@Samd - I realise you are being deliberately non-committal, but I do thank you 🙏 #1 for the latest response from 🌊Wave #2.
the callout
It is a response, though. Not a proactive update for the customers watching this 🧵thread with anticipation. 💬I'm not trying to speak 🙊 for anyone but myself, but I would expect to 👀 see more proactive updates 📝 now that this 🎉 feature is being:
@Samd said:
we're actively working on at the moment, and is on the roadmap for one of our priority projects for this year.
I will feel more involved if 🌊Wave also takes the bold stance of passing on the 🤓🥼 developers' (sanitised🧽) progress 🚧 at the appropriate sprint/squash/feat/branch/commit 🔤 stages, so we can follow along at 🏡home. Bugs 🐛 and all. 🥳
🖱️Click on the awesome button ⏬ if this sounds like a great idea to you too
footnotes
@Wave doesn't autocorrect to Wave
Or at least: 🌊Wave
Markdown #4 footnotes are supported. Well done! ↩︎
your emoji library is not meeting my expectations based on GitHub's capability.
I had to use the Unicode references for these: 🙏 ⏬ 🖱️ 👥 📛 💬 🤓 🆔 🐛 🏡 🚧 👀 🥳 🧽 📣 🙊 🎉 🥼 🧵 📝🌊 #3↩︎
and seriously, the missed opportunity here:
. ↩︎↩︎
named and numbered footnotes with nesting too. #5↩︎
This is obviously still a very popular feature request... It seems so basic to me.
Even the merge functionality isn't great, it uses the transaction of the receipt, so I lose all the info I had on the bank transaction, description, vendor, category,...
Here's how I work, I upload a CSV of my bank transactions, because that's where I start. I need to attach a receipt/invoice to every transaction I have. Then I start adding receipts for the transactions I have, but that creates these duplicate transactions.. So I merge them, resulting in a loss of info. Well okay it's not gone gone, but still... Not what I wanted to happen.
You really just need an autocomplete dropdown in the "Upload receipt" modal. I would've done this in a day guys come on... (developer myself). It's been 6 months.
I know I'm not paying for the product right now, but seriously, if it did what I needed it to do, i would be willing to pay for it..
@axelvnk Thanks for providing your workflow and sharing why it would be super helpful to be able to start attaching receipts. This is useful information for us and we appreciate you taking the time to reach out about this. If you head to the previous page on this thread, have you seen Mani's post which states we are going to have attaching receipts be a feature in Wave? It's not a matter of if but when so hang tight! While we don't have a specific ETA- there are lots of variables and priorities to consider- the attaching receipts feature will be part of Wave's future.
Hi @ckeen_1244. I am so relieved to hear that you will definitely be adding the ability to upload/attach receipts to existing/imported transactions! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have to ask, though, if you're willing to share what it is about the feature addition that is so complicated (you noted "lots of variables and priorities to consider"). I'm really not trying to be obnoxious, I promise. I'm sure your product team has a million things on their plate, and I'm no expert in product management or software engineering, but I do know enough about it (even specific to accounting software) to be really surprised that this isn't a quick addition. I wonder what current or planned Wave elements this might conflict with (what those "variables" are). I totally understand if this isn't something you want to be transparent about, but I think understanding the "why" behind the delay on this much-requested feature would make many of us feel a bit better about the wait. Appreciate your consideration, and thanks again for assuring us that it is in the pipeline.
@intothesun Full transparency, it's just not a main focus for our software at the moment. Even if it's a simple addition to add to the code, we're looking to improve our sales services which need work (customer statements etc), as well as the Reconciliation page. We definitely understand that this is a must-have feature, but we just don't have this listed a top priority at the moment I'm afraid. We will, however, continue to listen to everyones feedback in this thread so that we can get more motion on implementing this feature as soon as possible.
In one of the Wave team replies they say that "If it helps, you can attach a receipt image to an expense transaction in Wave! Once you post an imported receipt from the Purchases > Receipts page, it'll create an expense transaction which--by default--includes a link to the receipt image".
This sounds great, except I have a lot of receipts that Wave does not import correctly. How do I then add them with the digital receipt attached?
Hey @WDUK, thanks for reaching out! What seems to be the issue with your receipts uploading into Wave? Are you using the receipts app or uploading directly to your account?
If your receipts are not uploading and creating expense transactions, you can add those transactions manually to your account. You can do so by heading to Accounting > Transactions > Add expense.
Hello @Mani
Is there an ETA for this feature?
For some users trying WAVEAPPS or already working with it, this is a much-needed feature and I can assume that some people decide not to continue with WAVEAPPS only because this is not available.
I think it is only fair that you at least give users an ETA about this so they know if it's worth the wait or just go with a different solution.
Hi @OdedG , I can't speak for Mani, but on our end we don't have a set ETA for when attaching a receipt image to a transaction will be possible in Wave.
To be completely transparent, on the Support side of things, it's not something that we're preparing for in the immediate future, which means it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. As Chelsea mentioned above, the feature will be a part of Wave's future, but that looks to be some time down the road.
If I can ask for some feedback on this feature, is there anything you'd like to attach to a transaction other than receipts?
If I can ask for some feedback on this feature, is there anything you'd like to attach to a transaction other than receipts?
A bill. Or attaching a bill to a receipt would be nice.
In general, and as others have pointed out, being able to attach multiple receipts to a single transaction is necessary (probably via, Split this withdrawal feature).
I am a paying customer (Payroll and Invoice payments) since Jan 2018 and have followed this thread intermittently since then.
If this is not a priority as you state, how can we as paying customers make it a priority other than repeatedly ranting on these forums for years? I'd love to make this your priority by voting, adding a formal bug report (doubled transaction entries for every uploaded receipt in any accounting is a bug!) or even starting a GoFundMe drive to fund you to hire any one of the many freelancers that comment in here saying they could do it in an hour. I'll pay for that hour! As I see ZERO progress on this for years, I give up on providing any feedback here, since no one seems to give it priority. What options are you giving us other than to leave Wave?
As stated by quite a few people, this should be a VERY easy fix. Lets walk through for my ranting purposes, the steps that I can see from the UI and minified JS.
In your Purchases->Receipts page, you have a form called "ReceiptImageUploadForm" attached to the GUI element titled "Upload a Receipt". This generates a hash for the image, and pushes to some server. I'm guessing this does two things based on what I see in steps 2 and 3 below. I guess it generates a new row in some database table somewhere invisible to the user, but also uploads the image to your amazonaws drive. You are simply storing the url text to this uploaded image in your database under some field IMAGE or the like.
You have a JQuery Table in the Accounting->Transactions page where each input value change results in some minified event fired methods being called, which from a quick look, appear to do some basic text verification (on text inputs), hopefully prevents various database attacks, then pushes to what I assume is the same Table or database mentioned in step 1.
So it appears to me that you already have all the tools you need to make this work. Here are the steps you seemingly can take:
Add a GUI button or additional entry to the dropdown list for each transaction. The only functionality you need here is the file browser, image hash generation, and upload functionality that you already have built into your "Upload a Receipt" button from Purchases->Receipts. You simply remove the "push" functionality you have tied to it in the Purchases->Receipts interface.
After the upload to AmazonAWS completes, take the url pointing to the image, and using the same JQuery input change events you use on all your other items for each transaction in Accounting->Transactions, call all these text verification methods, then update your database entry with this image url text.
After this completes, generate the little attachment icon that exists in all the other receipt generated transactions. DONE.
@topher217 your frustration is coming through loud and clear. It's difficult for us to help our great customers feel heard. The palatable evidence is typically the release of a sought after feature, and we've failed to give you that here. We're speaking with customers across hundreds of community threads and tens of thousands of chats and emails every month. We're in the tough position of having to prioritize against many valid requests without the capacity to address all of it. For example, we've just launched a brand new and powerful Account Reconciliation feature which was heavily requested too.
What I'll fully admit is: duplicate transactions aren't acceptable to your business, and we should be solving this problem regardless of how receipts work in Wave. We are trying to start tackling that problem in Q4 but I can't yet promise when our solution will arrive.
In the case of receipts as attachments to transactions: I'm afraid it's not as straightforward as your careful articulation. We allow our mobile app to upload receipts and for receipts to be emailed in. Each of these requires different workflows to generate a transaction. Meanwhile, an attachment to an existing transaction works, but what about those who want OCR or to upload a receipt before the transaction has arrived through their connected banks or bank statement upload? Having 2 different ways to deal with Receipts will cause many users confusion.
None of this is your problem, and it doesn't excuse our inability to address your pain immediately. I only hope that you can trust that we're working tirelessly to deliver ever better software to your business. We continue to see this as one of the top problems for us to address in early 2020. As always, I can't make any promises.
@Mani the point that I believe @topher217 is trying to make is that having an attachments option to a given transaction is not at all a difficult thing to implement.
What I want (and what I believe many here want) is a simple attachment feature, DIFFERENT than the receipts feature, to store documents related to a transaction for compliance and bookkeeping reasons.
Such a feature would seem simple to implement (as @topher217 pointed out, most of the code seems to be already done), and by labelling it as an additional attachment rather than a receipt, it would imply to the user that it's a bonus place to store documents, and not an OCR automation data input.
All I want is an attachment feature. If storage becomes an issue, I'd honestly be completely willing to either pay for usage or have an integration w/ Google Docs, OneDrive, etc. for a library folder in which Wave would store the documents and have the proper linkage going back to the interface -- I understand that would be relatively much harder to code, but it's not rocket science since many SaaS already do the same.
@Mani said:
In the case of receipts as attachments to transactions: I'm afraid it's not as straightforward as your careful articulation. We allow our mobile app to upload receipts and for receipts to be emailed in. Each of these requires different workflows to generate a transaction. Meanwhile, an attachment to an existing transaction works, but what about those who want OCR or to upload a receipt before the transaction has arrived through their connected banks or bank statement upload? Having 2 different ways to deal with Receipts will cause many users confusion.
Lets start with the fact that I disagree that having 2 ways to deal with one issue to be confusing. I think this is a false premise, and as pointed out by your own answer (having a way to upload receipts and for receipts to be emailed in...requir[ing] different workflows to generate a transaction) would point to this already being the way of doing things. If for some reason though, the UX people want there to be a single way to do it, then I beg you to make a poll on here or somewhere like surveymonkey. I don't think you are getting reflective numbers on how you should be focusing your dev time if all you rely on is the few and far between random rants people like me post on here. Can we see some numbers as to what your customers want vs what you are actually developing? I'm really hoping to see how my opinion compares with other users. Maybe I am an outlier, and I need to be searching for other software, or maybe there are large percentages of equal minded customers that simply can't be bothered to make a log-in for this forum. Specifically to this thread, I would be eager to hear who prefers the first of these two proposed workflows.
(Current Work Flow)
1. Upload receipt
2. Check if OCR worked correctly and fix any mistakes
3. Manually find your automatically imported transaction from your bank. Note that you may upload receipts before your bank posts them. This will almost certainly lead people to forget to go manually find this auto posted transaction a few days later, and lead to incorrect books. Not to mention this requires one to go searching blindly by approximate date, since bank postings may post a different date than on the receipt, and you cannot search by transaction amount STILL...Another insanely easy operation on any database query.
4. Delete or merge this doubled transaction.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for ALL your individual receipts coming in at different posting times, on different dates, mixed withing hundreds if not thousands of transactions.
OR
(Proposed Work Flow)
1. Manually find your transaction uploaded from your bank (again this could be improved with a search by transaction amount feature).
2. Upload receipt.
3. Repeat 1-2 for all receipts.
Me for example, think your efforts towards OCR receipts is like trying to run a marathon before you can even walk. If there is anything I've heard more than once in the coding community, its to start basic and build up. You are aiming too high. Get your basic functionality in check. I would MUCH rather prefer having a working simple system over any sort of broken fancy features that are promised to be "on the way" for years.
@topher217 I appreciate your feedback and the candour you're offering. We'll make sure that your desired workflow, and the challenges with our existing one, are deeply considered as our team plans and prioritizes work.
@Mani Hello there! I have been using WaveApps for the past few months and love the overall ease of use except for, as many others, the problem of being unable to upload receipts to transactions other than using the double entry and merging which means a lot of flipping between features, this eats up a lot of valuable time. I really just want to add a picture to the banktransaction.
I don't know if you talk to other accounting software developers, but if you do, may I suggest you talk to the people at Moneybird in the Netherlands? I use their software for our Dutch company and am very happy with it. They have the exact feature everyone is looking for. It works similarly to your "attaching invoice to payment feature". As far as the uploading, they use the same system Wave does (email, picture in app or upload in site)
It's actually because the fact that Moneybird is not available for Canada that I ended up finding Wave as I was looking for a similar program.
Hope this feature can be added soon, it would make the program perfect, at least for me
Thanks for all of the team's effort!
Thanks so much for reaching out about this +1 to the feature request. We've clearly heard a lot of cries for this feature and I agree with you! It would make it so much easier. I'd also like to thank you for giving us must context as to what you'd be using this feature for. Always helps when the developers can understand and empathize with the clients.
This should be an extremely basic feature to add. All I want to do is to be able to attach a document to an existing transaction. Even this comment I'm writing has a feature to add attachments. I can upload images using a complex workflow through a separate mobile app, why can't I go into a transaction on the website and attach a document? I'm a software engineer and if I worked at waveapps I could bang this out in less than a week, even if the code base is a horrible spaghetti mess. Hilarious you guys don't have this feature yet, it's so so so basic and critical for accounting.
Good lord, please just include this feature. I'm battling with my business partner as to whether continue using Wave for accounting or go back to our spreadsheet. Wave is perfectly good for generation of PO/quotes/invoices, but the the accounting side (whilst providing some genuinely useful advanced features) really misses the mark on some fundamental basic functionality, such as this...as well creating repeat regular expenses/transactions. I'm finding more each day.
Hi @OdedG . No ETA as this isn't something that is on the roadmap for the near future. Like Mani mentioned above, this is something that we would like to address in 2020, but it hasn't been confirmed yet.
I am new to wave. I have uploaded all my receipts.
Now I want to connect my bank statement.
Looks like that will be a bad idea.
I really need this accounting easy.
Please update the software to revolve around my bank checking account!
I do everything thru my biz checking account so that I can keep track of my biz.
All my little white receipts have no meaning unless they match up to my biz bank account statement.
Hi @izoo . Can you give me a further idea of exactly what you're trying to accomplish? It sounds like you want your receipt purchases to match up with what's happening on your bank statement. If this is the case, you can use our reconciliation function to ensure that all of your balances line up.
If what you're looking to do is actually add a copy of your bank statement to transactions, I'm afraid this isn't possible.
Feel free to further clarify so I can give you some more info.
The lack of receipts-as-transaction-attachments feature is the number one reason I'm considering switching away from Wave, despite the rest of the platform being great. Wave's emphasis on automation workflows doesn't do away with the need to manually address receipts, and in many instances just creates more work:
transactions need to be manually examined anyway as part of reconciliation, and there's a chance of errors in automated receipt matching that create work to track down
transaction matching doesn't handle Foreign Exchange transactions very well - so Wave's workflow is always going to create duplicate transactions to track down manually for any business that buys anything online from a foreign supplier.
I want to add my vote to get an attach document/receipt to transaction function. As it currently stands I have to do a lot more work than necessary just to get my receipts linked to a transaction.
I know there are probably many ways to do it, but might I venture a suggestion...
Have a receipts page that is independent of any business. This is where all unattached receipts will go whether uploaded via a web browser or the app.
If you prefer to simply attached receipts to your already imported or created transactions, Start at a particular business's transaction page. Every transaction will have a button that says "attach receipt" or something similar. When you click on that button, it will bring you to a list of unattached images/receipts. Scrolll through that list and select the proper receipt. Once selected that receipt will be attached to that transaction and filed under a receipts list for the particular business you are attaching it too.
If you prefer to create transactions from receipts, start on the unattached receipts list/page. Next to any particular receipt would be a button that says "create a transaction for this receipt" or something similar. Once that button is clicked, you would get an import module similar to the current one (It would also allow you to select which business to create a transaction in). Once you have entered the necessary information (business, category, account, amount, etc), the receipt will be filed under a receipt list for that business and a transaction with the receipt already attached will be created.
I think this would give folks two ways of importing receipts and would simplify how we get receipts into wave.
As always we appreciate the lengthy feedback on how this benefits your business. This type of feedback is productive with our team.
Our team is well aware of the benefits this feature would have for the business owner and though I can't speak on their behalf, I too agree that this feature would be a major improvement!
These changes and implementations do take time as we prioritize our list of updates, so don't hesitate to continue giving your feedback on this feature folks
Oh man how dissapointing. I've been a Wave user since this thread started back in Feb 18 and been following this thread ever since. The simple fact that I cannot attach a receipt to a transaction is a real let down. Please Wave, this really needs to happen (it was promised that it would happen this year).
Comments
the greeting
@Samd - I realise you are being deliberately non-committal, but I do thank you 🙏 #1 for the latest response from 🌊Wave #2.
It is a response, though. Not a proactive update for the customers watching this 🧵thread with anticipation. 💬I'm not trying to speak 🙊 for anyone but myself, but I would expect to 👀 see more proactive updates 📝 now that this 🎉 feature is being:
📣 the challenge
@Mani ,
💭 What do you think ??
I will feel more involved if 🌊Wave also takes the bold stance of passing on the 🤓🥼 developers' (sanitised🧽) progress 🚧 at the appropriate sprint/squash/feat/branch/commit 🔤 stages, so we can follow along at 🏡home. Bugs 🐛 and all. 🥳
Also, @Charlotte , see footnote #3
📛 Virgil
🆔GitHub: @virgilwashere
🐤Twitter: @virgilwashere
👥the groundswelling support
🖱️Click on the
awesome button ⏬ if this sounds like a great idea to you too 
footnotes
Markdown #4 footnotes are supported.
Well done! ↩︎
your emoji library is not meeting my expectations based on GitHub's capability.
I had to use the Unicode references for these: 🙏 ⏬ 🖱️ 👥 📛 💬 🤓 🆔 🐛 🏡 🚧 👀 🥳 🧽 📣 🙊 🎉 🥼 🧵 📝🌊 #3 ↩︎
and seriously, the missed opportunity here:
. ↩︎ ↩︎
named and numbered footnotes with nesting too. #5 ↩︎
But not
#6 ↩︎
superscriptedtokens.🖱️Click on the
awesome button ⏬ if this sounds like a great idea 
to you too 
↩︎
This is obviously still a very popular feature request... It seems so basic to me.
Even the merge functionality isn't great, it uses the transaction of the receipt, so I lose all the info I had on the bank transaction, description, vendor, category,...
Here's how I work, I upload a CSV of my bank transactions, because that's where I start. I need to attach a receipt/invoice to every transaction I have. Then I start adding receipts for the transactions I have, but that creates these duplicate transactions.. So I merge them, resulting in a loss of info. Well okay it's not gone gone, but still... Not what I wanted to happen.
You really just need an autocomplete dropdown in the "Upload receipt" modal. I would've done this in a day guys come on... (developer myself). It's been 6 months.
I know I'm not paying for the product right now, but seriously, if it did what I needed it to do, i would be willing to pay for it..
@axelvnk Thanks for providing your workflow and sharing why it would be super helpful to be able to start attaching receipts. This is useful information for us and we appreciate you taking the time to reach out about this. If you head to the previous page on this thread, have you seen Mani's post which states we are going to have attaching receipts be a feature in Wave? It's not a matter of if but when so hang tight! While we don't have a specific ETA- there are lots of variables and priorities to consider- the attaching receipts feature will be part of Wave's future.
Hi @ckeen_1244. I am so relieved to hear that you will definitely be adding the ability to upload/attach receipts to existing/imported transactions! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have to ask, though, if you're willing to share what it is about the feature addition that is so complicated (you noted "lots of variables and priorities to consider"). I'm really not trying to be obnoxious, I promise. I'm sure your product team has a million things on their plate, and I'm no expert in product management or software engineering, but I do know enough about it (even specific to accounting software) to be really surprised that this isn't a quick addition. I wonder what current or planned Wave elements this might conflict with (what those "variables" are). I totally understand if this isn't something you want to be transparent about, but I think understanding the "why" behind the delay on this much-requested feature would make many of us feel a bit better about the wait. Appreciate your consideration, and thanks again for assuring us that it is in the pipeline.
While we're at it, one great feature would be bulk updating transactions w/ receipts by way of some sort of ID or description match.
@intothesun Full transparency, it's just not a main focus for our software at the moment. Even if it's a simple addition to add to the code, we're looking to improve our sales services which need work (customer statements etc), as well as the Reconciliation page. We definitely understand that this is a must-have feature, but we just don't have this listed a top priority at the moment I'm afraid. We will, however, continue to listen to everyones feedback in this thread so that we can get more motion on implementing this feature as soon as possible.
In one of the Wave team replies they say that "If it helps, you can attach a receipt image to an expense transaction in Wave! Once you post an imported receipt from the Purchases > Receipts page, it'll create an expense transaction which--by default--includes a link to the receipt image".
This sounds great, except I have a lot of receipts that Wave does not import correctly. How do I then add them with the digital receipt attached?
Hey @WDUK, thanks for reaching out! What seems to be the issue with your receipts uploading into Wave? Are you using the receipts app or uploading directly to your account?
If your receipts are not uploading and creating expense transactions, you can add those transactions manually to your account. You can do so by heading to Accounting > Transactions > Add expense.
Hello @Mani
Is there an ETA for this feature?
For some users trying WAVEAPPS or already working with it, this is a much-needed feature and I can assume that some people decide not to continue with WAVEAPPS only because this is not available.
I think it is only fair that you at least give users an ETA about this so they know if it's worth the wait or just go with a different solution.
Hi @OdedG , I can't speak for Mani, but on our end we don't have a set ETA for when attaching a receipt image to a transaction will be possible in Wave.
To be completely transparent, on the Support side of things, it's not something that we're preparing for in the immediate future, which means it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. As Chelsea mentioned above, the feature will be a part of Wave's future, but that looks to be some time down the road.
If I can ask for some feedback on this feature, is there anything you'd like to attach to a transaction other than receipts?
A bill. Or attaching a bill to a receipt would be nice.
In general, and as others have pointed out, being able to attach multiple receipts to a single transaction is necessary (probably via, Split this withdrawal feature).
I am a paying customer (Payroll and Invoice payments) since Jan 2018 and have followed this thread intermittently since then.
If this is not a priority as you state, how can we as paying customers make it a priority other than repeatedly ranting on these forums for years? I'd love to make this your priority by voting, adding a formal bug report (doubled transaction entries for every uploaded receipt in any accounting is a bug!) or even starting a GoFundMe drive to fund you to hire any one of the many freelancers that comment in here saying they could do it in an hour. I'll pay for that hour! As I see ZERO progress on this for years, I give up on providing any feedback here, since no one seems to give it priority. What options are you giving us other than to leave Wave?
As stated by quite a few people, this should be a VERY easy fix. Lets walk through for my ranting purposes, the steps that I can see from the UI and minified JS.
So it appears to me that you already have all the tools you need to make this work. Here are the steps you seemingly can take:
@topher217 your frustration is coming through loud and clear. It's difficult for us to help our great customers feel heard. The palatable evidence is typically the release of a sought after feature, and we've failed to give you that here. We're speaking with customers across hundreds of community threads and tens of thousands of chats and emails every month. We're in the tough position of having to prioritize against many valid requests without the capacity to address all of it. For example, we've just launched a brand new and powerful Account Reconciliation feature which was heavily requested too.
What I'll fully admit is: duplicate transactions aren't acceptable to your business, and we should be solving this problem regardless of how receipts work in Wave. We are trying to start tackling that problem in Q4 but I can't yet promise when our solution will arrive.
In the case of receipts as attachments to transactions: I'm afraid it's not as straightforward as your careful articulation. We allow our mobile app to upload receipts and for receipts to be emailed in. Each of these requires different workflows to generate a transaction. Meanwhile, an attachment to an existing transaction works, but what about those who want OCR or to upload a receipt before the transaction has arrived through their connected banks or bank statement upload? Having 2 different ways to deal with Receipts will cause many users confusion.
None of this is your problem, and it doesn't excuse our inability to address your pain immediately. I only hope that you can trust that we're working tirelessly to deliver ever better software to your business. We continue to see this as one of the top problems for us to address in early 2020. As always, I can't make any promises.
@Mani the point that I believe @topher217 is trying to make is that having an attachments option to a given transaction is not at all a difficult thing to implement.
What I want (and what I believe many here want) is a simple attachment feature, DIFFERENT than the receipts feature, to store documents related to a transaction for compliance and bookkeeping reasons.
Such a feature would seem simple to implement (as @topher217 pointed out, most of the code seems to be already done), and by labelling it as an additional attachment rather than a receipt, it would imply to the user that it's a bonus place to store documents, and not an OCR automation data input.
All I want is an attachment feature. If storage becomes an issue, I'd honestly be completely willing to either pay for usage or have an integration w/ Google Docs, OneDrive, etc. for a library folder in which Wave would store the documents and have the proper linkage going back to the interface -- I understand that would be relatively much harder to code, but it's not rocket science since many SaaS already do the same.
Lets start with the fact that I disagree that having 2 ways to deal with one issue to be confusing. I think this is a false premise, and as pointed out by your own answer (having a way to upload receipts and for receipts to be emailed in...requir[ing] different workflows to generate a transaction) would point to this already being the way of doing things. If for some reason though, the UX people want there to be a single way to do it, then I beg you to make a poll on here or somewhere like surveymonkey. I don't think you are getting reflective numbers on how you should be focusing your dev time if all you rely on is the few and far between random rants people like me post on here. Can we see some numbers as to what your customers want vs what you are actually developing? I'm really hoping to see how my opinion compares with other users. Maybe I am an outlier, and I need to be searching for other software, or maybe there are large percentages of equal minded customers that simply can't be bothered to make a log-in for this forum. Specifically to this thread, I would be eager to hear who prefers the first of these two proposed workflows.
(Current Work Flow)
1. Upload receipt
2. Check if OCR worked correctly and fix any mistakes
3. Manually find your automatically imported transaction from your bank. Note that you may upload receipts before your bank posts them. This will almost certainly lead people to forget to go manually find this auto posted transaction a few days later, and lead to incorrect books. Not to mention this requires one to go searching blindly by approximate date, since bank postings may post a different date than on the receipt, and you cannot search by transaction amount STILL...Another insanely easy operation on any database query.
4. Delete or merge this doubled transaction.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for ALL your individual receipts coming in at different posting times, on different dates, mixed withing hundreds if not thousands of transactions.
OR
(Proposed Work Flow)
1. Manually find your transaction uploaded from your bank (again this could be improved with a search by transaction amount feature).
2. Upload receipt.
3. Repeat 1-2 for all receipts.
Me for example, think your efforts towards OCR receipts is like trying to run a marathon before you can even walk. If there is anything I've heard more than once in the coding community, its to start basic and build up. You are aiming too high. Get your basic functionality in check. I would MUCH rather prefer having a working simple system over any sort of broken fancy features that are promised to be "on the way" for years.
@topher217 I appreciate your feedback and the candour you're offering. We'll make sure that your desired workflow, and the challenges with our existing one, are deeply considered as our team plans and prioritizes work.
@Mani Hello there! I have been using WaveApps for the past few months and love the overall ease of use except for, as many others, the problem of being unable to upload receipts to transactions other than using the double entry and merging which means a lot of flipping between features, this eats up a lot of valuable time. I really just want to add a picture to the banktransaction.
I don't know if you talk to other accounting software developers, but if you do, may I suggest you talk to the people at Moneybird in the Netherlands? I use their software for our Dutch company and am very happy with it. They have the exact feature everyone is looking for. It works similarly to your "attaching invoice to payment feature". As far as the uploading, they use the same system Wave does (email, picture in app or upload in site)
It's actually because the fact that Moneybird is not available for Canada that I ended up finding Wave as I was looking for a similar program.
Hope this feature can be added soon, it would make the program perfect, at least for me
Thanks for all of the team's effort!
Hey there @Martine
Thanks so much for reaching out about this +1 to the feature request. We've clearly heard a lot of cries for this feature and I agree with you! It would make it so much easier. I'd also like to thank you for giving us must context as to what you'd be using this feature for. Always helps when the developers can understand and empathize with the clients.
This should be an extremely basic feature to add. All I want to do is to be able to attach a document to an existing transaction. Even this comment I'm writing has a feature to add attachments. I can upload images using a complex workflow through a separate mobile app, why can't I go into a transaction on the website and attach a document? I'm a software engineer and if I worked at waveapps I could bang this out in less than a week, even if the code base is a horrible spaghetti mess. Hilarious you guys don't have this feature yet, it's so so so basic and critical for accounting.
Good lord, please just include this feature. I'm battling with my business partner as to whether continue using Wave for accounting or go back to our spreadsheet. Wave is perfectly good for generation of PO/quotes/invoices, but the the accounting side (whilst providing some genuinely useful advanced features) really misses the mark on some fundamental basic functionality, such as this...as well creating repeat regular expenses/transactions. I'm finding more each day.
Wave said:
Does anyone in the community have any free alternatives to Wave with this basic feature?
@Mani do you have any update for the community about this? Still no ETA?
Hi @OdedG . No ETA as this isn't something that is on the roadmap for the near future. Like Mani mentioned above, this is something that we would like to address in 2020, but it hasn't been confirmed yet.
I am new to wave. I have uploaded all my receipts.
Now I want to connect my bank statement.
Looks like that will be a bad idea.
I really need this accounting easy.
Please update the software to revolve around my bank checking account!
I do everything thru my biz checking account so that I can keep track of my biz.
All my little white receipts have no meaning unless they match up to my biz bank account statement.
Hi @izoo . Can you give me a further idea of exactly what you're trying to accomplish? It sounds like you want your receipt purchases to match up with what's happening on your bank statement. If this is the case, you can use our reconciliation function to ensure that all of your balances line up.
If what you're looking to do is actually add a copy of your bank statement to transactions, I'm afraid this isn't possible.
Feel free to further clarify so I can give you some more info.
The lack of receipts-as-transaction-attachments feature is the number one reason I'm considering switching away from Wave, despite the rest of the platform being great. Wave's emphasis on automation workflows doesn't do away with the need to manually address receipts, and in many instances just creates more work:
I want to add my vote to get an attach document/receipt to transaction function. As it currently stands I have to do a lot more work than necessary just to get my receipts linked to a transaction.
I know there are probably many ways to do it, but might I venture a suggestion...
I think this would give folks two ways of importing receipts and would simplify how we get receipts into wave.
Hey @JeremiahJames @gerbablo
As always we appreciate the lengthy feedback on how this benefits your business. This type of feedback is productive with our team.
Our team is well aware of the benefits this feature would have for the business owner and though I can't speak on their behalf, I too agree that this feature would be a major improvement!
These changes and implementations do take time as we prioritize our list of updates, so don't hesitate to continue giving your feedback on this feature folks
Thanks again.
@BarsinA Thanks for reply. I think we all appreciate that it takes time, but this thread is approaching 2 years old. Your users won't wait forever.
Oh man how dissapointing. I've been a Wave user since this thread started back in Feb 18 and been following this thread ever since. The simple fact that I cannot attach a receipt to a transaction is a real let down. Please Wave, this really needs to happen (it was promised that it would happen this year).