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How to add expenses and receipts to an invoice
shakey
Member Posts: 2
Hi - I invoice for services and that will include some expenses from time to time. I've captured receipts using the mobile app, and I've approved them under Receipts.
How can I now add these to an Invoice? Or do I have to do this manually?
Thanks!
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Hi @shakey! Wave currently doesn't have this functionality, but you can easily add receipt images to your invoice by exporting the Wave invoice to PDF and adding the receipts as additional pages, and then emailing the invoice and receipts together as one PDF doc.
Hi Sophia, thanks, but I was hoping to be able to just add each one as a line in an invoice. I'll have to look elsewhere.
I was actually looking for this functionality also. As a freelancer, getting reimbursed for expenses is common and adding receipts to invoices would be beneficial. I like Wave, but this is a really bummer. Any hope of this being added?
Hi, @kovalnyc,
I can't make promises, but I can tell you that you aren't the first person to ask for a feature like this one and that we do pay attention to feedback and suggestions from our users. We do have a suggested workflow to handle reimbursable expenses here, it might help out.
Can you tell us a bit more about your business? What field do you work in? Do you have reimbursable expenses on most of your invoices, or is it more of an occasional event? Do you require those receipts to be directly attached to the invoice, or would a simpler workflow to charge clients for those expenses do the trick?
Yes, the receipts are attached directly to the invoice. In this case, I have to print out the invoice and actually staple the physical copies of the receipts.
In this particular case I was doing some renovation for a client. The agreement was that I'd bill only for supplies I used, and I wanted to present the receipts as evidence of that for transparency reasons.
I've had other situations similar to this when a job is agreed upon via a flat fee, and requires me to purchase something in order to get the job done. Showing the receipt is sometimes required for the client side accounting.
It's not a deal breaker but other platforms have it. This is Xero's version of it. https://central.xero.com/s/article/Add-billable-expenses-to-bills#Web
The only thing I'd add to Xero's is to be able to present a copy of the expense or receipt to the invoice somehow, either collected at the end, or to the line item.
Thank you for following up with more details, @kovalnyc. Your feedback is extremely helpful!
I'd just like to add to this thread as I just started using this product for my business and I need this functionality. I provide consulting services, pay for the service can be variable depending on the client, but all clients pay for expenses as the consulting requires travel to sites. So I create an account for each trip, collect all my expenses for that trip with scanned images. I then reconcile that within my own corporate structure, but it would be great when I create an invoice for the client I could attach a selection of those expense from the account I associated them with to the invoice with images automatically. Usually meals are something that are not expense-able as individual items. So i might create -- as the account name, then when I create the invoice be able to select categories from that account name e.g. travel. All travel expenses are populated onto the invoice and images are attached.
@459consulting thank you for the additional input! I'll include your current and desired workflows when bringing this up to the team!
How do I send a pdf of the various receipts captured in the App (and now recorded as "Done"] to send with the Invoice to the client?
Hey @Simonereeves, the easiest way would be if you still have the image files of the receipts, to attach them and send them in an email along with the invoice PDF. Alternatively, you can head over to Receipts in the web browser and view the source images to save a copy of the relevant invoices and send them over. Going forward we're looking at ways to have items attached directly to invoices, so in the future this should be less of a manual process.
Ah, thanks, yes, would be great if you could attach them as this is not an uncommon happening...
THanks
Invoice2go does a great job at easily attaching receipts to invoices. Too bad Wave does not, kind of a deal breaker for freelancers.
@adventuresofnate In terms of us adding a feature such as this, could you elaborate a little more how it would benefit you while you are using Wave and how this would improve your workflow? It's always best to get a solid idea of how specific features would benefit our users so that, when we're planning, we can add them to roadmaps with backed-up intended use from customers.
To administrators - this is a super important function for a business and as a freelancer.
I freelance and have numerous expenses every month. At the end of the month I have to send through receipts via my email, and the invoice via Waveapps. It makes total sense that these are linked and the paper trail is altogether. Really Waveapps should be a one stop shop for this.
Please add this function, think it's something quite common place on other accounting software.
ps. love waveapps
@Cherrie Thanks so much for reaching out.
Just wanted to let you know our developers often check this forum when looking into future developments, so we always appreciate your feedback!
Totally agree with the other comments made - as a freelancer, I really need an invoicing app that syncs up with its own expenses app. After 18 months as a happy Wave customer, once one of my clients asked me to add my expenses to my main invoice I naively assumed the expenses app would link through. I really don't want to find another way to process my invoices but in this day and age I didn't think cutting and pasting into a Word doc or sending as attachments would be the solution offered. Fingers crossed you can resolve this swiftly.
This is a very weak workflow and functionality. Basically, you can put an image (a "receipt") into the system... and then can't do anything with it.
You can't attach it to an invoice, you can't include it on a report, you can even print it from Wave... From what I can tell, you can't sort them, file them, or search for them.
If the recommendation is "keep the original image" for the client (or for the tax auditor, or for whomever), that's really kind of missing the point... isn't it? I can easily have 50 receipts in a week, and apparently they just collect in a digital shoebox where one can't even click on the column headers to sort the list (which is a pretty basic web development thing). Considering the order appears to be "by time approved', it's going to be impossible to manage the receipts.
I'd highly recommend your program management team and developers spend time looking at how platforms like Expensify handle the images. (They have other issues that I don't like, but at least printing a report is easy.)
I am honestly SO CONFUSED as to how adding expenses via the receipts is not a thing yet??? I used to use freshbooks and it had a section where you could input expenses (food, props etc) and the easily add it to an invoice later! Your app that automates the receipts is amazing, please just add the ability to add the receipts and their attached info to any invoice as a line item under an Expenses line, which could be separate from the main invoice body. Also please let us choose our own receipt types, as I am a photographer so all of my receipts are for props and that is not an option currently. This is pretty basic invoicing functionality and I was initially really excited to switch to Wave from Freshbooks, and even chose it over Quickbooks, but I'm beginning to think perhaps I made a mistake. Imo, this should be a very high priority on your list of functionality to add to the website and app!
Is this going to be resolved because unfortunately I will have to go elsewhere if not ?
Honestly y'all, you have a receipts app and you have an Invoicing and payroll app and this is quite absurd. Drop everything and merge the two. 1 receipt associated to 1 line on an invoice. Clear your schedules and hop on it. I'm keeping it light, but you're gonna get burnt on comments if this goes on much longer (and you might lose clients).
@nods Although this is definitely something that we have our eyes on to implement in the future, it hasn't entered any sort of planning phase yet which means that we don't have an ETA.
I'd like to add another request for this feature. As a self-employed freelancer, I frequently submit invoices to my clients which include my fee as well as reimbursements for expenses. Wave's invoicing & tie-in with accounting works great for me, but sadly the way transactions/expenses are handled does not. I've been using a separate service (Expensify) to handle the latter, which works well both to manage expenses that I can generate a report for and attach it to an invoice, as well as track personal expenses that are not reimbursable so that I can easily deduct them at tax time. Obviously I'd love to do it all from one system instead of needing to generate docs (invoice in Wave + expense report in Expensify) and attach them manually.
Currently my workflow is to create expenses (either via manual entry or receipt scanning) and attach them to an expense report. The report generates a doc where each expense is a line item, grouped by categories, and attaches each receipt as a separate page. I used to do this manually in a word processor, but after putting together a 42-page report (meals + travel for several weeks!) I said no more, I need a system! For non-reimbursable expenses, I keep a "personal expenses" report open all year and put everything in that so that my category totals are ready for deductions.
Wave is nearly there and supports most of this flow, i.e. transactions (whether automatically created from a link card/bank or manually created), plus receipt scanning. I think the challenge is the concept of expense reports, which doesn't exist in Wave currently, and I think needs to be separate from something like filtering the transaction view. Related, a creating a new account for every single expense report (if that were the approach) will feel tedious. For example, I often bill 2-3 clients every month, so that means I could potentially need to create 6 new accounts per month(!) which would only be used once. And finally, being able to generate a document from that report, which includes
the already-attached receipts, each big enough to read (so likely one per page) would complete the need.
Thanks for reading!
Please add this feature soon! Please don't make me go back to Freshbooks!
Hey @Matt_F! Thanks for reaching out here. The feedback you have provided is super insightful for our team to have especially when implementing or changing features in Wave. To see your current process and then how you would like it to work in Wave shows us how it can really change your workflow for the better. I don't have any ETA on when this will be worked on but we really appreciate this!
I echo the frustration in comments above, as a contractor that works mostly on a T&M basis being able to attach receipts to the invoice would be a really streamline my billing. The quality and OCR of your scanning feature is amazing. If the ability to attach the scanned receipts to invoices were added, Wave would be the accounting platform for me! Unfortunately, I will be searching for a product that has this feature.
I'd just like to add my voice to this.
Paid for a product for a client, added the receipt to Wave, went to find the option to add this expense to an invoice, and was bewildered when the option wasn't there. As others have said, this is a really obvious feature.
I will now have to create this expense as a service I provided and invoice it that way, which seems like a completely unnecessary extra step.
Hey @Norm and @KLJHall!
Thank you both for the feedback and adding to the conversation! As you both already know, this currently isn't a feature/function that's available in Wave but we are of course aware that this is in demand.
To be completely transparent however, I do need to echo some of the earlier comments and say that there is currently no planned implementation of such a feature or function in Wave in the near or immediate future. That doesn't mean that this is something that will never happen, only that we shouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.
Having said that, a possible workaround would be to a) add the receipt expense item(s) as a line item (or multiple) on the receipt. If a product/service does not exist for such an expense yet, you can simply add it straight from the invoice creation page by clicking "create a new item" when adding it to the invoice. This would enable you to at least have the expense on the invoice, though it would not be associated with the receipt (which would be associated with the purchase transaction on your Accounting > Transactions page).
As others have stated above, you can also opt to download a copy of the receipt and send it to the customer as an attachment along with the invoice. To do so, simply download the receipt and invoice as .pdfs, and email to the client in a single email.
+1 This would be so useful. None of the workarounds are that good.