1. Personal Reports!
When we first launched Wave, we didn’t think our customers would want reports on their Personal finances, so we didn’t incorporate them into the application. Less clutter, we figured, would be a good thing. We were wrong. Many customers have asked for Personal reports, and today we unveil the first of them.

We’re starting with 2 reports (and planning more for the future). The first, “Transactions by Category” lets you pick a financial category — let’s say “Books, Music and DVDs” — and a time period, and see all the transactions that fit the bill.

The next report, “Income vs. Expenses,” lets you select a time period and compare the money that came in to the money that went out, showing totals for each category of income or expense.

Both of these reports are interactive: You can click numbers or descriptions and get more detail on what they represent.

As I mentioned, this is the first set of Personal reports. We plan to release more, to help you understand your personal finances in greater detail.

2. More horsepower
To meet our growing customer base, and the significant processing demands that our servers encounter in crunching numbers, we’ve added another server to our stable. More horsepower should mean faster page load times and less delay during peak hours. As with just about everything we do, we see this as an incremental process, and we’ll be making more improvements whenever we can.

3. Other tweaks and fixes:

• removed “down time” warnings that occasionally appeared in PDFs
• fixed errors when exporting reports to PDF
• implemented smoother process around some bank security questions
• fixed timeouts and year-end dates with Dashboard charts
• fixed filters on the Income screen
• and a bunch of other tweaks and fixes

Thanks for your continued support!

So we’re happy to announce that today’s release includes some significant enhancements to the invoices.  This gives you a lot more flexibility to customize your invoices in a variety of ways.

On these new invoices, you’ll be able to:

• Choose from four different templates, choosing a design that best represents your business.
• Select an invoice accent color to match your logo.

These new templates are just the first of several invoice improvements we have planned, to help you do business better.

As always, you will still be able to upload a company logo, choose whether or not to include this logo on your invoices, specify default payment terms, and create a standard message to appear on all invoices.

When you send an invoice notification via email, your customers will be directed to a web page with the invoice details. That page will also match your invoice customization preferences.

If you’d like more detailed information about these new invoices, we’ve created an FAQ on how to customize your invoices.

In addition to the new invoice options, today’s release also includes:

• Improved system monitoring for better site performance.
• A variety of small bug fixes.

Thanks for your continuing support.

Wave just got faster!

As part of our regular development process, we released Wave version 1.9 last night, and speed is the keyword.

• On the Imported Transactions screen, it’s now faster to load the page, categorize transactions, and navigate between pages of transactions.
• In the Reports section, it also takes less time to generate reports based on the time period you specify.

We’ve been working on speed improvements for some time, and the progress in this release has made the biggest difference so far. We’ll continue to work on even more speed improvements, along with other feature development, in upcoming releases.

Here’s a full breakdown of the progress in release 1.9:

Browser support

• We no longer support Internet Explorer version 7 (IE7). Users who access Wave using that browser will get a warning. We did this because of performance and security issues that occur with this browser. Users can still use IE7 if they wish, but future features may not work, and the support team will not be able to help them.

Bug fixes

• We fixed the bug that allowed people to approve transactions even if they were not autocategorized.
• Some customers were able to select a transaction on the Imported Transactions screen, only to have it “unselect” itself after a second. That’s fixed now.
• Still on the Imported Transaction screen, there was a bug that mis-counted the number of transactions in the system. That gave the impression that Wave was not showing all the transactions in your account. This no longer occurs.
• On the Sales Tax Report, we made a small change: When calculating the gross amount of foreign transactions, they’ll now be shown in the default currency.
• There was a problem when a customer with multiple businesses would view transactions on the Personal side, and tried to switch to Business. That’s also resolved.

Technical details on speed improvements:

• On the imported transactions screen we now grab the transactions for the next page so that when the user presses “next” they do not have to wait for the transactions to be pulled from the database. (That gave us a significant speed increase.)
• Deleting, archiving and categorizing multiple transactions are done in a batch function rather than one at a time in order to speed up that functionality. (More speed increases!)
• We changed our Javascript to be more efficient for displaying tool tips; that had been causing a slow down when loading the page.

Other stuff:

• We now display the user’s email address on the My Account page.
• We tweaked the email template to correct bracket size.
• We changed our error messaging on invoices to provide better guidance if there is a user error.
• On the business info screen (when registering or creating a business) the Business Type drop-down menu is now a two-step process, to improve browser compatibility and ease of use.

Geek stuff:

• We did a bunch of Javascript and CSS compression, to improve the performance and load times of our pages.

Wha…?

This is the point where most people glaze over, or give a resounding, “Huh?” So let me back up and give a bit more detail.

• What’s Google Chrome?
• What’s the Chrome Web Store?
• And most importantly: Why bother with the Chrome Web Store?

What is Google Chrome?

Chrome is a web browser produced by Google. It’s an alternative to Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari and others. Is it better? A lot of developers like it because it’s fast, and much more standards-compliant than Explorer. It’s rapidly gaining popularity because it works well, and because of features like the Chrome Web Store.

What is the Chrome Web Store?

The Chrome Web Store is a directory of online (“cloud”) applications that you can “install” in your Chrome browser. There are thousands of apps to choose from, from games (like Angry Birds) to online accounting apps. Some apps (including Wave) are free, and others are not.

When you install an app, its icon appears under “Apps” when you open a new empty tab in Chrome. To launch the app, you just click on the big, juicy icon.

Some people complain that “installing” an app is just a glorified bookmarking process, and they’re partly right. But there are some cool features, too.

So why bother with the Chrome Web Store?

Google (and lots of other people) believe that computing is naturally headed toward “the cloud” — that is, more and more people will be running online applications instead of installed-on-your-hard-drive applications. In addition to being a slick browser, Chrome makes it easy to run apps, or at least makes it easy to keep all your apps in front of you where you want them.

Now, I mentioned above that some folks think installing an app in Chrome is not much different from bookmarking. And they’re kinda right. After all, the app doesn’t actually live in your browser, and you still need to go online to use it. But there are advantages to installing an app in Chrome:

1. Pinned tabs

For any app you install, you can open it in a “Pinned tab.” A pinned tab is a special kind of tab that slides all the way to the left in your browser window, where it takes up less space. More importantly (this is the cool part), if you have apps pinned and you quit your browser, any pinned tabs will reopen when you start a new session. So imagine that you always want to have Wave, Gmail and Tweetdeck running when you open Chrome. You can pin the tabs, and each time you launch Chrome, there they are.

Three pinned tabs take up less space than one normal tab.

To create a pinned tab:

• log into Chrome and open a new tab
• right click (or command+click) the icon to any app that you have installed
• choose “Open as pinned tab”
• click the app icon to open

You can also right click or command+click on any normal tab, and select Pin Tab. However, that will only pin the tab for this session; if you launch it again later on, it will open in a normal (unpinned) tab.

With an app open in a pinned tab, you can just leave the window open and do what you want when you want to, and the tab is small enough to not get in your way while you do other things. That’s useful when you have lots of cloud apps on the go at once. I suggest you only open Wave in a pinned tab if you’re on your own computer in a secure place — you don’t want to leave your windows open if it’s a public machine.

Worth pointing out: A pinned tab isn’t locked to the app you launched. In other words, if you open Wave in a pinned tab, and then (while in that window) you select a new website link, that new site will now live in the pinned spot. (That functionality doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m just the messenger…)

2. Full screen

Some apps work better if you open them in “Full Screen” mode — i.e., taking up your entire monitor. (Having the extra length to a Wave screen helps sometimes, but the extra width doesn’t matter too much, so Full Screen isn’t too big an advantage for us.) Chrome allows you to set a preference to open an app in Full Screen mode. The steps are similar to setting a pinned tab: right click or control+click the icon in a new tab, and select “Open full screen.”

These features aren’t necessarily earth shattering. Yes, it’s just a spruced-up bookmark. But hey, better that than a plain-old vanilla bookmark, right? And truthfully, the more I use my cloud apps in a pinned tab, the more frustrated I get when some cloud apps (like WordPress) don’t appear in the Chrome store.

Apps in the Chrome web store will undoubtedly evolve to offer more features, too, like processing that happens in the background while you do something else, or even the ability to work offline. I imagine pinned tabs are just the tiny first step of something much bigger. At Wave, we’ll continue to explore these options as they come up.

Interested in getting started? You can download Chrome here, and install Wave here.

Firefox App Tab

Chrome isn’t the only option for pinned tabs. Users of Firefox 4 can do the same thing: right click or command+click on a tab, and select “Pin as App Tab.” This feature works pretty well exactly as it does in Chrome. But for the moment there’s no app store for Firefox.

When I connected my bank account with Wave, only a few months of transactions were imported. How do I import all my financial info for this year? How do I import last year’s info?

Wave doesn’t control how far back transactions can be imported. The amount of data Wave can access is set by your financial institution (FI). Every FI has a different setting, but for most of them we import transactions going back 30 to 90 days.

The good news: this limit doesn’t prevent you from having all your financial info in Wave. If you want to go back farther than your FI allows, you can upload an electronic bank statement.

Here’s how you can do that:

1) Make sure you first connect your bank or credit card account to Wave, and import as much as your bank will allow. (Learn more about connecting.)

2) Go to your Imported Transactions screen and make a note of the date on the earliest transaction. (The transaction farthest into the past.)

3) Go to your online banking site, and download an electronic statement into one of these formats:

• Microsoft Money (.OFX)
• QuickBooks (.QBO)
• Quicken (.QFX)
• Simply Accounting (.ASO)

If possible, only download transactions BEFORE the earliest transaction that Wave imported (the date you noted in step 2).

4) Log into Wave and go to your Imported Transactions screen. Click on “Upload a bank statement” (located at the bottom of your list of transactions) and follow the easy instructions.

5) Check for any duplicate transactions that overlap with already imported transactions. Delete any duplicates. (Ideally, you specified a date range for your electronic statement and have no duplicates to delete.)

You should now have all the transactions you want in Wave.

Please see our FAQs for step-by-step instructions on uploading statements.

Once you are finished all the uploading, you can read more about how to adjust your checking and savings balances or credit card and line of credit balances.

By default, transactions are sorted by date. By clicking any column header (“Description,” “Amount,” or “Categorized into“), you can resort your transactions. This often puts similar transactions all together in a neat little cluster, so you can categorize, approve or delete multiple similar transactions all at once.

Wow! We’ve really changed the Imported Transactions screen and process!

Now, we were pretty fond of our original Imported Transactions screen, I have to say. But to make various tools work better, and especially to make them touch-screen compatible, we began looking at alternatives.

I think what we have now is better than ever. Instead of drag-and-drop, it’s select-and-click: i.e., highlight the transactions, and click the name of the category where you want to file them away. Watch the video (at the bottom of this post) for a short demo.

This new functionality means that you can manage your transactions on tablets like the iPad.

With this new approach in hand, we were able to launch other tools on this screen. The most noteworthy is bulk delete and bulk approve. Those of you who, in the past, had multiple auto-categorized transactions to approve, or lots of transactions that you want to delete, will appreciate this. Now you can do them all at once, making the process a whole lot faster and easier.

Another feature we’re happy to introduce is how you view transactions on the screen. You can now view 20, 50, 100 or 150 transactions per page, and order them by date, description, amount or category. I find this especially useful when you connect an account for the very first time, or if you ever find yourself with a big backlog. Just sort by description, and you’ll be able to handle all the transactions of the same kind at a glance. (The default view is 20 items per screen, ordered by date.)

If you’re already making use of our transaction splitting tool, sales tax calculation tool, and transfer tool, you’ll notice that there’s a new way to get to those things now. When you highlight a transaction, a widget pops out of the left side, exposing these three options.

The Wave development team has also made improvements to the processes for transfers between accounts. Wave will be better able to detect transfers in the first place, and when Wave can’t detect a transfer, it’s easier now for you to mark a transfer manually.

And finally, among the under-the-hood changes that are harder to spot, we’ve improved the processes around handling problematic bank connections, with better detection on our end, and clearer error messages for you.

As always, thanks for the ongoing feedback and support from the awesome (and growing!) community of Wave users. Our next release promises to be just as full of cool stuff. More on that soon…

Video tour of the new Imported Transactions screen

The three places where some customers may notice changes:

1. Connecting with your bank or credit cards. We’ve made the process easier for customers dealing with suspended bank accounts, updating bank credentials, working with session timeouts (when the communication between Wave and your bank closes because it’s taking too long), deleting and re-adding accounts, and downloading data.
2. Matching transactions (such as a transfer from your Checking to your Savings account). We improved the transaction matching when a customer operates more than one business in Wave. We also made the matching better for Quick Entries, and made it simpler to undo a match.
3. Income/Expense pages. We improved the way we handle transactions that are related to deleted accounts, enhanced display of quick entry, and provided better pagination of the income transactions. We also tweaked the way invoice statuses are handled when a payment is edited.

Thanks, as always, for your ongoing feedback. If you have any suggestions on features you’d like to see, or need any help with Wave, please contact our support team. We’d love to hear from you.

This afternoon’s release addressed about 40 small improvements, with a couple of noteworthy examples:

1. Faster loading for Imported Transactions

For some customers, the Imported Transactions screen was slow to update when there were a lot of transactions involved. That experience should be better now.

2. Faster time-outs for security

Log out when finished for better security

3. Improved FreshBooks integration

We’ve improved the nightly download process, as well as the date interface where you select the range to be imported from FreshBooks into Wave.

4. HTML5 charting

We’ve changed the charts on your dashboard to HTML5. There are several advantages of the new solution:

• You can now mouse over an expense or income range to see the exact dollar amount. Click on it to go to the expense or income details for that time period.
• Charts now work on iPhone and iPad, so you can now use those devices to check your finances. Additional future improvements are still needed, though, before these devices can be used to categorize transactions.

As always, thanks for your continuing feedback. It will help us keep on making Wave better.

1. FreshBooks integration (beta)

Import invoices from FreshBooks

The setup is easy (see the video), and after that Wave can automatically import new invoices and updates from FreshBooks every night.

You’ll find more about the integration in our FreshBooks FAQs. We’ll be posting more on FreshBooks+Wave in the next few days, too.

2. Expense splitting

This is a smart tool that lets you take any transaction that Wave has imported from your bank account and break it into smaller pieces. When will you need to do this? A few examples:

• You pay for a number of items on one bill, but want to categorize them separately in Wave.
• You pay for business and Personal items on the same bill, and want to categorize each in its proper place.
• A client pays multiple invoices with one check, and you want to account for these separately.

You’ll access the splitting tool under the Tools icon next to each transaction on your Imported Transactions screen.

Learn more about splitting in our Splitting FAQs.

3. Reverse-engineering taxes

Reverse-engineer sales taxes

Learn more about the Calculating Sales Taxes tool in our FAQs.

Please let us know what you think about the new tools. We’re going to keep on building other smart features for Wave, too, so feel free to make suggestions on what else you’d like to see.