it as an option in the "category" section?...... "move to other business" then list the other businesses. Same as for moving personal transactions but for moving business transactions...
Hi. I am having an issue here. I have an Auto business that provides a service (Headlight Restoration). I did a restoration on one of my cars so naturally, that would be considered as drawings. The account I put it to was Owner’s Investment/Drawings as a withdrawal. When I go to category and try to select “Personal Expense or Withdrawal” there is nothing there. Am I missing something here? Was I supposed to create an invoice to myself and then bill it to Drawings? HELP!!!!
DEFINITELY NOT EASIER!!! I'm in the same boat as @JCD - sole trader, selling services, not usually physical products. I have one bank account that everything comes in to and just one tax return to complete each year, so the Personal account solution has been perfect for me because only the stuff that remained in the 'business' bit was relevant for tax. I understand that doing things 'properly' is a good thing, but I also feel that the needs of sole traders have rather been chucked out the window with this change (along with the needs of Euro users who now can no longer auto-import bank statements, but that's another grievance for another day). I understand the instructions that have been posted - but if the 'category' is now 'Owner Drawings', how do I then categorise a personal transaction as, say, non-business travel or groceries? Do I need to recreate every category from my personal account now in my business account under Equity to do this? The new system does seem to have recategorised the Personal account transactions as Equity, and they're still categorised according to what they are in Personal - but new Equity categorisations don't also move them into Personal for categorisation. So Personal now seems to be just an archive of old data, whose only use is to retain those categorisations which I can't actually apply to new transactions to get an overview of how my personal spending is tracking over time. And without categorisation of Personal transactions I can't keep track of my personal spending at all (which used to be super-easy, BTW, with the Budget feature you deleted. Grievances mounting up here...)
@wendigratz Thank you very much for your input and voicing your frustration. We need to stand behind this, in that it's the correct way to be accounting for this, as frustrating as I understand the change is. In the future, we're hoping to move towards a more nuanced system that will allow us to refine this feature, but this isn't on our current roadmap.
@jkidman_101 'Personal expense/withdrawal' actually still functions the same way when you're referring to the any other business, instead of a personal tab. I totally hear you as far as the 'Move to Other Business' option is concerned, and that's a cool feature idea!
@Patrice Can I get more context around the actual movement of funds here? If no funds were moved, then you can likely actually leave this as-is. I don't believe that you should need to create a transaction here. Please let me know if you believe otherwise!
@minim As an accounting software, our first priority is that the accounting parts of our software are as close to correct as possible. This then makes ease of use/usability a second priority.
This is a prime example of accounting principals taking a priority, and now we're looking into ease of use as a secondary element. To be transparent, we completely acknowledge the fact that there is work to be done, and we're up to that challenge, but it will take us some time to come up with the most feasible way to do this, especially considering the programming elements that drive this.
I understand that you want to further categorize these transactions so that you can track your personal finances. The only things you need to categorize are the things that apply to your business.
@ConnorM there is no movement of funds however I performed a service using the products that I would use to conduct my business. What I eventually did, I created an invoice and billed myself and then paid for the invoice from drawings. So there was a debit to my owner investment/drawings account
Hello, thank you for the help. I'm new to Wave and trying to get my accounting in order for the upcoming tax season. I made the mistake of syncing all my bank accounts at the start so my transactions are quite messy, especially since I use the profit first model. With all of the bi-monthly distributions it's tricky to track. I tried deleting my bank connection and starting over only syncing my operating expense account. This did not work, all of the accounts are still syncing. Any suggestions.
On another note, is there any way to sync with my Square account to sync revenue and CC fees as well? If not, I will just have to have my revenue report from Square and expense reports from Wave. Unless someone has a better idea.
Thank you in advance. Any help is appreciated.
Hey @Patrice I'm glad you've found a method that works for you! Thanks for the update.
Hi @MichaelaJC! This is a bit of a tricky one, for sure. All applicable accounts will pull into your Wave account, but you should be able to toggle off any accounts that you do not want to import. Do you not have the ability to do this? Also, we have the ability to integrate Square transactions with Wave transaction accounting, which would be my recommendation as a place to start! Give it a shot to see if that's going to be right for you. You can do so from the 'Integrations' link on the bottom left side of your Wave Business - near 'Settings'!
This does not help with moving transactions out of personal into business. You really should have warned people before removing that option.
Hey there @TheCatsMother
The same method could be done on your personal account but reversed to be reflected in your business. The key is adding that extra equity transaction in your business account (Equity In) and the transaction from your personal account (Equity out).
Let us know if you need further assistance with this.
I was on chat with a support rep and found out that the trouble with this is the entries do not show up in my business automatically when I do this. I will have to enter them all manually; double the work, and double the time!
My first reaction to this change was to find it extremely confusing, and also to view this as extremely time-inefficient, creating extra work and confusion. To describe the change as a simplification doesn't seem accurate. My update to this post - my initial reaction is that although I do think it creates more work, I will work with it and am finding ways to work with it that I think will work for me. (See a later comment of mine for what I'm doing so far.)
For my first payment on my business credit card, I had to pay from my personal checking account and not my business checking account. The transaction came in as a payment. How exactly would I track this to show it as an investment on my end?
Hey @frustrated111 . Can you give me your workflow as to what exctly you're trying to accomplish and which way these transactions should be moving? With that, I can point you in the right direction of what steps you should be taking next.
I used to be able to transfer from and to between my business and personal account now It wont let me do it . Or at least I dont know how anymore.
Thank you for your offer of assistance AlexL. I want to move certain transactions from a chequing account used for home/personal expenses (and imported under "personal" in Wave) TO my business in Wave. I have certain business-use-of-home expenses that I move to the business in Wave for accounting/income tax purposes but based on reading Wave's information and this thread, there is no way to do this any more. Based on reading this thread, I don't see how I can record in the business what account the payment was made from, nor is there a way to import these transactions (via moving them over). Based on what I've read, the only option is to MANUALLY enter any and all transactions from a personal account in Wave that apply to the business account. Am I missing something???? This seems incredibly tedious and creates a huge amount of work.
What a terrible change. Does Wave even use their own product? This was literally the best feature of Wave.
Anyone know of a Wave alternative?
Hey @frustrated111
So you're correct in that you will need to manually upload the transaction on both ends. I understand the frustration here, however, this is currently the method we have in place for this type of movement of equity. Our developers are aware of this and we appreciate all feedback as we continue to move forward with updating our software to improve these types of functions.
Thank you for your reply, Barsin. I'm sure we will all adjust and find a way forward. For me, for now, I will probably manually type the transactions in on the business side. (That's what I’ve started to adopt.) And on the home/personal side, I have created an expense category called "Business Related Expense" so that I can assign all of the business-related expenses to that category to be able to find them easily going forward. I am also adopting a system of on the personal side adding a note to myself to verify I have entered this transaction manually on the business side - and I make a note in both places of where the receipt is located (if electronic where it is stored, and if paper where it is stored, or both).
I understand Wave is continuing to try to make improvements and that these changes, ultimately, have to do with trying to make Wave better. Thank you for making that effort.
Hey there @Micah
I've merged your post with this thread on how to account for a business transaction made from a personal account. Because this is a movement of equity between two separate accounts, you'll want to follow the steps in this article:
https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020168332
Reach out if you need anything else.
Hi all,
I'm very new to this, having only started my business a couple of months ago, but here's my take...
The way that makes most sense to me is to upload my personal receipts and record them through a 'Director Expenses' account I created under 'Due to You and Other Business Owners'. That way it is happily recorded as a current liability and when I subsequently make a payment from the business account to reimburse myself, I can make a withdrawal from the bank account which will debit the 'Director Expenses' liability account to balance.
This seems to reflect the real world activities quite well and is easy to manage.
Feel free to point out any gaping flaws in my understanding at this point!
How about letting me finish out the year on the old system, and then I can start the new year with the new system?