Wave Connect: Easily import and export data with Wave's Google Sheets add-on
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Wave Connect: Easily import and export data with Wave's Google Sheets add-on
Wave Connect is Wave's official add-on for Google Sheets. Use it to quickly upload customers, products, invoices, bank transactions and bulk journal entries to your Wave business. You can also down...
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I was not able to find "Wave Connect" in the add-on store
Wave Connect does not come up in a search?
When do you expect this to go live?
When will Wave Connect go live on Google Add-ons?
I may have to switch to Zoho Invoice. It has the invoice import already running plus Customer portals.
Hi @Dimitriy, @KarenSted, @TCR, @Olive72,
Just a heads-up that Wave Connect has now been approved by Google, and is available to add to your Google Sheets.
At this moment, it is not yet 'findable' in the GSuite marketplace, but you can install from the button in this article, or directly with this link.
Thanks for your patience, and we look forward to hearing any feedback you may have on this new tool!
Thanks, PaulC for letting us know that Wave Connect is now available. I was able to import all of my products! Awesome!
That's great news. Thanks for letting me know, @Olive72 !
It will be interesting to see if customer statement and Bill can also be included in this addon
I was fooling around trying to find a way to export line items from invoices into an airtable so I can manage my inventory properly. Zapier doesn't seem to support line items (since the line numbers aren't exposed in wave) so I was about to give up. Then I googled and found this. Another angle of attack.
Sounds like a good use-case, Eric. Do let us know how you get on!
Thanks, Paul! The add-on is looking good! Curious to see when we will have an option to download transactions into Google sheets directly through this add-on. This would be very handy.
Are their plans to import recurring invoices? Also, any plans to enable bulk processing, such as bulk send invoices, etc?
Hi @TCR - no plans for recurring invoices or bulk send yet, but those are great suggestions. Most likely we'll look at them later in the year, as we release new APIs to build these features on top of.
@Dimitriy - when you say "download transactions", what are you thinking of? Are you thinking about "money transactions" in a particular bank account, with their splits to different Categories? Would you be OK with transactions for just one bank account at a time, and if not how would you expect to see bank transfers represented?What about Sales Taxes?
Are you looking for journal transactions, too? If so, would a 'pure' double-entry style report with debits and credits be sufficient for all transaction exports?
I can definitely understand why a transaction download would be valuable, but the data model in Wave is actually quite complex, so one of the hardest parts of this is figuring out how it maps down to a simple 2-dimensional spreadsheet view.
I appreciate both your feedback. Paul
@PaulC, when I say "download transactions", I simply mean being able to do a data dump of all transaction activity (with relevant other field/column details) in a "pure" double-entry style report. Ideally this would be a flat data table. The reason this would be valuable is because once exported, we would be able to run a number of reports and analysis using Pivot tables in Excel or Google sheets. Happy to discuss this further as needed.
Thanks,
Dimitriy
This is cool. Would love to see it support uploading split transactions (to account for Stripe or bank fees).
@sunnyt7 Thanks for an interesting suggestion.
Right now, the Bank Transaction Upload is designed as an alternative to Wave's regular CSV upload, and performs the same function: upload transactions without categorization.
To do what you are suggesting, we'd need to add both categorization and splits to the upload. That's not impossible, but it could obstruct our development of smart auto-categorization, by confusing the machine learning algorithms. We'd need to get a strong signal that uploading categorized (and possibly split) transactions is more valuable for most Wave customers than excellent auto-categorization before going down this road.
One question - have you considered using Zapier to automatically bring in Stripe transactions? We have a pre-built Zap Template for this, that does split out the Stripe fees.
Thank you for the great write up and further followup here in comments, it's all helped to get closer to a solution for my particular situation. This, indeed, is a great 'swiss army knife' tool to assist with data movement. Quite effective.
One of my financial institution is not making it easy to gather some historical transaction data, which I'd like to import to Wave in order to leverage it's categorization tooling (the bulk edit is a breeze, makes easy work of a few tasks). I'm only able to obtain PDF format for some of the older data. Is there any known best way to transform pdf to csv for the import? Manual copy/paste almost works using delimiter paste option in Google Sheets, tolerable but kind of pain. Any better ideas?
Alex
Hi there @aheiss,
Glad to hear you're finding Wave Connect helpful.
We don't offer any tools for working with PDF, but I've heard good things about https://www.pdftoexcel.com/ as a free online tool for converting from PDF to spreadsheet format.
If you try it, please let us all know how you get on.
Cheers,
How do i import excel data or csv from google sheets to Wave?Regards, Mario.
Hi,
Very useful - this and the API are starting to make the product useful. Of course understand with your business model that the focus is on the sales side, but could you please consider some easy wins to help with the purchase side e.g. download & upload of bills, which is surely just a 'reverse' of the invoicing process?
Best,
Nigel
Thanks @nigelwheeler,
On the API team, we're certainly keen to enable more functionality in the API and in Wave Connect. Right now, however, we are unable to do this with bills. This is not about business model, but that what we are doing right now is exposing APIs that currently exist within Wave.
While it certainly seems intuitive that Bills should be just the 'reverse' of invoices, in fact these are completely different within Wave, and are implemented differently: invoices have an internal API representation that we can expose in a public API; bills (currently) do not.
In due course, the Bills area of Wave will certainly be updated in a way that enables us to build a public API representation on top of it, but that first step is considerably more work that you may imagine, and right now I can't project when it will happen.
Whenever that happens, however, be sure you'll see bills added to Wave Connect!
once connected, it picks up the business accounts. What if i want to use the personal section?
Thank you for the tip @PaulC,
All in all, I found pdftoexcel a good fit for munging PDF into spreadsheet for use with Wave Connect. The extraction of data from the PDF was decent, but did require a little polishing afterwards. It took just a few seconds to fix. The validation tooling of Wave Connect was very helpful here.
Uploading of monthly CC statements to pdftoexcel site was a bit concerning, though after a bit of research (privacy policy, data retention standards, general legitimacy, overall content w/in my statements), I ended up not really caring. pdftoexcel did not appear to support processing of many statements at once (for free).
Adobe's free trial of Acrobat Pro DC could be used to combine PDF's to assist with bulk processing, though it's export to Excel/CSV/spreadsheet was horrible.
I found Tabula (https://tabula.technology) to be the best free tool for the job. It's easy to run, intuitive to use, does not require uploading data to third party, and made quick work of many statements.
Hope this can help others in similar situation of getting PDF statements into Wave.
Regards,
Alex
I've bee trying to upload invoices....but for some reason is not working......afte step 1 (prepare input sheet), I hit validate...and stalls for long long long time...without any sign of working at all, just blinking little blue squares next to the button, then I've tried to skip this step, and went to step 3, but got the same result, stalling next to blinking blue squares, without any signs of working. Any ideas of why is this behaving like this, Please advice..
Hi @DanielGT,
Happy to take a look at this, if you can share the Google Sheet with me.
I'll send you a personal message to follow up.
Cheers, Paul
Hi @DanielGT ,
I hope it is OK that I share the resolution here for the benefit of other Community members.
The cause of the issue was an additional column of data inserted in the upload sheet. Normally, Wave Connect will simply ignore additional columns, however in this case because the additional column also had no column heading, the validation/upload logic failed.
I have noted this condition to include and protect against as an additional validation check in our next update of Wave Connect.
Glad we were able to get your upload working again!
@PaulC
thank you very much for your support, please also pay attention that if the first row below the headers is empty, this also will stall the app without any messages to the user.
Also for the users, if you want to upload different invoices, for the same customer, @PaulC recommended to insert blank rows to separate each invoice, this actually works fine, but be careful with the first row.
thanks again.
Hi Wave,
Intending to upload invoices. I've clicked "prepare input sheet". It's been running for quite a while. But no drop-down lists are being pulled into the worksheet, i.e. "item", "price" etc
Appreciate if you can help me out.
Have had very good results with uploading bank statements but suddenly it is not responsive.
It seems to go through all the motions, up to "upload transactions" where it has dwelt overnight. There are only 53 lines of a bank statement - it all looks normal and similar to what I've done on every previous occasion.
On an earlier attempt it was as above but the order of actions was that it got up to the notice that there were 53 lines about to be loaded wherafter there would normally have been an indication of that process, where it shows the reducing number of lines being downloaded. That did not appear.
It may have something to do with this notice (not appeared since) that has come up once only :
"Cannot call SpreadsheetApp.getUi( ) from this context. (line 56, file "Code", project "Wave Connect")"
There is nothing in Line 56 ! For good order I then deleted the rows 54 - 56 just in case there was a hidden item. No affect.
Notwithstanding that on a previous try, it went through the Validation successfully, there was a small notice indicating a specific cell needed a "valid number". This was on one cell only. I then retyped each number down the range to ensure all figures were "numbers" that should have been successful. No success.
Still locked in "Upload Transaction".