Get ready to celebrate, you’re almost done!

Now that your information is in Wave and categorized, you’re ready to file your 2011 taxes! From here, you have two options:

Option A: Bring in a guest collaborator like an accountant who can file your taxes for you

1. If you need an accountant, and would prefer one who is already familiar with Wave, we can help! Contact us for a listing of small business accounting pros in your area. Once you’ve touched base with your accountant, follow the steps below to invite them to be a guest collaborator in your Wave account. If you have an accountant who would prefer not to collaborate online, you can email them your Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Sales Tax Report from the Reports screen.

2. To invite a Guest Collaborator, go to Settings and select Guest Collaborators.

3. Click Add Collaborator. Fill out your accountant’s information, and select their access type (View Only or View and Edit), depending on your preferences. You may want to contact your accountant to let them know you’ve given them access.

(Note: Let your collaborator do what’s needed, but remember that you’re still ultimately responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of your tax filing.)

Option B: File your taxes yourself

4. If you will be filing your taxes yourself, there are three key reports you will be using: the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Sales Tax Report. You can access these by signing in to Wave and going to Reports. You may find it easier to print a copy of these reports, or you can work from your screen.

5. You’ll now be inputting information from these three reports into your tax software or tax forms. Wave doesn’t currently integrate with tax software, so you’ll be entering your totals into these forms manually. Make sure to double check accuracy, as well as local tax laws for your jurisdiction. Remember: You are responsible for the accuracy of your tax filings, so if you have any doubts, check with a tax professional before submitting your return.

6. Congratulations! You’re all done.

Need more help?
If you want more assistance, or if you prefer to let someone else do the work, we can put you in touch with accountants and bookkeepers from the Wave Pro Network. Find a Wave Pro.

Make your next tax year as pain-free as possible: Sign up for free online accounting for small businesses, by Wave.

Here in the office, we’re all pretty ecstatic about what this means for Wave (and in extension for your small business). In the immediate future, this funding will be used to help support an even faster rate of ongoing application development and improvement.  It also means the launch of a highly anticipated and very exciting new complementary application later this year (stay tuned to find out the specifics, this app is worth the wait).

CRV and OMERS will provide more than just capital,  they’ll provide valuable expertise and insights as Wave continues to grow.  Charles River Ventures is dedicated to helping exceptional entrepreneurs turn their ideas into category leaders in high-growth technology and media ventures, and for the past ten years their funds have been ranked among the industries top performers.  OMERS Ventures is the new $180 million venture capital arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) pension fund, and it focuses on early-stage companies with the intention of remaining on with successful companies as a life-cycle investor.

Speaking of growth, we’re already moving quickly down that path, with almost 75,000 small business signups in over 198 countries, all in under one year (by the way, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to our newest country, Greenland).  Now, with the strength of CRV and OMERS Ventures behind us, we’re more confident than ever that Wave’s constant growth, development,  and innovation won’t be slowing down any time soon.

For full details, download the press release.

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.

Wave customer of the week:
Kate Whitmore, Lifestyle Photographer

It starts with a dream. “I am going to take pictures for a living.”

Kate Whitmore is busy building that dream, shooting weddings and portraits outside Columbus, Georgia, and spending quality time with Brett, her husband of exactly two years today. (Happy anniversary!)

Not long after the wedding, Whitmore launched her own photography business. And on the strength of photos she describes as “fresh, real and lively” (including those on this page), Whitmore plans to grow to a multi-photographer shop within five years, while building a business that gives her the flexibility to also shoot projects she’s really interested in.

Our goal at Wave is to help her get there.

Before & after

“I was spending way too much time — hours — entering this information manually.”

Most entrepreneurs avoid accounting if they can. Before Wave, Whitmore was no exception.

“Frankly, it was atrocious!” she says. “I would attempt to set aside time weekly to collect my receipts and record them manually in ledgers that I had created. Usually I missed that time that I set aside and several weeks would go by before I had recorded my expenses and income. At that point, it was too difficult to truly catch up.”

Now, by connecting her bank accounts and using Wave’s other time-saving tools, she’s finally ahead of the game. “It was such an easy set-up, and it amazes me that it organizes your expenses into categories all on its own (and correctly!).”

“Every week or two, I can log in to categorize/match my expenses. At the end of the month, I make sure it’s all together and then print off records such as the Income Statement. It gives me such a great view of what my company made in that particular month, and I’m so thankful that I don’t have to use my ledgers and add them all up anymore! It’s taking me about an hour PER MONTH now to organize my income and expenses. I just make sure I keep all of my receipts in a safe place, and Wave does the rest!”

Even in a light month, Whitmore guesses she’s saving at least 10 hours by using Wave. “I have more time to shoot, edit and correspond with clients.” She also estimates having saved $175 in software costs.

But best of all, she says, “I now actually have time to lounge on the couch watching TV with my husband! ”

Company info

Kate Whitmore Photography
katewhitmore.com
hello@katewhitmore.com
Skype: whitmore.kate
http://Twitter.com/katewhitmore
http://facebook.com/katewhitmorephotography

Be a Wave featured customer

What’s your story? If you’d like to have your company profiled in Wave, please contact us at info@waveaccounting.com.

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.

Input the last of your income and expenses

First thing you need to do is make sure that you are all up to date on your income and expense entries. If you have connected your bank account you’re likely already up to date. If not you should ensure you have uploaded your bank statements or manually entered your data to year end.

Small business balance sheets

If you are a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to preparing a tax return, you will need to run an Income Statement for the year and possibly a Balance Sheet if that is required. You can get them both, very easily, on the Reports screen. Just choose the report you want, and specify the date range. Then you take the data from those reports and input it where appropriate on your tax forms to complete your returns.

If you want to send your accountant this data, you can email the same reports in PDF format. You can email a PDF directly from inside your Wave account. If you prefer Excel reports, you can create and save them to your computer, and then send them using your own email system.

Bring in the hired guns

For the easiest way to handle your taxes, simply invite your accountant to be a Guest Collaborator in your Wave account. They can run the reports they need, use the drill-down functionality to check your work and update any transactions that they need to. Also, once they have completed your return if they need to update your books to handle adjusting entries, they can do that very easily using our Journal Transactions screen.

And as always, we are here to help you or your accountant when needed.

Here’s what he said:

[I]n my post on online accounting services a little while back, I mentioned a service called Wave Accounting that was about to debut. I’ve since tried it out extensively, and I think it does a good job of basic accounting — in particular of generating and tracking invoices, tracking expenses, and providing a dashboard that shows graphically what’s going on financially.

What’s more, Wave can track both personal and business activity (separately), and it can automatically download your credit-card and bank-account activity — even figuring out the nature of each downloaded transaction and categorizing it correctly (usually).

That’s really handy for expense accounting, and it also provides a nice check on whether you’re properly entering the payments you receive by trying to match them to actual bank deposits.

And, even though I’d say the service is well worth paying for, it’s free.

They’re not the first to start free and charge later. And there are some people in the industry who have argued that free doesn’t work. (They, of course, want you to pay hundreds of dollars instead, but that’s a different story.)

Where does all this leave Wave? Short answer: Wave is and will remain a free online accounting program, because we never planned on taking your money in the first place.

Let me go into some detail, starting with what can go wrong with some free products.

Many — maybe most — companies that have a free version use it as a stepping stone to get you to pay later. In this model, the free version usually offers limited features, and the goal of the company is to get you in the door and then migrate you to a paid “deluxe” or “pro” version of the product later on. But if they can’t move enough customers into the paid version, the business model falls apart and they kill off the free version.

Some free products plan to generate revenue with add-on products or similar strategies, but can’t make it work for whatever reason. Maybe they’ve misjudged the revenue potential or the size of the market. Most often in these cases, though, free is still not where the company’s heart is at. Free for them is probably still a transitory state — the place where you go before you pay.

Does that mean free can’t work? No way.

There are some very successful, free business-to-business applications we can point to. And most notably, these are companies where the business model is based on a free product being self-sustaining. These companies want customers to come, stay, and never pay a cent.

PracticeFusion.com is one of these. It provides a web-based electronic medical records (EMR) tool for free to doctors, with an advertising-supported version. You can opt to pay for an ad-free version, but if you’re comfortable with their discreet advertising, you can keep using the PracticeFusion for the long term, and everyone — including the company — is happy.

SpiceWorks.com is another successful, free, B2B web app. Also ad-supported, it’s a free IT management software, and it’s rocking its industry. Once again, SpiceWorks will do just fine even if its end users never pay SpiceWorks a cent.

These two, and a handful of others, show that free B2B online applications can in fact thrive. What we see as the common thread here is a well-planned business model that doesn’t treat free as a temporary state. Instead, free is the natural, permanent state for them.

This is also where we have positioned Wave. We intended for it to be free for the long haul, and built our business model accordingly. That model is:

• we provide a great, free accounting application for small businesses
• by bringing lots of small businesses together in one place, we can attract the providers of the products and services you want, and get a better price from those products and services (we call these Savings Opportunities)
• if you take advantage of these Savings Opportunities, we get paid by the supplier

Other companies give up on free because they never wanted to be in the free business in the first place.

At Wave, free was always the plan. If you never hand over a penny to us, we’ll still be happy. And you’ll still have a great product that you can count on for a long, long time.

Things you may notice:

• Bank and credit card account management: Let’s say you have already connected your bank accounts to Wave, and then you open another account at the same bank. Now Wave makes it easier to connect the new account with your personal or business finances.
• Dashboard: We switched to HTML5 charts a couple of weeks ago. Today we tightened up some of the graphical elements.

The release also improves FreshBooks data importing in unusual situations, sales tax functionality, and transaction matching performance.

Wave customer of the week:
Capital Freight Management, LLC

Ever Gonzalez knows about small businesses, and he knows about saving money. A three-time business owner, Gonzalez is now the president of Capital Freight Management, a shipping solutions company that focuses on helping small to medium size businesses save money on their freight.

This southern Utah–based company co-ordinates transportation across America and into Canada. Gonzalez has big plans for the future, and they might just include you. His goal is to find a way to save you 25% in your annual freight spend, and to become a trusted, valuable asset to each of his clients.

Elevator Pitch:
“With our online Freight Management Software our clients are given instant visibility and are able to manage their freight from cradle to grave. We provide online invoicing, damage claim assistance, product inventory, dedicated customer service, freight bill auditing, and supply chain management. Our clients are also able to run daily, weekly, and/or monthly reports giving them snapshots of all of their transportation activities.”

Before & After

Before using Wave I would rather pull out all of my teeth with a pair of old rusty pliers than do my accounting.

“Before using Wave Accounting, we were using expensive accounting software that we did not fully use or understand,” says Gonzalez. “We only used a small portion of the software and at times we seemed be spending more time updating it than actually tracking or using the numbers to help us plan our next strategic moves.”

Gonzalez signed up for Wave shortly after our November 2010 launch, and quickly got up and running with tools like bank statement uploading, invoicing, expense tracking.

“Now that we’re using Wave, not only is the process easier and faster but we’re actually seeing an accurate snap shot of all of our numbers allowing us to see where we stand at any giving moment. It’s easier for our team to create, record, and keep track of all of our invoices.”

“My team has reduced [the time spent on accounting tasks] by about 30%,” he says, “Wave has already saved our company money and we look forward to saving more in 2011.”

Company info

Capital Freight Manangement, LLC
“Leveraging our Human and Logistics Capital”
63 East 200 South #1, St George, UT 84770
(562) 879-5290
Fax: (562) 391-1878
info@capitalfreightmgmt.com
www.capitalfreightmgmt.com
www.facebook.com/capitalfreightmgmt
www.twitter.com/CapitalFr8Mgmt