Also pretty disappointed in this. We were recently updated to the new version of Wave and I was really hoping that this would be a feature in the new release as it is the Achilles heel of the solution. We have been balancing on the fence considering moving away to a different solution that will let us do this for over a year now. While I do love most things with Wave, the pricing model makes them pretty comparable cost-wise to the other big online accounting solution, which does have a decent solution for handling transaction attachments. I'm afraid that if there is no ETA for this then we will likely start our new fiscal year on an alternative solution instead of continuing to wait.
Wave reps, this is an essential feature, why can't you fix this? In fact if you fix this, there won't be a need for merging feature. In fact we only need feature for attaching a receipt to transaction. Adding a new transaction for a receipt is really USELESS. Please please please add this feature ASAP. Lots of my time is WASTED for merging transactions. I hate doing work when the solution is very simple. And during the entire conversation there has not been offered a good explanation. Thanks.
I have also been riding the fence on switching to Wave as my sole small business solution. The ability to add supporting documentation (receipts) to a transaction is the last item I need to cut over. Please consider this as a high priority and notify your user base when available - I am not the only one waiting for this feature. Thanks for your awesome application and continued efforts. ... standing by...
My sincere apologies that this has been delayed. Our team has had to shift a few things around to deal with migrating users onto our new platform. We plan on addressing and announcing this update once it's ready. Again I apologize for the timelines that may have been shared previously.
Hey @BarsinA ,
Thank you for the update. Would you mind sharing the ETA for this? As this discussion is going for 2 years now and we were told in the past that's it's being worked on...so when "once it's ready" is planned to be?
due to this problem I've got a mountain of work to do..... getting carpal tunnel clicking non stop. Yea I did bad bookkeeping from the get-go but the process to clean it up isn't helping!
Is there an updated ETA for implementing this feature?
My thoughts, as an IT guy, have the ability to upload invoices in bulk in the "Receipts" menu... now they are available. Now you could go to 'Transactions' and have a 'link to a receipt' button for expense transactions and it shows all the uploaded, unlinked receipts. Choose one, and it links the receipt to that transaction and done! No duplication! Alternatively, could go to the "receipts" menu and simply post those uploaded reciepts to transactions (as it does now).
Hi @BITS . At the moment, this doesn't exist on our short term roadmap. It is something we've wanted to add to the software for a while now so we're hoping that we can get to the implementation of it sooner than later.
My apologies that this hasn't been implemented yet. It is on our list of things to address in future updates for the new year. Hope you can continue to upload your expense transactions since we don't have an ETA for when this function will be implemented just yet!
Thanks.
Hi ! Just want to share my "workaround", while we wait for this important feature.
First, I go through my bank statements via transactions and reconciliation, making sure everything is in the right place and move them to the right account chart. I also often need to add taxes and sometimes split the bill between two accounts, when only a portion of the bill is taxed. The only thing I'm not doing yet is check the "review" status, since this is my check to know if I have the receipt or not.
Obviously, after all this work, I don't want to use the Merge feature since it will delete almost everything I've done with the account charts and taxes.
What I do is I then go to the Receipts page, and I review receipt by assigning a dummy account & account chart called "Receipts", then post it to the transactions. I do this in batch for a bunch of receipts
I go back to Transactions and scroll down in the list. I will quickly see two similar transactions, and I can look for "Receipts" in the Account column to quickly navigate through the transactions and I stop when I see a receipt "fake transaction". Next to it normally sits the original transaction. I check that the amount matches and I can then click on "Mark as reviewed" since I now know that I have this receipt.
I delete the "fake transaction" receipt, which I no longer need, to avoid duplicates. If later I need to find a receipt for a reviewed transaction, I know I'll be able to find it in the Receipts page in Wave. That's still not giving you a receipt linked to a transaction, but at least it gets my accounting straight, in my case.
Notes:
I use the receipts features only for physical receipts like restaurants. I don't collect all of my digital receipts/invoices in Wave since I can always search for them in my mails. I believe this workaround works if you have few receipts here and there and not on all of your transactions.
The only downside I can see is that WHEN Wave will implement a proper Merge or Link receipt to transaction, I might not be able to back-track with those receipts since they are marked as "done" and can no longer be moved to transactions.
Hope it helps someone
Side note for Wave team:
1. Your system already finds the date, amount and name of the transaction on scanned receipts
2. You already have the UI/UX workflow of linking matching transactions between accounts (which works awesome BTW)
3. The way I see it would be exactly the same: when you open a receipt you have a dropdown menu with a selected list of suggested transactions to link to, based on the date & amount
4. If you need help to speed up this implementation, I'll be happy to help
My apologies that there was a promise unfulfilled in this thread. Still no solid updates from our accounting team yet. We will most definitely make a post about it when there is a release.
Thank goodness I searched this before I went all in on your app. Just convinced my partners that Wave was the way to you over Quickbooks. As you have been told for two straight years, attaching a receipt to an expense is a basic function, so much so that your competitors don't consider this an enhancement. I was going to spend this week moving all of our books over to Wave, then yesterday wanted to attach a couple scanned receipts, found this thread....now I get to tell my partners, "ooops I spoke too soon, this is not fully baked yet". Nice try though. Bummer.
It would be great if merging receipts with bank transactions could be more seamless. I wish the program would automatically search for matches when we confirm the receipt. This would save so much time.
+1. Reallly would like this. Other people in our business are the ones making purchases while I handle accounting, so it'd be really nice if when they upload a receipt, it would attach to a transaction automatically based on date of sale and amount. If no exact match found, it could be placed in a 'needs review' queue so I can manually decide which transaction to attach to. With a receipt attached, it would greatly help me correctly categorize the expense.
Wave, I am sorry, but this feature is a deal breaker. Have been using your software for almost 2 years, waiting for this feature. But I can't wait forever. I am sure you are loosing more and more customers because of this. So yea, there you go.
Well I'm calling it after two years. 2nd year in a row I curse Wave while dealing with receipt duplicates while doing taxes and trying not to mess up my accounting. Two years of "your not using the correct process" ignores real world complications, "its only 5 clicks" x100 receipts, "we appreciate your feedback" but ignore it anyway, "its coming soon"... NOT. You clearly have no idea how important a BASIC feature this is and how it affects all users. There have been many brilliant posts in this thread by amazing users that led nowhere. Your forums are littered with other threads dealing with the fallout from the lack of it. I love your software in every other way but this is a deal breaker and you have lost my trust to address it. As one poster mentioned, Keep it simple and don't over think it. "Perfect is the enemy of good."
I started at page one and continued to read with increasing disbelief. It boggles the mind that this basic feature still isn't present after two years. This shows an utter disdain for the user base.
Two years!? I'm glad I found this thread before I fully committed to Wave. It was so promising, but maybe I'll have to go back to Quick Books Online for my new business.
Just to echo the points made. To upload receipts without duplicating under transactions page....come on guys. Its so so basic and you get many other things right. Why is this not a priority?
Im considering moving over to Wave from Sage...but you need to give customers an answer....is this going to happen or not?
On a similar note I still dont understand why we cant use the "receipt scanning" technology to upload Purchase Invoices?
Wave is brilliant - even though in the UK you can no longer have automatic bank feeds, but I understand and accept this. The issues raised on receipt matching needs to be addressed ... 2 years on and this thread is still ongoing. Time for a yes or no please
Congratulations Wave you've just lost a customer over this. I imagine there have been plenty before me and will be plenty after me until you let us just upload attachments simply without all the receipt processing.
I already have all my transactions in wave. I just want to attach a receipt to them. I tried uploading receipts and they took hours to process with no manual override at all. That's insanity! Glad to be moving to Quickbooks for the new tax year!
At this point we haven't heard whether this automated feature will be a prioritized update. Currently you can merge the receipt transaction with the bank imported transaction in the meantime. We do know that receipts function will update in the future however. Our team is aware of the limitations with both the mobile app, as well as the functionality in the web version. Thanks for your input in our community.
I've been trying to ascertain what possible reason Wave would have for not adding this functionality after 2+ years of requests by users (see below). The manual process for:
1) Uploading receipts one at a time
2) Classifying the receipt
3) Finding the duplicate transaction (made slightly easier by transaction $ amount), then (finally)
4) Merging the transaction
is absolutely asinine. Give users a way to attach a receipt to a transaction. Hard stop.
The first post I found from a Wave SVP about the issue is dated Feb-2018 (below):
Mani
Let's start with an admission: we know our system can be better with this workflow. The duplication is frustrating and the situation is actually common. The solution hasn't always been easy, but we're now actively working towards making improvements this year. Our intent is to first ensure that we do a better job detecting duplicates and merging them for you automatically. Thereafter, we're going to look at shifting towards an "attach receipt" model, and that will permeate throughout Wave. I know it doesn't solve your problems immediately, but know that we feel your pain.
Such a great platform, why leave out this basic feature? Wave, pretty please with a cherry on top 🍒, listen to your users and add the ability to attach receipts to bank transactions.
Hey all. Thank you for your continued feedback here. This is not something that we've heard any further on, but we will be sure to update this thread if we hear anything back!
Can we at least know what the technical challenge of attaching receipts is? You guys have automatic OCR scanning of receipts and automatic creation of transactions - technically challenging on their own accords. Yet, it's hard to believe that simply attaching a receipt record (in the database) to a transaction record (again in the database) is so hard. I mean you already do this mapping when you create a new transaction via receipts screen.
I think this is more to do to with your product manager ignoring the user community and not your tech team's fault. My background is in product engineering and product management, so I understand the trade-offs that the teams have to make behind the scenes - but this issue alone seems to be a slam dunk in my view to just prioritize and fix.
I know the support team doesn't make decisions on features, but at least forward this note to your product manager so you can get a timeline established for your users.
Comments
Also pretty disappointed in this. We were recently updated to the new version of Wave and I was really hoping that this would be a feature in the new release as it is the Achilles heel of the solution. We have been balancing on the fence considering moving away to a different solution that will let us do this for over a year now. While I do love most things with Wave, the pricing model makes them pretty comparable cost-wise to the other big online accounting solution, which does have a decent solution for handling transaction attachments. I'm afraid that if there is no ETA for this then we will likely start our new fiscal year on an alternative solution instead of continuing to wait.
Wave reps, this is an essential feature, why can't you fix this? In fact if you fix this, there won't be a need for merging feature. In fact we only need feature for attaching a receipt to transaction. Adding a new transaction for a receipt is really USELESS. Please please please add this feature ASAP. Lots of my time is WASTED for merging transactions. I hate doing work when the solution is very simple. And during the entire conversation there has not been offered a good explanation. Thanks.
I have also been riding the fence on switching to Wave as my sole small business solution. The ability to add supporting documentation (receipts) to a transaction is the last item I need to cut over. Please consider this as a high priority and notify your user base when available - I am not the only one waiting for this feature. Thanks for your awesome application and continued efforts. ... standing by...
It's been almost 2 years since an update was promised. This very basic feature is still missing!
Can you give us an update, please?
Hey @SomeGuy4
My sincere apologies that this has been delayed. Our team has had to shift a few things around to deal with migrating users onto our new platform. We plan on addressing and announcing this update once it's ready. Again I apologize for the timelines that may have been shared previously.
Hey @BarsinA ,
Thank you for the update. Would you mind sharing the ETA for this? As this discussion is going for 2 years now and we were told in the past that's it's being worked on...so when "once it's ready" is planned to be?
due to this problem I've got a mountain of work to do..... getting carpal tunnel clicking non stop. Yea I did bad bookkeeping from the get-go but the process to clean it up isn't helping!
Is there an updated ETA for implementing this feature?
My thoughts, as an IT guy, have the ability to upload invoices in bulk in the "Receipts" menu... now they are available. Now you could go to 'Transactions' and have a 'link to a receipt' button for expense transactions and it shows all the uploaded, unlinked receipts. Choose one, and it links the receipt to that transaction and done! No duplication! Alternatively, could go to the "receipts" menu and simply post those uploaded reciepts to transactions (as it does now).
Hi @BITS . At the moment, this doesn't exist on our short term roadmap. It is something we've wanted to add to the software for a while now so we're hoping that we can get to the implementation of it sooner than later.
Still waitinggggg.....
Isn't this what accounting is about?
Tracking your expenses properly for the tax man?
Receipts are core to this..
Hey @Ronalds
My apologies that this hasn't been implemented yet. It is on our list of things to address in future updates for the new year. Hope you can continue to upload your expense transactions since we don't have an ETA for when this function will be implemented just yet!
Thanks.
Hi ! Just want to share my "workaround", while we wait for this important feature.
First, I go through my bank statements via transactions and reconciliation, making sure everything is in the right place and move them to the right account chart. I also often need to add taxes and sometimes split the bill between two accounts, when only a portion of the bill is taxed. The only thing I'm not doing yet is check the "review" status, since this is my check to know if I have the receipt or not.
Obviously, after all this work, I don't want to use the Merge feature since it will delete almost everything I've done with the account charts and taxes.
What I do is I then go to the Receipts page, and I review receipt by assigning a dummy account & account chart called "Receipts", then post it to the transactions. I do this in batch for a bunch of receipts
I go back to Transactions and scroll down in the list. I will quickly see two similar transactions, and I can look for "Receipts" in the Account column to quickly navigate through the transactions and I stop when I see a receipt "fake transaction". Next to it normally sits the original transaction. I check that the amount matches and I can then click on "Mark as reviewed" since I now know that I have this receipt.
I delete the "fake transaction" receipt, which I no longer need, to avoid duplicates. If later I need to find a receipt for a reviewed transaction, I know I'll be able to find it in the Receipts page in Wave. That's still not giving you a receipt linked to a transaction, but at least it gets my accounting straight, in my case.
Notes:
Hope it helps someone
Side note for Wave team:
1. Your system already finds the date, amount and name of the transaction on scanned receipts
2. You already have the UI/UX workflow of linking matching transactions between accounts (which works awesome BTW)
3. The way I see it would be exactly the same: when you open a receipt you have a dropdown menu with a selected list of suggested transactions to link to, based on the date & amount
4. If you need help to speed up this implementation, I'll be happy to help
Gab
Any news on this? It's been almost 2 years since an update was promised.
Can you give us an update, please?
Hey @Stratozsphere
My apologies that there was a promise unfulfilled in this thread. Still no solid updates from our accounting team yet. We will most definitely make a post about it when there is a release.
Thank goodness I searched this before I went all in on your app. Just convinced my partners that Wave was the way to you over Quickbooks. As you have been told for two straight years, attaching a receipt to an expense is a basic function, so much so that your competitors don't consider this an enhancement. I was going to spend this week moving all of our books over to Wave, then yesterday wanted to attach a couple scanned receipts, found this thread....now I get to tell my partners, "ooops I spoke too soon, this is not fully baked yet". Nice try though. Bummer.
It would be great if merging receipts with bank transactions could be more seamless. I wish the program would automatically search for matches when we confirm the receipt. This would save so much time.
+1. Reallly would like this. Other people in our business are the ones making purchases while I handle accounting, so it'd be really nice if when they upload a receipt, it would attach to a transaction automatically based on date of sale and amount. If no exact match found, it could be placed in a 'needs review' queue so I can manually decide which transaction to attach to. With a receipt attached, it would greatly help me correctly categorize the expense.
Wave, I am sorry, but this feature is a deal breaker. Have been using your software for almost 2 years, waiting for this feature. But I can't wait forever. I am sure you are loosing more and more customers because of this. So yea, there you go.
Well I'm calling it after two years. 2nd year in a row I curse Wave while dealing with receipt duplicates while doing taxes and trying not to mess up my accounting. Two years of "your not using the correct process" ignores real world complications, "its only 5 clicks" x100 receipts, "we appreciate your feedback" but ignore it anyway, "its coming soon"... NOT. You clearly have no idea how important a BASIC feature this is and how it affects all users. There have been many brilliant posts in this thread by amazing users that led nowhere. Your forums are littered with other threads dealing with the fallout from the lack of it. I love your software in every other way but this is a deal breaker and you have lost my trust to address it. As one poster mentioned, Keep it simple and don't over think it. "Perfect is the enemy of good."
This my friends, is an outrage.
I started at page one and continued to read with increasing disbelief. It boggles the mind that this basic feature still isn't present after two years. This shows an utter disdain for the user base.
Two years!? I'm glad I found this thread before I fully committed to Wave. It was so promising, but maybe I'll have to go back to Quick Books Online for my new business.
Just to echo the points made. To upload receipts without duplicating under transactions page....come on guys. Its so so basic and you get many other things right. Why is this not a priority?
Im considering moving over to Wave from Sage...but you need to give customers an answer....is this going to happen or not?
On a similar note I still dont understand why we cant use the "receipt scanning" technology to upload Purchase Invoices?
Wave is brilliant - even though in the UK you can no longer have automatic bank feeds, but I understand and accept this. The issues raised on receipt matching needs to be addressed ... 2 years on and this thread is still ongoing. Time for a yes or no please
I can't believe this still isn't a thing!?!?
Congratulations Wave you've just lost a customer over this. I imagine there have been plenty before me and will be plenty after me until you let us just upload attachments simply without all the receipt processing.
I already have all my transactions in wave. I just want to attach a receipt to them. I tried uploading receipts and they took hours to process with no manual override at all. That's insanity! Glad to be moving to Quickbooks for the new tax year!
Hey @stuzz82 Hi @TimBob12
At this point we haven't heard whether this automated feature will be a prioritized update. Currently you can merge the receipt transaction with the bank imported transaction in the meantime. We do know that receipts function will update in the future however. Our team is aware of the limitations with both the mobile app, as well as the functionality in the web version. Thanks for your input in our community.
I've been trying to ascertain what possible reason Wave would have for not adding this functionality after 2+ years of requests by users (see below). The manual process for:
1) Uploading receipts one at a time
2) Classifying the receipt
3) Finding the duplicate transaction (made slightly easier by transaction $ amount), then (finally)
4) Merging the transaction
is absolutely asinine. Give users a way to attach a receipt to a transaction. Hard stop.
The first post I found from a Wave SVP about the issue is dated Feb-2018 (below):
Mani
Let's start with an admission: we know our system can be better with this workflow. The duplication is frustrating and the situation is actually common. The solution hasn't always been easy, but we're now actively working towards making improvements this year. Our intent is to first ensure that we do a better job detecting duplicates and merging them for you automatically. Thereafter, we're going to look at shifting towards an "attach receipt" model, and that will permeate throughout Wave. I know it doesn't solve your problems immediately, but know that we feel your pain.
SVP of Product @ Wave
February 23, 2018
Love using Wave but still not understanding why the feature to attach a receipt hasn't yet been added.
Such a great platform, why leave out this basic feature? Wave, pretty please with a cherry on top 🍒, listen to your users and add the ability to attach receipts to bank transactions.
Hey all. Thank you for your continued feedback here. This is not something that we've heard any further on, but we will be sure to update this thread if we hear anything back!
Can we at least know what the technical challenge of attaching receipts is? You guys have automatic OCR scanning of receipts and automatic creation of transactions - technically challenging on their own accords. Yet, it's hard to believe that simply attaching a receipt record (in the database) to a transaction record (again in the database) is so hard. I mean you already do this mapping when you create a new transaction via receipts screen.
I think this is more to do to with your product manager ignoring the user community and not your tech team's fault. My background is in product engineering and product management, so I understand the trade-offs that the teams have to make behind the scenes - but this issue alone seems to be a slam dunk in my view to just prioritize and fix.
I know the support team doesn't make decisions on features, but at least forward this note to your product manager so you can get a timeline established for your users.
Another user requesting this feature. I may have to look for other accounting software if this simple feature isn't implemented by year's end.