Sub-categories, accounts, and expense reports

hslabbert

We have a few interconnected requirements we're trying to solve in our accounting:

First, we're looking for subcategories on expenses/transactions. We're a charity working with animal rescue. So, for example, rescue work is a large "over-arching" category that we need to be able to report on. But, within that rescue work we have various categories of expenses, such as feed and bedding, veterinary care, transportation cost, etc. We can account for these different more granular categories with an expense category for each, using a common prefix (e.g. Rescues - Transportation; Rescues - Veterinary care, etc.). But, then we lose the ability to report on the overall Rescues category and have to resort to data exports and a bunch of spreadsheet shenanigans. One alternative that we're looking to adopt next year is to basically abuse accounts as these "over-arching" categories. Any rescue-related expenses (Feed & bedding; veterinary care; etc.) would be allocated to a "Rescue Expenses" account, with the categories being those more granular classifications. We could then use the "Rescue Expenses" account expense numbers as a "roll-up" for all of the more finely categorized expenses within that account.

Having subcategories, though, would be ideal here, i.e. permitting creating "Parent" categories ("Rescues", in this example) and then creating subcategories below those parent categories (so e.g. "Rescues > Veterinary Care". Reports could then report on the subcategories as well as the aggregated figures for a given parent category.

This starts to interact with the second requirement, which is around expense reports for reimbursement of staff or volunteers. We need to be able to track expenses incurred by volunteers by a given project on a per project/volunteer pair basis. A project here would be e.g. the rescue & transport of one or a group of animals (but this could translate to other businesses as well, e.g. trades allocating employee-incurred expenses to a given trades project). This requirement is similar to what's discussed in the Expense reimbursement for employees thread. We currently handle this with spreadsheets, with a tab per project. The process is as follows:

• Volunteers submit receipts to us for bookkeeping, either physical receipts or photos.
• a new spreadsheet tab is created for the project/employee pair if it does not yet exist (e.g. "Rescue A - Volunteer1", "Rescue A - Volunteer2", "Rescue B - Volunteer3", etc.)
• each expense/receipt gets a line item in the spreadsheet on that project/volunteer pair's tab, recording the expense amount and vendor
• receipt images are uploaded to Wave
• receipts are processed for amount and posted to accounting to a single "Expenses" account that was manually added as a "Cash and Bank" account
• the total expenses incurred by each volunteer on a project are tabulated in the spreadsheet
• the volunteer is reimbursed for their expenses manually, e.g. via e-transfer
• the e-transfer is done in an account linked to Wave, and is recorded as a transfer to the central expense account described above
• the tab is annotated to indicate that the listed expenses have been reimbursed ("export report has been processed")

We've recently found the How to account for reimbursements article. That is similar to our reimbursement process on the accounting flow, except using a liability account per volunteer / staff member rather than a single cash & bank "Expenses" account. This could help, but it still falls short on a couple of fronts:

1. It has no ability to correlate expenses to a given project. This is the notion of an "expense report" as described in the Expense reimbursement for employees thread.
2. It conflicts with the "account as a parent category" workaround that we are trying to implement to address the lack of subcategories.

On #2: If we were to try to implement the reimbursement liability accounts per volunteer, as described in How to account for reimbursements, things would get somewhat convoluted if we also have accounts as "parent categories". It could work, but the flow would have to become:

1. post the volunteer's expenses to their unique (per-volunteer) liability account
2. reimburse them via e-transfer
3. record the e-transfer transaction in our bank account as a "transfer to account", with the destination account being the "parent category" expense account, e.g. "Rescues" from the example.
4. Perform a second transfer, this time from the "parent category" expense account but with the destination being the volunteer's unique liability account.

It still does not have any notion of a "project" or grouping of a set of expenses into a compiled expense report.

Effectively we are looking for a method to indicate "this group of expenses were incurred by Individual1 in service of Project A, and this is the status of this grouping of expenses (received; posted to accounting; approved/rejected; reimbursed".

Are there current methods to implement these two requirements in Wave? Just to summarize, we're looking for:

1. Sub-categories for transactions (specifically expenses)
2. Ability to group a set of transactions (expenses) into an expense report, ideally with some notion of the status of the expense report (received; approved/rejected; processed; reimbursed/processed)

AlexL

Hey @hslabbert , thanks for providing us a detailed description of what you're looking for in the system and how you're looking to use it. This always helps our product team understand the needs of our users and prioritize new releases. I'll answer your needs in order:
1. Sub-categories do not exist in Wave and it is a commonly requested feature idea that I'll add your name to.
2. We don't support project accounting (which can be similar to sub-categories) and we don't support custom reports in Wave.

Although both of these things have been requested before, we don't have a timeline on when they'll be implemented in Wave and as it turns out there's no other real way to handle this (especially when dealing with both together) within the software. You mentioned that you currently do the work on a spreadsheet and and this would still be the best way to handle these situations moving forward.

ohio_bryce

Another vote for sub-categories.

For instance - I like to have Utilities and then sub-categories for each utility provider

(Actually... If I can report by vendor, is this an unnecessary redundancy?)

Thanks!

WesH

And another vote for sub-categories.

kimhopkins

Hi, I tried my best at tax time last year to work around the absence of sub-categories. I can't do it again. I'm not sure if this is the best place but I wanted to make sure it's communicated to Wave directly. Do you have any plans to roll out sub-categories and if so, when? If it's not by the end of 2021, I'm 100% switching to another software. I don't care how much I have to pay for it. This is unusable without sub-categories. Thank you, Kim

princesspanic18

Sub-categories, pls! And a reporting process to go along with it.

mdkoch84

@AlexL Please add my vote for sub-categories! We love Wave but are likely gonna have to jump ship since we can't break out expenses (or report on it). Please help!

TomCooper

COA sub accounts or sub categories seems pretty useful. Please add this feature.

dancepanther

Also voting for subcategories, and also very important - the ability to edit/delete ALL Chart of Account categories and accounts. Is very frustrating to have so many items in the Chart of Accounts that are not used (ever) and no ability to streamline/fully customize them. Cumbersome when categorizing transactions.

Flopbot

I upvote this one too. Is there a way to truly vote this one up? For Personal Finances - not my Business Finances - I use a program called Simplifi by Quicken. They have a "Savings Goals" feature that I so wish existed in Wave.

For example, if I have $1,000 in my one (1) Savings Account, I want to know that $200 is reserved for Marketing, $600 is reserved for Contingency, and $200 is reserved for taxes.

Has anyone found a viable workaround?