Hi, I have a question about account receivable. It seems I cannot create an income transaction with Dr. account receivable and Cr. sales, only journal transaction works. However, An expense transaction can be created with Dr. Account payable and Cr. expenses. The reason why I say this because if account receivable cannot be chosen in an income transaction, and then only journal entry is made, when the payment is settled, the paid income does not reflect properly in the report of sales from customers (journal entry of sales will not display in paid income).
Hi, I just moved to Wave this year.
When I entry the starting balance, in date column should I put 1 January 2020 or 31 December 2019? Does it matter?
Thank you.
Hey @Luciel 👋A few things to unpack here. Most Wave users will impact their Accounts Receivable through the creation of Invoices. Given your situation here, creating an invoice for a specific customer would solve for both the things you identified!
Another thing to keep in mind is that Wave offers both accrual and cash-based accounting. On your Chart of Accounts (ACCOUNTING > Chart of Accounts) you can look to add a Money in Transit. You can learn more about those by checking out this guide
Hello @mycharvel and congrats on your first post in our Community! To keep your balances and accounting records accurate, you'll need to enter the starting balance for those accounts on January 1 (or whatever date your business's fiscal year starts). You can learn more about Starting Balances and how they're handled in Wave here. If you want to change the start date of your Fiscal Year check out this guide.
Hey @onthebooks! Thanks for reaching out here. I just wanted to clarify the steps you are taking to account for a loan. At the moment, are you following the process in this Wave guide - How to account for a loan? If so, is there a particular step in here that you are getting stuck on, or that does not seem right? Let us know!
yes I am still getting stuck with this cause I am not getting the results correctly I will break down the explanation a little bit more of what i am trying to accomplish: So say I have car loan with a balance of 7500 remaining and payments are auto drafted from my account in the amount of 900 so i did not actually receive funds in my account the funds went to car purchase. Can you tell me and/or show with examples how first this should be entered in the COA ,secondly how I account for the balance and the payment i would like to show the balance being reduced every time a payment is made. Thank you for your help.
Hey @onthebooks! When you say you did not receive the funds in your account, can you explain this a little further? If the 7500 for the loan was not received where is this amount recorded? This will helpful to understand the situation!
To set up the loan in Wave, go to: Transactions, click More > Add journal transaction. You need to create a transaction that indicates the availability of the loan funds, so you’ll debit your checking account and credit your newly created liability account with however much you have set aside for a loan (it looks as though 7500 in your case).
The you will want to follow the steps in the link above to account for the loan repayment. You will debit the loan account you created and credit your business checking account (or whatever bank account you are repaying the loan from). If you have interest you can add an extra line to the journal transaction to account for it.
I have been using Wave since 2019. My fiscal year ended on December 31, 2019. When I run Account Transaction report for 2020 where I select start date as 01-01-20 and end date as today's date, all accounts have a starting balance carryforward from 2019. 2019 fiscal year has been closed, is there a way to have just 2020 balance show under Account Transaction report?
Other accounting platforms don't allow you to touch historical data, but in Wave, you can pull up reports and make adjustments at any time. This means that your previous years never really "close". All that happens at year-end is that current year earnings get zeroed and added to previous year earnings.
At the start of your new fiscal year, you will see your new previous year earnings balance, fresh income and expense account balances, and your usual bank account balances.
What Wave doesn't do is put those amounts under a common account, such as retained earnings, that you can post transactions to. If you want your previous year income/loss to roll forward into retained earnings, you will need to manually do this. Here's how:
Run an income statement for the year. This will give you all of your income and expense final balances.
Save this statement in excel or a PDF so you have all of the balances saved.
Click Accounting > Transactions > More > Add journal transaction.
Enter the balances as opposite of how they appeared on your income statement.
Note that the amount of Net Income on the Income Statement matches the amount of the debit to Owners Equity.
This could get confusing, so if you are concerned about your year-end balances and need some professional accounting help, you might want to get in touch with a professional accountant, which we always recommend
I followed the instructions on setting up depreciation accounts. I have all three accounts set up for Property XYZ. Now I need to transfer the accumulated depreciation balance from my old bookkeeping system. I would use journal entry for this but what is the exact entry I need to make? I'm thinking to set entry date for 12/31/2019, debit Accumulated Depreciation and credit Depreciation expense?
Hey @GoranB , I'd highly recommend you reach out to an accountant or CPA on this. As I'm not 100% sure on the best way to handle this, I don't want to offer you advice that puts your accounts in jeopardy.
I am new to Wave and have struggled far to long to set up starting balances for 1) Retained Earnings; 2) Shareholder Loan (owing to shareholder); and 3) Accounts Payable (payroll source deduction from previous year, payable this year).
All instructions I have seen tell me to select "Owner's Equity" from the drop down menu, but this option does not even exist in the system! The only thing close is "Common Shares", but to use that does not make any sense at all.
Please lead me through these issues to get it right from the beginning.
@Viben It sounds like when you created your business in Wave, you selected "Corporation" as your business structure. Within Wave only Sole Props and Partnerships require the Owner's Equity accounts, as corporations have more strict regulations around how money can be taken out of them and also how this process is accounted for. It sounds as though you have selected the incorrect buisness type which is why you cannot find the "Owner's Equity" account in Wave.
Hi Jordan,
My business is a corporation, so the business type setting is correct.
It appears as if your instructions are not applicable to corporations, and your comment seems to support that. Should I assume that Wave does not support corporate accounting?
Hello
I'm not expert in accounting, my question is regarding Starting balance, the Starting balance need to update every month for example every 01 Feb 2020 need to udpate Starting balance again or just one time per year only? my business's fiscal year starts is 01 Jan 2020, please help
Hey @Viben , we definitely support corporate accounting, but because the process for this is so different and can get much more convoluted and complex, we highly recommend reaching out to an accountant directly so they can advise you on the best way to account for this for your business specifically. Selecting the wrong account could have larger accounting implications.
@rifaieismail you only need to add a starting balance to when you started using Wave so that your bank balances are inputted correctly. If you continue to track your balances appropriately after that point, you won't ever have to worry about entering in another starting balance. Let me know if this doesn't make sense and I'd be happy to explain further!
My connected loan account is being mis-categorized as bank account and is showing under assets. I just started using Wave and don't have any understanding on Accounting other than common sensical understanding
My apologies that your account is being mis-categorized! The issue with this is that our banking data aggregator doesn't actually support loan accounts. Only credit card and checking/savings or similar asset accounts. It sounds like your transactions somehow got pulled through but are not appearing in the correct account. My apologies for this. Unfortunately since plaid does not support loan accounts I would recommend turning off this account under your banking > connected accounts page and trying to upload them manually.
Wave has a couple of options when it comes to uploading your transactions without a bank connection:
CSV Uploader
Using our CSV uploader. With the proper formatting, you are able to download a CSV document containing all of your transactions from your online banking website, and upload them directly to Wave. Check out this article on Troubleshooting your csv upload if you run into any problems when uploading your transactions.
Wave Connect
My personal favorite method is WAVE CONNECT.
Wave Connect allows you to upload or download transactional data, invoices, customer lists, etc, into a Google spreadsheet. Your excel files can be easily transferred into a Google Spreadsheet as well. See this image below of what Wave Connect looks like: All you need to do is input the transactional information into a template that is generated through the add-on feature in Google sheets and it auto-populates right into your Wave account once you've validated the data.
Given that our partnership with our third-party bank aggregator may cause communication errors between your bank account and Wave, please know that we always serve up alternative methods to using Wave until that connection is successful once again.
Hope this helps, please don't hesitate to reach out if you need further clarification.
I've merged your discussion into the starting balances guide for some additional context.
Have you tried entering expense transactions from the transactions page to these accounts with dates that go back to the very first transaction? This in theory should give you a negative balance. Let us know if you are able to achieve this or if you have any additional specific questions.
Starting Balance for an account is only when you are introducing an account. An example- You want to bring a new bank account to wave but your bank balance is $200 wave will bring the transactions in however wont know you already had money there. So you need to enter the starting balance to ensure your bank balance is correct on Wave. Moving forward you wont have to do this again for this account as its only done initially. Does that make sense?
Can anyone please make a 20 second video on how to enter a new bank-loan and the loan starting amount. been trying to do it for one hour!!!!
WAVEAPP Please!!!!!!!
Hello,
I am new to this app and also recently incorporated my business so my knowledge in accounting is very minimum.
I am trying to enter a starting balance for a bank account and following the step by step process shown above this page. However, I am stuck at steps #5 and # 8: "In the Category column, select Owner's Investment/Drawings or Owner's Equity from the dropdown menu (or an appropriate Equity account for your business)" . #5: I do not see the " Business Checking" category under account as shown in the image above. Do I need to manually create one? If so, I would appreciate it if you can provide me with the direct link to the instruction page. #8: It does not give me the options "Owner's Investment/Drawings or Owner's Equity from the dropdown menu". Again, do I need to manually create this first?
All of my historical data is missing. All that is available is information from my bank & PayPal accounts. I don't know how PayPal was linked & I don't see how to delete the link. I use that account for business & personal also, so I've had to go line by line & delete PayPal transactions that have nothing to do with my business.
Because my historical data is missing, my starting balance is way off. I posted a comment in the Community forum & sent an email. I've had no reply to either. I really liked using Wave, but this is absolutely not acceptable.
I am so disappointed in the lack of customer service & this company having no regard for me by not even replying to my 3 emails. I guess I'll have to do what I can to repair this & find a reliable software.
I do apologize for the delay in our teams response as we are currently dealing with a major backlog. I see that you have multiple businesses under Melanie's Mixups. It is likely that you created a different account under the same name but with a different email.
You can download your transactions under Settings > Data exports and start to upload those into your proper account if you like!
I don't get it. When setting up accounts for the first time, if I want to set the opening balance for an equity account, like common shares, what is the other side of that transaction?
If you'd like, the starting balance workflow can definitely be applied to an Equity account as well. When you set up any initial balance, the other side of the entry is almost always owner's equity. So with a common shares account, that balance doesn't usually change, so the offset would be a different equity account from what I understand.
I have a small business and I am maintaining my books in Excel. Now I am switching to Wave accounting software to maintain my business Accounts. I have transferred all of the account balance of Trial balance in to Wave as starting/beginning balance except the Accounts receivable.I have 3 Customers and the receivable amount is given:
Customer-"A" $100
Customer-"B" $200
Customer-"C" $200
My Question is how do I enter the starting balance of customers in Wave Accounting software?
Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
In Wave you won't be able to create a "starting balance" for customers. However, if you import all of your business data into your account, you will be able to create customer statements, along with a variety of reports.
Yes, but in order to have the starting balances show up for that year in the Account Balance report, you actually have to enter them on Dec. 31st of the previous year. Which is counterintuitive to say the least.
Comments
Hi, I have a question about account receivable. It seems I cannot create an income transaction with Dr. account receivable and Cr. sales, only journal transaction works. However, An expense transaction can be created with Dr. Account payable and Cr. expenses. The reason why I say this because if account receivable cannot be chosen in an income transaction, and then only journal entry is made, when the payment is settled, the paid income does not reflect properly in the report of sales from customers (journal entry of sales will not display in paid income).
Hi, I just moved to Wave this year.
When I entry the starting balance, in date column should I put 1 January 2020 or 31 December 2019? Does it matter?
Thank you.
Hey @Luciel 👋A few things to unpack here. Most Wave users will impact their Accounts Receivable through the creation of Invoices. Given your situation here, creating an invoice for a specific customer would solve for both the things you identified!
Another thing to keep in mind is that Wave offers both accrual and cash-based accounting. On your Chart of Accounts (ACCOUNTING > Chart of Accounts) you can look to add a Money in Transit. You can learn more about those by checking out this guide
Hello @mycharvel and congrats on your first post in our Community! To keep your balances and accounting records accurate, you'll need to enter the starting balance for those accounts on January 1 (or whatever date your business's fiscal year starts). You can learn more about Starting Balances and how they're handled in Wave here. If you want to change the start date of your Fiscal Year check out this guide.
Hey @onthebooks! Thanks for reaching out here. I just wanted to clarify the steps you are taking to account for a loan. At the moment, are you following the process in this Wave guide - How to account for a loan? If so, is there a particular step in here that you are getting stuck on, or that does not seem right? Let us know!
yes I am still getting stuck with this cause I am not getting the results correctly I will break down the explanation a little bit more of what i am trying to accomplish: So say I have car loan with a balance of 7500 remaining and payments are auto drafted from my account in the amount of 900 so i did not actually receive funds in my account the funds went to car purchase. Can you tell me and/or show with examples how first this should be entered in the COA ,secondly how I account for the balance and the payment i would like to show the balance being reduced every time a payment is made. Thank you for your help.
Hey @onthebooks! When you say you did not receive the funds in your account, can you explain this a little further? If the 7500 for the loan was not received where is this amount recorded? This will helpful to understand the situation!
If you did receive the 7500 amount, you would want to set up the loan account in your Chart of Accounts following the first 3 steps in this link: https://support.waveapps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000041883-How-to-account-for-a-loan
To set up the loan in Wave, go to: Transactions, click More > Add journal transaction. You need to create a transaction that indicates the availability of the loan funds, so you’ll debit your checking account and credit your newly created liability account with however much you have set aside for a loan (it looks as though 7500 in your case).
The you will want to follow the steps in the link above to account for the loan repayment. You will debit the loan account you created and credit your business checking account (or whatever bank account you are repaying the loan from). If you have interest you can add an extra line to the journal transaction to account for it.
Hi there,
I have been using Wave since 2019. My fiscal year ended on December 31, 2019. When I run Account Transaction report for 2020 where I select start date as 01-01-20 and end date as today's date, all accounts have a starting balance carryforward from 2019. 2019 fiscal year has been closed, is there a way to have just 2020 balance show under Account Transaction report?
Hey @malley
Other accounting platforms don't allow you to touch historical data, but in Wave, you can pull up reports and make adjustments at any time. This means that your previous years never really "close". All that happens at year-end is that current year earnings get zeroed and added to previous year earnings.
At the start of your new fiscal year, you will see your new previous year earnings balance, fresh income and expense account balances, and your usual bank account balances.
What Wave doesn't do is put those amounts under a common account, such as retained earnings, that you can post transactions to. If you want your previous year income/loss to roll forward into retained earnings, you will need to manually do this. Here's how:
This could get confusing, so if you are concerned about your year-end balances and need some professional accounting help, you might want to get in touch with a professional accountant, which we always recommend
I followed the instructions on setting up depreciation accounts. I have all three accounts set up for Property XYZ. Now I need to transfer the accumulated depreciation balance from my old bookkeeping system. I would use journal entry for this but what is the exact entry I need to make? I'm thinking to set entry date for 12/31/2019, debit Accumulated Depreciation and credit Depreciation expense?
Hey @GoranB , I'd highly recommend you reach out to an accountant or CPA on this. As I'm not 100% sure on the best way to handle this, I don't want to offer you advice that puts your accounts in jeopardy.
I am new to Wave and have struggled far to long to set up starting balances for 1) Retained Earnings; 2) Shareholder Loan (owing to shareholder); and 3) Accounts Payable (payroll source deduction from previous year, payable this year).
All instructions I have seen tell me to select "Owner's Equity" from the drop down menu, but this option does not even exist in the system! The only thing close is "Common Shares", but to use that does not make any sense at all.
Please lead me through these issues to get it right from the beginning.
@Viben It sounds like when you created your business in Wave, you selected "Corporation" as your business structure. Within Wave only Sole Props and Partnerships require the Owner's Equity accounts, as corporations have more strict regulations around how money can be taken out of them and also how this process is accounted for. It sounds as though you have selected the incorrect buisness type which is why you cannot find the "Owner's Equity" account in Wave.
Hi Jordan,
My business is a corporation, so the business type setting is correct.
It appears as if your instructions are not applicable to corporations, and your comment seems to support that. Should I assume that Wave does not support corporate accounting?
Hello
I'm not expert in accounting, my question is regarding Starting balance, the Starting balance need to update every month for example every 01 Feb 2020 need to udpate Starting balance again or just one time per year only? my business's fiscal year starts is 01 Jan 2020, please help
Hey @Viben , we definitely support corporate accounting, but because the process for this is so different and can get much more convoluted and complex, we highly recommend reaching out to an accountant directly so they can advise you on the best way to account for this for your business specifically. Selecting the wrong account could have larger accounting implications.
@rifaieismail you only need to add a starting balance to when you started using Wave so that your bank balances are inputted correctly. If you continue to track your balances appropriately after that point, you won't ever have to worry about entering in another starting balance. Let me know if this doesn't make sense and I'd be happy to explain further!
My connected loan account is being mis-categorized as bank account and is showing under assets. I just started using Wave and don't have any understanding on Accounting other than common sensical understanding
Hey @Amit_G
Welcome to Wave
My apologies that your account is being mis-categorized! The issue with this is that our banking data aggregator doesn't actually support loan accounts. Only credit card and checking/savings or similar asset accounts. It sounds like your transactions somehow got pulled through but are not appearing in the correct account. My apologies for this. Unfortunately since plaid does not support loan accounts I would recommend turning off this account under your banking > connected accounts page and trying to upload them manually.
Wave has a couple of options when it comes to uploading your transactions without a bank connection:
CSV Uploader
Using our CSV uploader. With the proper formatting, you are able to download a CSV document containing all of your transactions from your online banking website, and upload them directly to Wave. Check out this article on Troubleshooting your csv upload if you run into any problems when uploading your transactions.
Wave Connect
My personal favorite method is WAVE CONNECT.
All you need to do is input the transactional information into a template that is generated through the add-on feature in Google sheets and it auto-populates right into your Wave account once you've validated the data.
Wave Connect allows you to upload or download transactional data, invoices, customer lists, etc, into a Google spreadsheet. Your excel files can be easily transferred into a Google Spreadsheet as well. See this image below of what Wave Connect looks like:
Given that our partnership with our third-party bank aggregator may cause communication errors between your bank account and Wave, please know that we always serve up alternative methods to using Wave until that connection is successful once again.
Hope this helps, please don't hesitate to reach out if you need further clarification.
Take care!
I have followed a guide on how to set opening balance of the year, but it does not allow me to set with a negative balance, how do I set it?
Hey there @echoitia
I've merged your discussion into the starting balances guide for some additional context.
Have you tried entering expense transactions from the transactions page to these accounts with dates that go back to the very first transaction? This in theory should give you a negative balance. Let us know if you are able to achieve this or if you have any additional specific questions.
Starting Balance for an account is only when you are introducing an account. An example- You want to bring a new bank account to wave but your bank balance is $200 wave will bring the transactions in however wont know you already had money there. So you need to enter the starting balance to ensure your bank balance is correct on Wave. Moving forward you wont have to do this again for this account as its only done initially. Does that make sense?
Can anyone please make a 20 second video on how to enter a new bank-loan and the loan starting amount. been trying to do it for one hour!!!!
WAVEAPP Please!!!!!!!
Hello,
I am new to this app and also recently incorporated my business so my knowledge in accounting is very minimum.
I am trying to enter a starting balance for a bank account and following the step by step process shown above this page. However, I am stuck at steps #5 and # 8: "In the Category column, select Owner's Investment/Drawings or Owner's Equity from the dropdown menu (or an appropriate Equity account for your business)" . #5: I do not see the " Business Checking" category under account as shown in the image above. Do I need to manually create one? If so, I would appreciate it if you can provide me with the direct link to the instruction page. #8: It does not give me the options "Owner's Investment/Drawings or Owner's Equity from the dropdown menu". Again, do I need to manually create this first?
All of my historical data is missing. All that is available is information from my bank & PayPal accounts. I don't know how PayPal was linked & I don't see how to delete the link. I use that account for business & personal also, so I've had to go line by line & delete PayPal transactions that have nothing to do with my business.
Because my historical data is missing, my starting balance is way off. I posted a comment in the Community forum & sent an email. I've had no reply to either. I really liked using Wave, but this is absolutely not acceptable.
I am so disappointed in the lack of customer service & this company having no regard for me by not even replying to my 3 emails. I guess I'll have to do what I can to repair this & find a reliable software.
Hey there @Melaniesmixups
I do apologize for the delay in our teams response as we are currently dealing with a major backlog. I see that you have multiple businesses under Melanie's Mixups. It is likely that you created a different account under the same name but with a different email.
You can download your transactions under Settings > Data exports and start to upload those into your proper account if you like!
I don't get it. When setting up accounts for the first time, if I want to set the opening balance for an equity account, like common shares, what is the other side of that transaction?
Hey @Rob88 !
If you'd like, the starting balance workflow can definitely be applied to an Equity account as well. When you set up any initial balance, the other side of the entry is almost always owner's equity. So with a common shares account, that balance doesn't usually change, so the offset would be a different equity account from what I understand.
I have a small business and I am maintaining my books in Excel. Now I am switching to Wave accounting software to maintain my business Accounts. I have transferred all of the account balance of Trial balance in to Wave as starting/beginning balance except the Accounts receivable.I have 3 Customers and the receivable amount is given:
Customer-"A" $100
Customer-"B" $200
Customer-"C" $200
My Question is how do I enter the starting balance of customers in Wave Accounting software?
Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
Hey there @ayoub !
In Wave you won't be able to create a "starting balance" for customers. However, if you import all of your business data into your account, you will be able to create customer statements, along with a variety of reports.
If you are looking to add a starting balance for an account, you can do so using the workflow outlined here.
this is super-helpful. thank you!
Yes, but in order to have the starting balances show up for that year in the Account Balance report, you actually have to enter them on Dec. 31st of the previous year. Which is counterintuitive to say the least.