Create beautiful invoices, accept online payments, and make accounting easy—all in one place—with Wave’s suite of money management tools. Wave supports its own first-party payment processing, but won’t allow any third-party integrations to process payments through the Wave platform. The Wave platform has high invoicing functionality and great customer service options, even if a few features are limited.

We like how easy it’s to record a new bill and enter an expense without paying. You can snap a photo of your expense receipt and upload it to Wave through the mobile app, but this requires an $8 per month subscription to Wave Receipts. You can attach a receipt to transactions within the web interface of Wave for free.

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 app also comes with standard financial reports like Profit & Loss (Income Statement) and Balance Sheet.

1. The Rollback function allows undoing any erroneous syncs in bulk with no harm to the data in your QuickBooks Desktop account.
2. Wave is packed with great (free) features, including creating invoices and tracking transactions.
3. This works wonders for sales teams on the go as they can update the entries in real-time when making purchases.
4. Wave even lets you categorize transactions in bulk as well as merge duplicate transactions, allowing you to streamline the process.
5. The break down of the transaction costs and what features you’ll get can be a bit complicated, so read on for a full summary, as well as the pricing behind Wave’s Payroll add-on.

Our (non-judgmental) team of bookkeeping, accounting, and payroll experts is standing by to coach you—or do the work for you. If you’re willing to pay for the best invoicing software on the market, we’d recommend FreshBooks overall. But Wave is an inexpensive solution that handles the basics with aplomb, and is well worth considering. The customer support team is available to users through email and live chat, but not by phone.

How Much Does Wave Cost?

She holds a Bachelor’s degree from UCLA and has served on the Board of the National Association of Women Business Owners. She also regularly writes about business for various consumer publications. You can’t count on Wave for managing fixed assets, which isn’t surprising for a free program. In our case study, Fit Small Business purchased a job trailer with a bank loan. Wave will record the purchase price in the fixed asset and note payable accounts—but that’s the only thing it does. “Wave invoicing makes your life a whole lot easier and takes that worry off you. I’ve tried Quickbooks—it’s a bit more complicated and technical, and takes more time to set up.”

Wave accounting review 2024: Is Wave accounting any good?

Support for non-paying users is limited to the chatbot and self-service Help Center. Many or all of the products featured here are from our partners who compensate us. This influences which products we write about and where and how the product appears on a page. If you live in one of the 14 full-service states, though, Wave can make your payments and file the required paperwork with state agencies and the IRS. These states are Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. If you’re a busy person, we recommend getting bookkeeping support.

Wave Accounting Ease of Use

While the basic Wave Accounting membership is free, there are paid options including Wave Payroll and Wave Payments/Wave Invoicing. Wave Accounting is designed with how much does wave accounting cost freelancers and entrepreneurs in mind, designed to be simple and intuitive. You’re only support is through an automated chat bot or by perusing self-help material.

Scheduling and Accepting Payments

Wave Accounting is ideal for micro businesses with less than 10 employees, contractors, freelancers and other service-based businesses on a budget. The free financial management software is user-friendly and equipped with all the basics, including income and expense tracking, bank connections, invoicing and reporting. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Online is our best small business accounting software because of its comprehensive accounting features like inventory tracking and wide network of ProAdvisors. Overall, Wave is considerably behind Zoho Books and QuickBooks Online because it’s free software. However, we still recommend Wave for users who don’t need advanced accounting features, but only simple income and expense tracking.

While it has an automatic reconciliation feature, it doesn’t allow for any reconciling items, such as checks written but not yet processed by your bank. While Wave has a good invoicing capability, it still comes up short in terms of other features. For instance, you can’t combine multiple checks in a single deposit, issue a credit memo to a customer, or add tracked expenses to an invoice.

While you can track your sales tax in Wave, there’s no way to file your returns or pay your tax liability. This feature is also handy if you’re working with independent contractors and need to generate a 1099 form for tax filing. The sales and income tax features are evaluated across the other categories, so it has no separate video. There are no options to track or view your list of fixed assets. Also, you can’t set up separate depreciation for fixed assets or create loan amortization schedules.

We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Wave’s free plan is beneficial for any type of business coming from any kind of industry, given the importance of accounting in every business setting. Whether you’re a start-up, a small business, a consultant, or a freelancer, you can generate financial statements and monitor every transaction with ease by using the software.

The company has worked during the last year to make the site more accessible, and it shows. You can check out our comparison table to see how Wave compares against the top accountancy providers, too. It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made when it comes to making sure my accounting is on point. Daniel Epstein is a senior financial research analyst at FinancesOnline and the architect behind our Fintech and ERP content division. His main areas of expertise are blockchain technologies, cryptocurrencies, and the use of biometrics in fintech solutions. His work has been frequently quoted by such publications as Forbes, USA Today, Entrepreneur, and LA Times.

Honest, Objective, Lab-Tested Reviews

Accounting software is essential for freelancers, contractors, and businesses in general. The great news is there’s a free app called Wave to help you handle bookkeeping. In addition to its free services, Wave has software and services that do come with fees, including Wave Payments, Wave Payroll and Wave Advisors for bookkeeping https://business-accounting.net/ support and accounting coaching. But for the most part, its free accounting and bookkeeping software lets freelancers and solopreneurs get accurate, intuitive accounting help at the blissful cost of exactly zero dollars. Read these tips to help make sure you get paid on time, and that you don’t fall victim to unpaid invoices.

Most users are very satisfied with the features they get entirely for free. It’s very easy to get used to the WaveApps interface, as it is intuitive and straightforward. For example, if we compare Wave vs FreshBooks, the latter provides a four-tiered subscription schedule.