Detailed Wave Accounting Review

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Wave Accounting Review

In order to close the invoice, I will have to mark it as completely paid and doing that can overstate or affect my financial records and reports within Wave. While getting in touch with someone from Wave was difficult, the company offers multiple online help resources, including a knowledgebase, blog, user forum, getting-started guides and video tutorials. Within the software, the company’s WaveBot suggests tips when you’re using a feature for the first time. It also has a help button that you can use to access the help page on the website or user forum. If you’re looking for extensive features and detailed accounting reports, Wave probably isn’t right for you.

You can start small if you want and easily make the transition to more full-featured versions when it’s necessary. Prices range from $25 per month for QuickBooks Simple Start to $150 per month for Advanced. Each offers a 30-day free trial and 50 percent off the first three months. Wave delivers an excellent, free accounting service for freelancers. Its invoice creation and management tools are good, too, though the invoices could stand to be more flexible.

Wave Accounting Reports

Instead, you can access Wave customer service only online, either by submitting a request on the Wave site or pressing the “help” button on your Wave account. Do you work with independent contractors during only certain parts of the year? You can pause your payees’ payroll accounts, meaning you won’t be charged the Wave Accounting Review extra $6 a month if you aren’t paying that person. You can also put your entire Wave account on hold if your business operates only part of the year. With unlimited payroll runs and automatic tax filing, Gusto helps small-business owners worry less about payroll and put more time into growing their business.

For some businesses, Wave may be a better choice than QuickBooks. While it doesn’t have as many features or integrations as QuickBooks, Wave software is free and may offer just enough features for some small businesses, Etsy sellers, and eCommerce businesses. For our full comparison guide, check out Wave VS QuickBooks Online. “The best thing is that it lets you switch businesses within one account. And it’s free – it has all the features that a typical small business would need and to save $50-100/month is great.”

You can also set up recurring invoices, create estimates to send to potential clients, and even send out customer statements. Wave is great for solo entrepreneurs, businesses that are growing and scaling, and even side hustlers. Anyone can use the program, and the features it includes can fit an array of needs. Any unauthorized copying and reproduction of the content of this page, including all meta data and computer code, is strictly prohibited. The sole purpose of the material presented herein is to alert, educate, and inform readers.

  • As is the norm with accounting software, a vertical pane on the left of the screen contains the links you need for all Wave’s most useful features.
  • Initially determined to be an accountant, she put away the calculator and picked up a laptop to pursue her dream of being a writer.
  • It’d be silly to forget about the dashboard since it’s one of the more simple, beautiful options for small businesses.
  • That meant that I could invest more in growing my business and keeping a roof over my head.
  • You can’t, however, see an overview of all your businesses from one screen.
  • Anyone can use the program, and the features it includes can fit an array of needs.

Wave Accounting software offers a fully integrated accounting solution that exclusively serves small organizations. Wave Accounting software can be used in industries like financial services, real estate, wholesale and distribution, retail and more. Both solutions provide users with bank reconciliation, invoicing, inventory, expenses, purchasing, bookkeeping tools, and more. While Xero software is statement of retained earnings example a product of Xero Accounting for Small Business, Wave accounting is a product of Wave Accounting Inc. Both Xero and Wave Accounting platforms are supported on Windows, iPhone/iPad, Mac, and Web-based devices. Wave Accounting is ideal for small to medium businesses with 9 or less employees. Big companies may still choose to use it though its features may not be enough for their specific needs.

Time Tracking

You can make unlimited professional invoices with just a click, including recurring invoices for billing and email reminders. Wave Invoicing is available as a free app for both iOS and Android so you can create and send invoices on-the-go. Wave Accounting is a free online accounting software competitor to QuickBooks, offering many of the same features without the price tag.

You can import customer and vendor data via CSV files or as Google Contacts. This doesn’t take long, since customer and vendor records only contain fields for extended contact information, though there are more, specialized fields if you designate someone as a 1099 contractor. You can enter a name and description, price, and sales tax information. If you check boxes to indicate that you buy and/or sell an item, you have to specify an account name. If the one you need doesn’t appear in the drop-down box, you can click the plus (+) sign to see more.

Wave Accounting Review

As a solo entrepreneur, it kept my business accounting separate from my personal, and I loved that it was a free service that looked professional when emailing clients. We use Wave as our primary system to track expenses, invoices, and payments. At first, it appeared to be great way to track invoices and easily receive payments via credit card. With Wave, creating professional looking invoices, estimates, and receipts is a smooth process. From this software, you can monitor the status of all your invoices and payments. The system also enables users to accept payments via credit cards, giving you and your customers unparalleled convenience. offers a wide range of free invoice features and a high level of customization to make it easy to manage business payments.

Unlimited Accounting & Invoicing Software Packed With Tons Of Features, Always 100% Free

Once you’ve considered pricing, it’s also important to look at the ease of use. After all, low-cost software may seem appealing on the surface, but if the software is difficult to use, is it even worth the headache? Fortunately, Wave’s recently redesigned UI is easy to use, even if you have no prior accounting experience. Setting up your account is quick and easy, and getting started takes no time at all. While there is no back button, this doesn’t seem to be a problem for most users, who find the software quite easy to navigate.

We publish unbiased reviews, our opinions are our own and are not influenced by payments from advertisers. If I continue to scale my business, I can pay to utilize some of the more focused products to support continued growth. The problem on the Wave software is not so numerous, but we notice that it is impossible to close a period correctly.

A spot to enter notes for your customer.Xero gives us this functionality. You could perhaps follow the transaction trail and pull some reports to try to piece together what happened, but I want to see a detailed audit log of who changed what, per transaction. I’m no accountant, but it seems strange to me that Wave doesn’t show an audit history of some sort, especially since you can have multiple people working in your account. I breathed a sigh of happiness when logging in to Xero the first time, clicking around and noticing how quick the page loads were compared to what we had been using. And it’s probably Wave’s user interface that grabs most people’s initial interest as it did mine when we first started.

Wave Accounting Review

If you decide you’d like even more from your Wave account, then you can choose to utilize Wave’s free or pay as you go add-ons. With these add-ons, you can extend your functionality and perform retained earnings more of your business accounting tasks in one platform. When you’re choosing accounting software, you’ll want to know exactly what kind of activities you can perform with your account.

Such detailed research guarantees you take out unsuitable applications and select the one that has all the benefits you require business requires. This makes Wave an ideal accounting and invoicing tool for small startups, freelancing professionals, and consultants. The software comes with a very clean and friendly dashboard, where everything you need is within a click of a mouse. QuickBooks is more comprehensive and can grow with your business, but there is no free version.

In Xero there’s an option “Unmark as Invoiced” that shows up in the Options menu of a quote once it’s been converted to an invoice. Not only can’t you see if any particular quote/estimate was accepted by your customer, in Wave it’s possible to click the ‘Convert to Invoice’ button again. This even extends to customer records in Wave, which strangely don’t have a notes field in them either.

Whereas other companies charge for their services—from $4.99 per month for GoDaddy Bookkeeping’s base product to $15.00 per month for FreshBooks—Wave’s primary accounting features are absolutely free. Credit card processing ledger account costs 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction (3.4 percent plus 30 cents per transactions for American Express). Wave Payroll is available for a $35-per-month base fee, plus $6 per month for each employee or contractor.

With the self-service payroll plan, Wave’s software tells you what amount to deduct each payroll period. It gives you the necessary info to quickly fill out IRS forms and file them yourself online. Sure, it’ll take a few extra minutes, but it’s not particularly complicated. The firm recently closed a $10 million Series C investment, which brings its total capital up to $35 million.

Credit card payments have been extremely problematic and are often held up for an unreasonable amount of time . It is extremely difficult to contact support as they do not provide a dedicated customer service line and it takes a long time to get a response via email. One thing I’d like Wave to implement is for me to be able to pass along credit card fees to the customer. It would be great if I could turn it on and off each invoice as needed. Sending multiple invoices to one client that needs to use different payment methods raises a red flag.

Supplemental pay is a variable payment from bonuses to sales commissions made to employees. Here’s how supplemental pay works and how to handle withholding tax. Adding a new employee is more time-consuming than it should be, with the process divided into multiple steps.

Not too much to complain about with Wave although I do wish they kept an audit trail of all invoice reminders sent, changes in the invoice, and have the ability to pull reports with this data. This functionality would be great to review clients as a whole to determine profitability and time spent with these clients. Overall interface is incredibly easy to navigate through and you don’t have to be a professional accountant or book keeper to make sense of everything. Crisp, clean invoices, and I particularly like the ability to customize the invoice to fit our needs. I’m sure that there are more sophisticated systems out there but I have a limited number of expenses and invoices each year – for me, Wave meets my needs. They’ve made significant improvements to their dashboard over the past three years and have not changed the cost . It is very easy to generate a sales invoice and see the average period for our company to get paid.

With Wave, you should be able to set up your account and learn to use the system quickly and easily. Plus, both of these add-ons are pay as you go, meaning the cost is based on how you use them. Also, they each offer substantial functionality, connect directly to your main Wave account, and work seamlessly with the software.

On the other hand, perhaps you think you need accounting software that can offer more advanced features, such as those we mentioned earlier. Keep in mind, though, that unlike Wave, these accounting software options won’t be completely free. The basic version of QuickBooks Self-Employed starts at $10 per month but is discounted to $3 a month for your first three months for a limited time.

Author:Andrea Wahbe