Setting up Wave Accounting

I use Wave for our other business, and Easy Auction Tracker for eBay. I considered using Wave for eBay but, honestly, EAT does so much and makes it all seamless, and they’re only $50 per year. They’re based on Excel, and provide everything I need. I log in at the end of every month to pull my eBay sales, it takes a couple minutes, and then I manually enter my expenses. That’s it. At the end of the year, I do a “values” copy/paste of my expenses tab and Profit and Loss sheet, send them to my CPA, and all taxes are done. This year they added a Sales Tax option and managed payments are covered too.

In comparison, Wave is hard work for eBay. They work excellently for my other business, where I actually generate invoices and get paid online, but the only way I would use Wave is as a secondary accounting system, pulling the information from EAT. Which seems a lot like reinventing the wheel.

According to Google search results, you’re not alone in wishing Excel macros would work with Google sheets! Would this work for you, Jay? It appears some coding knowledge would apply.

I’m trying to find a non-Windows solution to the EAT conundrum myself. Once I move over to Linux, I’m going to need an alternate platform, and I don’t want to lose the convenience of EAT. Fortunately, I do have a spare laptop that I can configure and use, and the laptop would then become my “eBay workstation”, as it is also linked to my Dymo.

Wouldn’t it be grand if all software played nice in the same sandpit? Sigh…

I’m looking into Wave Accounting for this year. Is anyone else using this and how did you set it up? I tried to pull my PayPal CSV for January, but it seemed kinda jumbly.

I used Wave for 2019 from the beginning of the year, and was able to get information successfully to my accountant. While I would not discourage anyone from trying a free service, I will say that the PayPal integration flat out doesn’t work. You might get it to work for a bit, but it will stop working shortly and you will get no help getting it to work again. Support just says to upload it manually, and the forums show that the problem has existed for several years. It also has stopped working with my bank periodically, and at this point I’m just manually doing that as well, I don’t really have too many bank transactions.

What I ended up doing was downloading a report weekly from PayPal and using the Wave Google Sheets integration to do a nice clean upload. Works fine but takes some time.

By far the best part about Wave is the mobile receipts app, which lets you take a picture of a receipt, analyzes it, does character recognition, lets you correct any errors, and then uploads directly to Wave as an expense. That works great, but if your bank integration is working will create duplicates which you will have to merge. At one point a technically-aware customer noticed that the receipt photos were being stored in a completely open Amazon S3 storage container which anyone can access if they know the URL structure. I don’t know if that was ever fixed, but I decided to live with it. Terrible lack of security though.

At one point during the year Wave was purchased by H&R Block. It was hoped that would enable resources to attack the issues that exist, but sadly I haven’t seen any improvements to speak of.

Not a perfect solution, but as cheap as I am has been working for me. I’m not really making enough money at this (entirely due to my own lack of devoting enough time to it) to justify spending money for a paid service at this time.

Hope that helps!
RichieMac9

I just signed up with wave, and got the last 2 months of paypal records to integrate fine. But it looks like I shouldn’t expect that to last.

Yeah, the Paypal integration doesnt work automatically. What we do is manually sync every day or every couple days. This works.

Hey, Jay. Unfortunately that is not what I’m describing. Sooner or later it will just stop working altogether. With no fix. Again, not bashing them, I love what it enables me to do, but would love the PayPal and bank connections to actually work.

(Edit: Shouldn’t say sooner or later it will stop working altogether. That has been my experience, not necessarily going to happen to you.)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by RichieMac9.

I am sooooo small that WAVE still works for me even with the PayPal integration issues and having to resync so often. When my eBay invoice comes out, I enter it as a bill (line items: Store Subscription, Credits, Fees etc.) and then assign that bill to the PayPal Auto Payment from EBay. You can do the same in QB which is probably better for Multiple businesses. I used to do a Journal Transaction for Sales Transactions but too time consuming…
There was a WAVE forum that asked what users wished for most and so many people mentioned better PayPal that I hope they improve it – treat it as a Bank, not an Integration. Free is still all I can afford!
Elizabeth