Introducing Next Wave

Building software that adds up numbers isn’t hard. Building a software system that can handle tens of thousands of new customers a month, with hundreds of millions of transactions — that gets tricky.

But that’s still nothing compared to building that software system with the power and flexibility to re-imagine the future of accounting, invoicing, payments and payroll — with room to grow — now there’s a technology challenge.

This is what we’ve been busy with throughout 2015. We’ve had dozens of engineers, computer scientists, designers and product managers working long days and late nights to build a system that will support great innovation, tomorrow and into the future, to help you run your business with confidence and ease.

The thing is, until now, their work has been invisible to you. It’s sort of like building the scaffolding of a rocket ship: The work is essential, but scaffolding alone doesn’t get you to the launch pad.

Introducing “Next Wave”

Starting this month, we’ll be in a position to start showing the fruits of our labor.

What does that mean? For starters, we won’t be doing dramatic Apple-style unveilings of big, new products. Though we’ve already gathered a ton of customer input on our prototypes, we want real-world feedback now to make sure that every feature or improvement is easy, fast, and awesomely useful.

So we’re going to go one feature improvement at a time. We’ll take an improvement and offer it to a small group of customers. We’ll work with them to do some real-world testing, act on their feedback, polish up that feature, and release it to the rest of the Wave community. And then we’ll do it again and again and again, in a steady stream.

We have a series of rollouts that we plan to get to you in the next 12 months. What’s on the roadmap? Here’s what I can tell you today:

• We’re re-thinking the most basic bookkeeping tasks that you do every day in Wave, to create workflows that are so intuitive, you’ll have complete confidence to manage your business’s finances. We’re doing the same on invoicing and payroll, too.
• We’re making invoicing more flexible and customizable, to match the way you do business. You’ll have more control over templates (what information gets shown), plus added functionality like discounting. Along with that are some beautiful new invoice designs to make your business look great.
• We are committed to building smart mobile solutions for your favorite devices.
• You’ll see accounting tools that give you insights into changes in your income and expenses. We want you to get more value out of doing your bookkeeping, with less work.
• Everything we release will be engineered for maximum performance. Nobody likes a slow web page, so we’re making improvements that could shave up to 90% off the load times for some pages.
• We’re even working on ways for you to get money in the bank faster when you ask your customers for payment. By making it easier for your customers to pay you, we can improve your cashflow and make your customers happier, too.

Unfortunately, I can’t get more specific than that today. We work in a very competitive industry and we can’t tip our hand too soon. And frankly, what we’re doing is hard, and we’ve learned from experience not to promise a feature before it’s ready to launch. There are many things that can and will come up that will make us tweak product and delivery plans. We have to stay agile, and be able to adjust timelines and details, in order to give you the most innovative and useful products we can.

As we roll out improvements, we’ll let you know in the “What’s New” section of our Forums, and by email.

It’s going to be an exciting few months. Thanks for your feedback and support.

Sincerely,

Kirk Simpson, CEO and co-founder