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Wave: Small Business Software Wave Financial

wave bookkeeping

With our intuitive dashboard, you’ll be a money management pro in no time. Quickly build project estimates and professional invoices that reflect your business. Upload your logo, add customer info, share notes, and set net payment terms with ease. When everything is neatly where it belongs, tax time is simple. Wave’s smart dashboard organizes your income, expenses, payments, and invoices.

Wave Invoicing

The dashboard includes shortcut buttons so that you can easily create new transactions, like bills, estimates, and invoices. Even if you don’t have accounting experience, you can familiarize yourself with the features of Wave in less than a week. Wave Accounting is ideal for micro businesses with fewer than 10 employees, contractors, freelancers and other service-based businesses on a budget.

Accounting for beginners

“It’s not just a cool piece of software, it is giving peace of mind to people.” You deserve to know your taxes aren’t something you have to sweat over the entire calendar year.”

  1. Enable invoice payments by credit card for a pay-as-you-go fee as low as 2.9% + 60¢, and watch the money roll in.
  2. The editorial content on this page is not provided by any of the companies mentioned and has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.
  3. The free (Starter) and paid (Pro) plans offer basic features, such as invoicing, income and expense tracking, and payment processing.
  4. Users of the free plan are limited to using Wave’s Help Center or Mave, the support chatbot.

We weigh each section differently to calculate the total star rating. Wave holds its own against two of its biggest inventoriable costs competitors, QuickBooks Online and Xero. Wave’s free pricing structure gives the software its appeal, but users that have larger businesses and require more advanced accounting features may find QBO or Xero to be the better fit. The company also offers good customer support options, including an accounting guide, to help you learn to balance the books and use the software. Tim worked as a tax professional for BKD, LLP before returning to school and receiving his Ph.D. from Penn State. He then taught tax and accounting to undergraduate and graduate students as an assistant professor at both the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Mississippi State University.

Tim is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor as well as a CPA with 28 years of experience. He spent two years as the accountant at a commercial roofing company utilizing QuickBooks Desktop to compile financials, job cost, and run payroll. Tim has spent the past 4 years writing and reviewing content for Fit Small Business on accounting software, taxation, and bookkeeping. You can set up multiple sales tax rates, apply them to invoices, and generate reports to help with tax compliance.

We encourage you to research and compare multiple accounting software products before choosing one. Make it easier for your customers to pay you through a Wave invoice, right from their bank accounts. Wave’s online payments feature lets you accept bank payments, quickly and easily. 1 Payouts are processed in 1-2 business days for credit card payments and 1-7 business days for bank payments. Deposit times may vary due to processing cutoff times, third party delays, or risk reviews. First, Wave is remarkably customizable—especially considering that it’s, you know, free.

wave bookkeeping

When I set up my sample company for the case study, I had to manually input the chart of accounts, service items, and beginning account balances. Even worse, the only way I found to enter beginning account balances was with a large journal entry. None of these really matter if you’re setting up a brand new company—but it can take considerable time for established companies.

Wave Accounting Features

The software supports multiple companies and offers personal accounting as well. Wave improved its software and has addressed many customer complaints in its latest redesign, including adding 1099 payroll support, duplicate transaction management, and cash-basis accounting. The checkout feature is one-of-a-kind and a great addition for business owners who need to charge multiple customers quickly. Wave has recently updated its pricing model to now include a paid plan. Now, many standard features (such as automatic importing of bank transactions) are only available if you purchase a monthly or annual plan.

You can access personalized support through the Wave Advisor program where you can get coaching and year-round advice from a Wave expert starting at $149 per month. While that is very reasonable for the services delivered, it’s only a starting price—and Wave doesn’t publish any additional pricing information. Wave doesn’t have a feature to accumulate costs by project, so it’s not great for project-based businesses. However, you can create customized estimates for project bids, but then there is no way to automatically compare actual costs to the estimate.