After reading the responses I feel like the Wave team does not understand why this is such an issue for customers. Here's my take about why, beyond the loss of a key feature, this issue has me thinking about dropping Wave. FWIW, I have worked on webapps for 15 years and my opinion is based on being part of product teams that billions use every day (and made both good and bad decisions.)
-I spent a few hundred dollars on consulting and dozens of hours getting everything set up. While Wave is "free" I have invested as much as if I had gone with a monthly fee competitor. I am deeply concerned that Wave may again decide to reduce functionality in the future randomly. I am intensely frustrated that the cost of switching is so high and my investment was upfront. Product teams that depend on lock in make miserable software. Please do not become another Intuit. Please.
-The feature was removed silently and without notice. This feels really, really sneaky and makes me wonder about the integrity of the Wave team. It is not difficult to find out how many inline emails were being received per day and thus know how much this pain this would cause ahead of time.
-There was no error produced when the intake system received a valid email it could no longer process. This again makes me wonder if there was an attempt to conceal this. This lack of an error has cost customers many frustrating hours diagnosing the issue after weeks or months of assuming that it was still working, and then laboriously redoing the work with the pdf workaround that has been offered. Creating error notifications for things like this is a very basic best practice.
-This is not a feature request. When existing functionality stops working suddenly it is a bug. A bug that produces many howls of pain is a high priority bug. Treating this as a low priority feature request shows poor product decision making that's detached from user needs, vs the migration project staff mentioned earlier. Again, I see no reason why this would not happen again in the future given what's happened here, where functionality is removed to further a corporate initiative, either directly or by shifting eng resources away.
I hope this note is useful for communicating why this is causing grave concern for customers even beyond the loss of a key feature. I would like to see the Wave team fix this bug ASAP and communicate that they understand why the combination of the appearance of being sneaky and ignoring basic SAAS best practices is such a brand confidence killer.
@bd3517Very well stated. I was prepared to write essentially the same message, but @bd3517 has done such a good job, I think I'll just add my +1 with a couple more points.
This is the second or third Wave support thread I've seen where a significant number of users are outraged over suddenly losing a feature we've come to depend on. Wave, it appears you're going through some kind of significant pivot; there've been a lot of changes in recent months, and if I remember correctly, every one of them has been the removal of a feature so you can "prioritize" other things yet to come. What should we be expecting? A mobile receipts app? Great, there are a million of those, and I've never used one that doesn't process both physical receipt photos and emailed digital receipts (both attachment and email body). I'm not impressed.
But the biggest issue relates to the sneakiness, as @bd3517 put it, which really does lead one to question your team's integrity. I'm sorry you have to deal with these complaints as support agents; I know your hands are tied. But I also really hope you are bringing threads like this one to the attention of your strategy and product teams. Months and months seem to pass without resolution on these things, which makes me think the strategy/product teams either aren't getting the feedback or they are but actively choose to design for themselves instead of the user. Is design research a thing at Wave? User testing? Anything? Amongst all these competing priorities we hear about, it seems customer needs is your lowest priority of all.
I'm off to sort through three months of emails I thought Wave had been processing... (Again, no error bounceback?! I can't get over it...)
Hi @bd3517 & @intothesun . Thanks for this extremely in-depth feedback and I'll respond to both of you to the best of my ability.
Receipt forwarding was never something that Wave fully supported. We've never advertised that we do, and in this very article above, we've always stated not to forward receipts to the email as it doesn't work. As previously mentioned, due to some sort of blind spot, this did in fact work for numerous users. However, when the team went in to change some things with receipt emails, this blindspot was plugged up as a consequence of the changes made.
I fully understand that something that was being used by our users was taken away without any notice and that it's not an ideal situation. This was not in any way intended to be a secret ploy on Wave's part, and maybe it should have even been communicated better when it initially happened.
@bd3517 , you're correct when you say that as support agents our hands are completely tied here. As a result though, we are actively tracking the number of posts we have in this thread as well as anywhere else that a user reaches out about this so we have some hard numbers to consistently provide to the Product team.
As much as I can't personally make this switch back for you, I encourage all users to continue to voice their opinion on this as we continue to track the user impact that it has had.
Once again, thanks for all of this feedback, it's much appreciated.
I am shocked to discover this page. I am looking for an accounting system and my ONLY mandatory feature is receipt scanning. It is still advertised all over this website. So I signed up, started forwarding my receipts. And of course, nothing happens. I spent a few hours trying again and debugging, and no luck. Two days later I discover this thread. Wow, I am extremely disappointed. WTF.
@BarsinA said:
as we advance in a more mobile age...
Lets do some 2019 consumer research 101... we're moving to a digital age, majority of which is conducted on mobile devices by consumers. This means physical receipts are being sent electronically vs paper printouts... which means consumers are validating receipts in their EMAIL on their mobile devices.
This user research should inform product development of a mobile app that processes physical receipts (for the vendors who are slower to adopt electronic receipts) AND electronic ones.
I have been using Wave since the beginning and forwarding emails was, without a doubt, one of the most useful features available!!! When did this get shutdown?? I need to go back and find the receipts that were being processed to when they were not all of a sudden!
Thanks for the responses, but I have to say it doesn't allay my concerns that Wave is worth trusting with the finances of my small business. What I hear is:
1. It was never really meant to work
The idea that a function that is heavily used for years is a "blind spot" and was never promised to work and therefore it's OK to turn it off does not inspire confidence in the product and engineering team. What additional functions that are in use are blind spots? Will they silently be taken away in the future?
We are monitoring this thread to see if we should fix this.
Why would the team rely on people finding this help page and taking the time to respond vs monitoring the number of inline receipts received as an indicator of scope and severity? Many people still have no idea this is broken, as it continues to fail silently. it's also worth pointing out that most of your competition offers inline receipt functionality.
I want to underscore that the staff responding to the threads here are not responsible for this decision, so my annoyance is not personally directed at them - I appreciate the tough position you are in and grateful that you are advocating for the users.
@AlexL said:
Receipt forwarding was never something that Wave fully supported. We've never advertised that we do, and in this very article above, we've always stated not to forward receipts to the email as it doesn't work. As previously mentioned, due to some sort of blind spot, this did in fact work for numerous users. However, when the team went in to change some things with receipt emails, this blindspot was plugged up as a consequence of the changes made.
This is patently false and is more evidence of how sneaky and untrustworthy Wave has become. As you can see in my comment from 9/12, emailed receipts were advertised by your marketing department on the website. It was subsequently changed and no longer is present. I cannot believe you would say this
I noticed that the receipts I've been forwarding recently have not been showing up in wave, and I have had no confirmation emails. I assumed it was something that had broken. To find that a perfectly working feature has been removed astounds me! Forwarding receipt emails was actually my primary reason for choosing Wave in the first place as, at the time, none of the competition offered this facility.
Seeing as the competition do now have this (I believe), and coupled with the bank feeds no longer working in the UK, it looks like it is time to ditch and switch. A shame, as wave has been a very useful tool over the past few years.
All,
Until this is fixed by Wave here is a fix to get email forwarding back. If you found this thread please don't use the workaround and not post as Wave said they are monitoring this thread and reporting it back to the appropriate team. Your post will help escalate this!
To get back forwarding receipts to Wave that are in the body of the email:
** WINDOWS **
1- Download the latest PDFCreator version: http://download.pdfforge.org/download/pdfcreator/list Be careful and decline the additional programs in the installer. It will also install PDF Architect which you can delete or keep your existing PDF program, your choice.
2- Under Profiles>Save slide the switch to "automatic". Click "only save file temporarily"
3- Under Profiles>Send check SMTP and fill in the credentials from you email account you send receipts to wave under the "account" section. In the "To:" section enter receipts@waveapps.com. Under "Edit E-mail text" put in "receipt" for the subject and click "use HTML" (This is just a precaution- don't want the email to get rejected with no subject line). You can also put in your own email address in the "To:" section and click on "Send Test E-mail" to make sure it works first then switch back to the receipts@waveapps.com . Save the profile
4- Under Printer rename the printer to "WaveReceipts"
5- Under Settings>Default Printer select "ask"
Now if a receipt comes into your email that is already a PDF attachment, just forward it to Wave like you have always done. If the receipt is in the body of the email just click on Print and choose the "WaveReceipts" printer and you're done. You'll see your receipt show up in your account.
No more printing the email to PDF, saving it, opening a new email, attaching it, sending it, then delete the PDF.
For Android devices all you have to do is connect the WaveReceipts printer to Google Cloud Print. You can now forward receipts that are in the body of the email to Wave right from your phone. PDF receipts just forward the email like always. You can then open up the Receipts app to post and confirm your receipts.
** APPLE **
I'm sure there are ways to get Google Cloud Print working on Apple devices but I don't have any info as we don't own or use any Apple devices.
Hey @GlennF. Did you create the post in this thread? If so, could you let me know the date of when you posted it? Our moderators wouldn't have deleted the post unless there were derogatory comments, or something inappropriate in terms of our forum rules.
@JamieD
Hi, I posted it 10/11/2019. There was nothing derogatory. Just a working fix for the users. It did have links in it though so maybe it got flagged as spam or something?
Another +1 for email forwarding. It's a pretty big deal for most of your user base (obviously at this point). I have to "Print" to pdf all of my electronic receipts, name them and save them separately, create a new email to Wave and attach the pdf I just created from my electronic receipt, rinse and repeat VS receiving my electronic receipt, clicking forward, typing in Wave and hitting send. It's not hard to see why you've got a pretty frustrated customer base right now. It seems your product team wasn't as focused on the customer as they were on plugging holes and patches. This shouldn't be a hard thing to fix considering they just plugged it. Your customers are speaking, it's good to listen. Admins I know it's not your fault but I'd just print out this entire thread and any other related ones and dump them on your developers' desk. Show them and the Product Team how important this issue is to us.
I agree, this is a total let down. Why is supporting a forwarded message such a big deal? If someone emails me a receipt, do you really want me to download it and re-create a new email, re-attach it and then send it to Wave? Why can't I just hit forward? I have a wireless scanner that I can send emails from directly. Since the scanner can't send it to Wave (because the scanner is not sending from my primary email) the solution was to send to primary email and forward. A bit of a work around but okay. Now having to create a new email: show stopper.
Just chiming in here, can't believe it took me this long to check the support site about this problem. I've been wondering for ages why all of a sudden my forwarded receipts weren't showing up in Wave. This feature (whether intended or not!) used to work brilliantly for both receipts in the body of emails and attached as PDFs. Having worked in even smaller startups than Wave, I am shocked that you've been getting customer feedback about a feature for more than 6 months and don't even have it on your roadmap. What's up with that? Please please add the feature back in, on purpose this time. I'm about to have to spend hours combing through my sent emails to make sure every receipt is logged. If this was a known "plug" when you made the update, it would have been nice to alert users so that we didn't continue blindly forwarding our receipts for months.
If we can't forward emails, and emails have to be sent as an attachment, then can you tell me what this means? It's a direct quote from your page about receipts. This really seems like a bait and switch.
"Have receipts in your inbox? If you have a receipt sitting in your inbox, you can email it to receipts@waveapps.com. The information will flow automatically into your Wave account."
+1 for forwarding of receipts via email. I noticed it stopped working a little while back but didn't research it until today. I have been manually uploading via the website. So thankfully I don't have to go back and re-do any. This forwarding is super convenient. I don't deal with paper receipts very often - less than 5% I'm thinking.
Regardless of whether it was an unintentional feature or not, it did save me time. Would be great if you would get it working again and make it an intentional feature.
I have really liked Wave from the first time I used it. Very easy to use and I could use it for free which was great for my wife's small business which was just starting up. She is starting to use payments through Wave, so her business is now becoming a paying customer. I love that on-ramp you have. I get tired of the big businesses that are not responsive to customers. Hope you'll find a way to keep that small company feel and experience.
I, too, am having this issue. Is there an update to fixing this, should we just continue to use the workaround forever, or find a new company with this feature?
Hi @tplusfive . Thanks for the kind words. We have no plans on changing our small business feel 🙂
@tplusfive@lsmscreations Although I am tracking the amount of users reaching out about this so we have an idea of the impact, there are no immediate plans on changing it so that you can forward receipts to Wave.
I am a business coach and consultant here in Toronto, who often works with small businesses and new entrepreneurs. Being a certified bookkeeper and accredited coach. I often recommend Wave to new entrepreneurs and completely love that you are a true accounting software. THANK YOU for that.. !
The feature of not being able to forward bills" invoices" and receipts from suppliers is disappointing. the ability to forward source documents to your accounting software such as other third part receipt software is a HUGE time saver for bookkeepers and new entrepreneurs. It would be a gigantic benefit to your clients to be able to forward receipts and bills to their Wave account for automatic posting to the proper GL Accounts
That said. some companies are now not using Pdf, tiff, jpegs etc and simply sending the bill or receipt in the body of an invoice. How would Wave handle these?
It is a sign of the time that more and more companies are streamlining their processes moving away from the traditional forms of paper trails in this electronic and automated world.
Please consider allowing forwarding of source documents to the software. Saves time and Money.
Hey @Spectrumx! Thanks for reaching out and taking the time to provide your feedback. At the moment there are no plans to change the aspect of forwarding receipts, but we appreciate the detail you have provided to let us know how it would improve your workflow! Keep up the good work in Toronto
Hi @hailm, can you provide a little more detail about what you are trying to do in your account? We'd be happy to dig into this further with you!
This is really turning into an interesting case study around digging in one's heels against the user base.
In addition to the tactical issue around receipts, this is why people should look at this and have deep concern about using Wave.
-Wave removes important functionality without notice and makes it so it fails silently
-Hundreds of angry posts do not count in product decisions and bug fixes and are described as a "few users."
-The consulting investment is upfront, so if they remove a deal breaker feature, you are stuck.
-If you use your computer for doing your books or inputting receipts , Wave is not for you (see the admin post below...)
As someone with many email travel receipts, the annoyance of the immediate issue is driving me up the wall, but what this says about how Wave will act in the future is of even deeper concern. Having spent 15 years doing large scale web apps that are used by billions every day, how Wave is responding to this issue does not bode well for the Wave brand or product.
I saw this other thread linked below from @BarsinA . Of note, there are as many emails in that thread as well that the product team has not given weight to.
"To be completely honest with you @HandymanHeadlee
We are pushing forth with improving our mobile receipts application rather than the email function. You were right in saying that this was a happy accident, but it looks like it this may not be a function working for a few of our users if they were in the past. Again a majority of our teams efforts is going toward keeping up with our mobile receipts application as well as new receipt uploading abilities in our online Wave platform. Take care!"
+1 for forwarding of receipts via email. I moved from Expensify which had a great system for managing emailed receipts, but Wave had more features so I moved. Hmmm... wondering if I made the right choice. Looking forward to this bug fix.
This is clearly listed as a feature on the website. Seems like a no-brainer that it should be incorporated, an intuitive obvious step. "If you have a receipt sitting in your inbox, you can email it to receipts@waveapps.com. The information will flow automatically into your Wave account." I can't think of a case where you'd email yourself a picture of a receipt, this so wording includes forwarding email receipts you've received from transactions.
Comments
After reading the responses I feel like the Wave team does not understand why this is such an issue for customers. Here's my take about why, beyond the loss of a key feature, this issue has me thinking about dropping Wave. FWIW, I have worked on webapps for 15 years and my opinion is based on being part of product teams that billions use every day (and made both good and bad decisions.)
-I spent a few hundred dollars on consulting and dozens of hours getting everything set up. While Wave is "free" I have invested as much as if I had gone with a monthly fee competitor. I am deeply concerned that Wave may again decide to reduce functionality in the future randomly. I am intensely frustrated that the cost of switching is so high and my investment was upfront. Product teams that depend on lock in make miserable software. Please do not become another Intuit. Please.
-The feature was removed silently and without notice. This feels really, really sneaky and makes me wonder about the integrity of the Wave team. It is not difficult to find out how many inline emails were being received per day and thus know how much this pain this would cause ahead of time.
-There was no error produced when the intake system received a valid email it could no longer process. This again makes me wonder if there was an attempt to conceal this. This lack of an error has cost customers many frustrating hours diagnosing the issue after weeks or months of assuming that it was still working, and then laboriously redoing the work with the pdf workaround that has been offered. Creating error notifications for things like this is a very basic best practice.
-This is not a feature request. When existing functionality stops working suddenly it is a bug. A bug that produces many howls of pain is a high priority bug. Treating this as a low priority feature request shows poor product decision making that's detached from user needs, vs the migration project staff mentioned earlier. Again, I see no reason why this would not happen again in the future given what's happened here, where functionality is removed to further a corporate initiative, either directly or by shifting eng resources away.
I hope this note is useful for communicating why this is causing grave concern for customers even beyond the loss of a key feature. I would like to see the Wave team fix this bug ASAP and communicate that they understand why the combination of the appearance of being sneaky and ignoring basic SAAS best practices is such a brand confidence killer.
@bd3517 Very well stated. I was prepared to write essentially the same message, but @bd3517 has done such a good job, I think I'll just add my +1 with a couple more points.
This is the second or third Wave support thread I've seen where a significant number of users are outraged over suddenly losing a feature we've come to depend on. Wave, it appears you're going through some kind of significant pivot; there've been a lot of changes in recent months, and if I remember correctly, every one of them has been the removal of a feature so you can "prioritize" other things yet to come. What should we be expecting? A mobile receipts app? Great, there are a million of those, and I've never used one that doesn't process both physical receipt photos and emailed digital receipts (both attachment and email body). I'm not impressed.
But the biggest issue relates to the sneakiness, as @bd3517 put it, which really does lead one to question your team's integrity. I'm sorry you have to deal with these complaints as support agents; I know your hands are tied. But I also really hope you are bringing threads like this one to the attention of your strategy and product teams. Months and months seem to pass without resolution on these things, which makes me think the strategy/product teams either aren't getting the feedback or they are but actively choose to design for themselves instead of the user. Is design research a thing at Wave? User testing? Anything? Amongst all these competing priorities we hear about, it seems customer needs is your lowest priority of all.
I'm off to sort through three months of emails I thought Wave had been processing... (Again, no error bounceback?! I can't get over it...)
Hi @bd3517 & @intothesun . Thanks for this extremely in-depth feedback and I'll respond to both of you to the best of my ability.
Receipt forwarding was never something that Wave fully supported. We've never advertised that we do, and in this very article above, we've always stated not to forward receipts to the email as it doesn't work. As previously mentioned, due to some sort of blind spot, this did in fact work for numerous users. However, when the team went in to change some things with receipt emails, this blindspot was plugged up as a consequence of the changes made.
I fully understand that something that was being used by our users was taken away without any notice and that it's not an ideal situation. This was not in any way intended to be a secret ploy on Wave's part, and maybe it should have even been communicated better when it initially happened.
@bd3517 , you're correct when you say that as support agents our hands are completely tied here. As a result though, we are actively tracking the number of posts we have in this thread as well as anywhere else that a user reaches out about this so we have some hard numbers to consistently provide to the Product team.
As much as I can't personally make this switch back for you, I encourage all users to continue to voice their opinion on this as we continue to track the user impact that it has had.
Once again, thanks for all of this feedback, it's much appreciated.
I am shocked to discover this page. I am looking for an accounting system and my ONLY mandatory feature is receipt scanning. It is still advertised all over this website. So I signed up, started forwarding my receipts. And of course, nothing happens. I spent a few hours trying again and debugging, and no luck. Two days later I discover this thread. Wow, I am extremely disappointed. WTF.
+1 request for email forwarding of receipts. I can't think of a tool that doesn't offer email forwarding. Basic functionality at this point.
Lets do some 2019 consumer research 101... we're moving to a digital age, majority of which is conducted on mobile devices by consumers. This means physical receipts are being sent electronically vs paper printouts... which means consumers are validating receipts in their EMAIL on their mobile devices.
This user research should inform product development of a mobile app that processes physical receipts (for the vendors who are slower to adopt electronic receipts) AND electronic ones.
I have been using Wave since the beginning and forwarding emails was, without a doubt, one of the most useful features available!!! When did this get shutdown?? I need to go back and find the receipts that were being processed to when they were not all of a sudden!
Thanks for the responses, but I have to say it doesn't allay my concerns that Wave is worth trusting with the finances of my small business. What I hear is:
1. It was never really meant to work
The idea that a function that is heavily used for years is a "blind spot" and was never promised to work and therefore it's OK to turn it off does not inspire confidence in the product and engineering team. What additional functions that are in use are blind spots? Will they silently be taken away in the future?
Why would the team rely on people finding this help page and taking the time to respond vs monitoring the number of inline receipts received as an indicator of scope and severity? Many people still have no idea this is broken, as it continues to fail silently. it's also worth pointing out that most of your competition offers inline receipt functionality.
I want to underscore that the staff responding to the threads here are not responsible for this decision, so my annoyance is not personally directed at them - I appreciate the tough position you are in and grateful that you are advocating for the users.
This is patently false and is more evidence of how sneaky and untrustworthy Wave has become. As you can see in my comment from 9/12, emailed receipts were advertised by your marketing department on the website. It was subsequently changed and no longer is present. I cannot believe you would say this
Thanks everyone for the continued opinions and feedback on this matter. I'll continue to pass your feedback to the team.
@seanpmgallagher we didn't end the ability to email receipts altogether, just the forwarding function isn't available.
I noticed that the receipts I've been forwarding recently have not been showing up in wave, and I have had no confirmation emails. I assumed it was something that had broken. To find that a perfectly working feature has been removed astounds me! Forwarding receipt emails was actually my primary reason for choosing Wave in the first place as, at the time, none of the competition offered this facility.
Seeing as the competition do now have this (I believe), and coupled with the bank feeds no longer working in the UK, it looks like it is time to ditch and switch. A shame, as wave has been a very useful tool over the past few years.
** TEMPORARY WORKAROUND FIX **
All,
Until this is fixed by Wave here is a fix to get email forwarding back. If you found this thread please don't use the workaround and not post as Wave said they are monitoring this thread and reporting it back to the appropriate team. Your post will help escalate this!
To get back forwarding receipts to Wave that are in the body of the email:
** WINDOWS **
1- Download the latest PDFCreator version: http://download.pdfforge.org/download/pdfcreator/list Be careful and decline the additional programs in the installer. It will also install PDF Architect which you can delete or keep your existing PDF program, your choice.
2- Under Profiles>Save slide the switch to "automatic". Click "only save file temporarily"
3- Under Profiles>Send check SMTP and fill in the credentials from you email account you send receipts to wave under the "account" section. In the "To:" section enter receipts@waveapps.com. Under "Edit E-mail text" put in "receipt" for the subject and click "use HTML" (This is just a precaution- don't want the email to get rejected with no subject line). You can also put in your own email address in the "To:" section and click on "Send Test E-mail" to make sure it works first then switch back to the receipts@waveapps.com . Save the profile
4- Under Printer rename the printer to "WaveReceipts"
5- Under Settings>Default Printer select "ask"
Now if a receipt comes into your email that is already a PDF attachment, just forward it to Wave like you have always done. If the receipt is in the body of the email just click on Print and choose the "WaveReceipts" printer and you're done. You'll see your receipt show up in your account.
No more printing the email to PDF, saving it, opening a new email, attaching it, sending it, then delete the PDF.
PDFCreator is also open source and I always try donate to projects and teams. I would encourage anyone that this helps to buy them a coffee or beer: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?item_name=Donation+to+PDFCreator&cmd=_donations&business=donate@pdfforge.org
** ANDROID DEVICES **
For Android devices all you have to do is connect the WaveReceipts printer to Google Cloud Print. You can now forward receipts that are in the body of the email to Wave right from your phone. PDF receipts just forward the email like always. You can then open up the Receipts app to post and confirm your receipts.
** APPLE **
I'm sure there are ways to get Google Cloud Print working on Apple devices but I don't have any info as we don't own or use any Apple devices.
Hope this helps!
I posted a temp solution fix for this issue but the post is missing for some reason. Either odd or fishy. Can a moderator look into it?
Hey @GlennF. Did you create the post in this thread? If so, could you let me know the date of when you posted it? Our moderators wouldn't have deleted the post unless there were derogatory comments, or something inappropriate in terms of our forum rules.
@JamieD
Hi, I posted it 10/11/2019. There was nothing derogatory. Just a working fix for the users. It did have links in it though so maybe it got flagged as spam or something?
Another +1 for email forwarding. It's a pretty big deal for most of your user base (obviously at this point). I have to "Print" to pdf all of my electronic receipts, name them and save them separately, create a new email to Wave and attach the pdf I just created from my electronic receipt, rinse and repeat VS receiving my electronic receipt, clicking forward, typing in Wave and hitting send. It's not hard to see why you've got a pretty frustrated customer base right now. It seems your product team wasn't as focused on the customer as they were on plugging holes and patches. This shouldn't be a hard thing to fix considering they just plugged it. Your customers are speaking, it's good to listen. Admins I know it's not your fault but I'd just print out this entire thread and any other related ones and dump them on your developers' desk. Show them and the Product Team how important this issue is to us.
I agree, this is a total let down. Why is supporting a forwarded message such a big deal? If someone emails me a receipt, do you really want me to download it and re-create a new email, re-attach it and then send it to Wave? Why can't I just hit forward? I have a wireless scanner that I can send emails from directly. Since the scanner can't send it to Wave (because the scanner is not sending from my primary email) the solution was to send to primary email and forward. A bit of a work around but okay. Now having to create a new email: show stopper.
Just chiming in here, can't believe it took me this long to check the support site about this problem. I've been wondering for ages why all of a sudden my forwarded receipts weren't showing up in Wave. This feature (whether intended or not!) used to work brilliantly for both receipts in the body of emails and attached as PDFs. Having worked in even smaller startups than Wave, I am shocked that you've been getting customer feedback about a feature for more than 6 months and don't even have it on your roadmap. What's up with that? Please please add the feature back in, on purpose this time. I'm about to have to spend hours combing through my sent emails to make sure every receipt is logged. If this was a known "plug" when you made the update, it would have been nice to alert users so that we didn't continue blindly forwarding our receipts for months.
Hey @GlennF . Looks like it was flagged and put into the spam queue. I've re-added it to the thread
"Have receipts in your inbox?
If you have a receipt sitting in your inbox, you can email it to receipts@waveapps.com. The information will flow automatically into your Wave account."
+1 for forwarding of receipts via email. I noticed it stopped working a little while back but didn't research it until today. I have been manually uploading via the website. So thankfully I don't have to go back and re-do any. This forwarding is super convenient. I don't deal with paper receipts very often - less than 5% I'm thinking.
Regardless of whether it was an unintentional feature or not, it did save me time. Would be great if you would get it working again and make it an intentional feature.
I have really liked Wave from the first time I used it. Very easy to use and I could use it for free which was great for my wife's small business which was just starting up. She is starting to use payments through Wave, so her business is now becoming a paying customer. I love that on-ramp you have. I get tired of the big businesses that are not responsive to customers. Hope you'll find a way to keep that small company feel and experience.
I, too, am having this issue. Is there an update to fixing this, should we just continue to use the workaround forever, or find a new company with this feature?
Hi @tplusfive . Thanks for the kind words. We have no plans on changing our small business feel 🙂
@tplusfive @lsmscreations Although I am tracking the amount of users reaching out about this so we have an idea of the impact, there are no immediate plans on changing it so that you can forward receipts to Wave.
I am a business coach and consultant here in Toronto, who often works with small businesses and new entrepreneurs. Being a certified bookkeeper and accredited coach. I often recommend Wave to new entrepreneurs and completely love that you are a true accounting software. THANK YOU for that.. !
The feature of not being able to forward bills" invoices" and receipts from suppliers is disappointing. the ability to forward source documents to your accounting software such as other third part receipt software is a HUGE time saver for bookkeepers and new entrepreneurs. It would be a gigantic benefit to your clients to be able to forward receipts and bills to their Wave account for automatic posting to the proper GL Accounts
That said. some companies are now not using Pdf, tiff, jpegs etc and simply sending the bill or receipt in the body of an invoice. How would Wave handle these?
It is a sign of the time that more and more companies are streamlining their processes moving away from the traditional forms of paper trails in this electronic and automated world.
Please consider allowing forwarding of source documents to the software. Saves time and Money.
How can i verify the forwarding on gmail https://tppr.me/MVRkn
Hey @Spectrumx! Thanks for reaching out and taking the time to provide your feedback. At the moment there are no plans to change the aspect of forwarding receipts, but we appreciate the detail you have provided to let us know how it would improve your workflow! Keep up the good work in Toronto
Hi @hailm, can you provide a little more detail about what you are trying to do in your account? We'd be happy to dig into this further with you!
This is really turning into an interesting case study around digging in one's heels against the user base.
In addition to the tactical issue around receipts, this is why people should look at this and have deep concern about using Wave.
-Wave removes important functionality without notice and makes it so it fails silently
-Hundreds of angry posts do not count in product decisions and bug fixes and are described as a "few users."
-The consulting investment is upfront, so if they remove a deal breaker feature, you are stuck.
-If you use your computer for doing your books or inputting receipts , Wave is not for you (see the admin post below...)
As someone with many email travel receipts, the annoyance of the immediate issue is driving me up the wall, but what this says about how Wave will act in the future is of even deeper concern. Having spent 15 years doing large scale web apps that are used by billions every day, how Wave is responding to this issue does not bode well for the Wave brand or product.
I saw this other thread linked below from @BarsinA . Of note, there are as many emails in that thread as well that the product team has not given weight to.
"To be completely honest with you @HandymanHeadlee
We are pushing forth with improving our mobile receipts application rather than the email function. You were right in saying that this was a happy accident, but it looks like it this may not be a function working for a few of our users if they were in the past. Again a majority of our teams efforts is going toward keeping up with our mobile receipts application as well as new receipt uploading abilities in our online Wave platform. Take care!"
https://community.waveapps.com/discussion/5371/emailing-receipts-isnt-working
As usual, this is not an issue with the folks that look after this forum, but rather the product team.
+1 for forwarding of receipts via email. I moved from Expensify which had a great system for managing emailed receipts, but Wave had more features so I moved. Hmmm... wondering if I made the right choice. Looking forward to this bug fix.
This is clearly listed as a feature on the website. Seems like a no-brainer that it should be incorporated, an intuitive obvious step. "If you have a receipt sitting in your inbox, you can email it to receipts@waveapps.com. The information will flow automatically into your Wave account." I can't think of a case where you'd email yourself a picture of a receipt, this so wording includes forwarding email receipts you've received from transactions.
Hey @Renataf
Thanks for your feedback and again I apologize that this feature is not available in Wave currently.
Just to highlight step number three mentions
With that being said, I still appreciate you bringing this to our attention.