How to import past transactions from your bank or credit card account

When Wave connects to your bank, the number of past transactions we can import is limited by what your bank allows. 

This article explains how you can use a manual import to pick up the older transactions that your bank did not pass through to us, or to fill in any other gaps in your bank data.

Importing older transactions

  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.) To do this, click Banking from any screen, and then select Bank Connections.
  2. Go to your Transactions screen and make a note of the date on the earliest transaction. (The transaction furthest 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 your bank doesn't support any of these formats, it may offer 'Spreadsheet' or 'CSV' format. Wave can import these formats too, but the process is more prone to errors and requires more effort, so please try to use one of the formats listed above.

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

  4. Log into Wave and select Accounting > Transactions in the left navigation screen. Click on Upload a bank statement (located in the top right of your screen) and follow the easy instructions. All the transactions you want should now be in Wave. 

A small but important FYI regarding deleting things in Wave:

If you delete data in Wave, you won’t be able to recover it. Because you own your financial information, if you delete it, you’re telling us you don’t want us to store it anymore. So we won’t! Anything you delete (invoices, bills, manually created or imported transactions, journal entries, and pretty much anything else you can add) is gone forever once it’s deleted. This includes your entire Wave account, should you choose to close it; you can read more about that here.

If you do delete something you realize you need back, you’ll need to enter it or create it again. You can reference information from outside Wave to help with this, like bank statements, bills, or receipts. We don’t store any of your old data or older versions of your account, so make sure you definitely want to delete something before you hit that button!