Wave Small Business Accounting Review 2024 TRUiC

Financial statements, a sales tax report, customer report, and an aged receivables report are also available, as is an aged payables report and account balances report. Wave also integrates with its own suite of products, which include Wave Payroll, Wave Invoicing, Wave Payments, and Wave Money. As a Wave user, you also have access to Wave Advisors, an assisted bookkeeping service.

Wave has been one of the best accounting applications for years because it’s good and it’s free (unless you need payroll, and many microbusinesses don’t). Our Editors’ Choice winners for small business accounting programs are Intuit QuickBooks Online and FreshBooks for their superior capabilities, usability, and customizability, but neither is free. Wave accounting integrates with bank accounts, and can accept credit card payments as well as online bank transfers to your business. You can also manage paying outside contractors, and send and manage receipts.

Our Wave accounting review finds the best things the app has going for it are its excellent features and the fact the basic software’s completely free. You can connect your bank account to Wave, which will automatically import and match your banking transactions with your recorded income and expenses. The recurring invoice option can be a real time-saver, since it allows you to automatically charge your customer’s credit card each month, eliminating the need to wait for payment.

1. The vendor also provides expert accounting coaching by real advisors, which is a great resource.
2. Overall, Wave is considerably behind Zoho Books and QuickBooks Online because it’s free software.
3. In addition to packaging, pricing and available tools, we’ll be comparing Wave’s customer support and number of users to one of the most well known companies in the industry.
4. Moreover, you can integrate QuickBooks with hundreds of third-party tools available in the app marketplace.

You can specify a type (withdrawal, deposit), add sales tax, split the transaction among categories, add customers or vendors, write a note, and upload a receipt. Wave may try to categorize some transactions automatically, but it didn’t guess many of mine correctly. The app learns as it goes, so it should categorize similar transactions automatically as you use it more.

The market is stacked with competitive accounting software options though, so check out our comparison page to see how the best of the best compare side by side. Wave is a streamlined accountancy platform that likes to keep things simple. However, it secured a terrible score of 0/10 for advanced features and completely lacks budgeting tools, making it completely unsuitable for businesses that need a one-size-fits-all solution.

While it’s easy to use, we encountered several issues with its general features. There’s no option to set up two separate classes or locations, which can be difficult if your company has different locations or offers several classes of products or services. However, we were able to successfully add a new user and limit access to each user. Yes, Wave’s accounting software does automatic double-entry bookkeeping.

Wave Payments is an add-on payment processing service that allows your business to accept credit cards, debit cards, and ACH payments. This is a pay-per-use service with credit card processing rates starting at 2.9% + $0.60 per transaction and ACH rates set at 1% per transaction. Wave offers a handful of optional add-on services for an additional fee. Wave Accounting is free, but you will have to pay processing fees if you choose to accept invoice payments online.

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Additionally, Wave’s double-entry accounting makes it easy to pass books on to an external accountant when that becomes necessary. Unlike a majority of its competitors, Wave does not have a comprehensive mobile app. While it does offer a free iOS and Android app, the app is limited in the number of features and functions. From its add-ons to its support options, there is a lot to discuss when it comes to this provider.

FreshBooks: Best for invoicing

The best part of Wave advisors is that they are available year-round and will provide advice tailored to your business goals. The software also allows you to set up recurring billing and payments for retainer clients. Last but not least, Wave invoice payments automatically sync to your accounting dashboard.

See our guide to the best small business accounting software for additional recommendations. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are editorial in nature, and are not aggregated from user reviews. Each staff reviewer at Merchant Maverick is a subject matter expert with experience researching, testing, and evaluating small business software and services. The rating of this company or service is based on the author’s expert opinion and analysis of the product, and assessed and seconded by another subject matter expert on staff before publication. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are not influenced by affiliate partnerships.

Wave Accounting

Managing the books to keep track of cash flow and other important information is a necessity of running a business. Hugh Wilson writes about business and the interface of business and technology for a range of titles including The Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, The Times, BBC and MSN. He has written a large number of articles for Top Ten Reviews about insurance matters, accounting, and some business-to-business wave accounting review software and appliances. Wave knows its market, and integrates seamlessly with Shoeboxed, Etsy, PayPal and Google Sheets. Creating a report, raising an invoice and uploading an expense receipt are easy to do and take minutes. Xero on the other hand is still pretty cost effective, since their intro package starts at only $9, but you are still paying between $9-$70 a month depending on what you need.

Wave is a top pick for the accounting and information technology industries, and it’s one of the lower-priced options for its capabilities. One of the biggest benefits of using Wave is that it offers a lot of functionality at no cost. The other benefit is utilization https://personal-accounting.org/ of Wave Payments, which allows you to accept online payments from your customers. And, as stated earlier, a new payment option is in beta testing right now that allows you to accept payments directly from your website, opening the door to online selling.

Wave Accounting Software Review: Pros, Cons

For instance, Xero’s cheapest plan limits users to sending 20 invoices a month, while FreshBooks’ cheapest plan limits users to invoicing only five clients a month. With Wave, you can send an unlimited number of invoices to an unlimited number of clients each month. If you have a question or issue, you can browse the help center or reach out to Mave, the automated chatbot. If you do want live support, you’ll need to invest in an Advisor or paid service.

Wave Payments lets your customers make a payment directly from their invoice, and accepts all major credit cards. Payroll fees vary, with supported states paying a $35 monthly fee, while the other states are charged $20 per month. There is also an additional $4 per employee charge assessed each month. Honestly, these features outpace those included with some paid accounting software. For instance, Xero only includes expense tracking with its priciest plan, which starts at $65 a month.

Payments made by Apple pay, credit card, and bank payments can be applied directly to invoices. You can’t pay bills through Wave as you can in Intuit QuickBooks Online, but you can record them, mark them as paid, and track the status of your payables. Wave now uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read photos of receipts taken with a smartphone and turn them into categorized transactions. It worked in testing, though the app detects receipts and snaps photos so quickly sometimes that you only get a partial image. You can also create an email-forwarding address so that you can email copies of receipts into your Wave account. What many very small businesses will miss most in that respect are the kind of time- and project-tracking tools that FreshBooks, for one, does so well.