Wave Reviews We think Wave is great, but you don’t need to take our word for it. Read a collection of reviews from trusted third-party websites and testimonials from our happily satisfied customers. Wave money transfer review 26 February 2019. We value our editorial independence, basing our comparison results, content and reviews on objective analysis without bias. The Wave app offers a secure way to transfer funds almost instantly to a mobile money account using your debit card.
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- Date Established
- 2010
- Location
- Canada
Pros
- Free
- Easy to use
- Numerous features
- Attractive invoice templates
- Cloud-based
- Good support materials
Cons
- Limited mobile apps
- Unsuited for large businesses
- Poor customer support
Overview
Have you heard of the free accounting software that is making waves in the accounting industry? In the five or so years that we’ve been following Wave, the software has grown from 1 million users to over 3.5 million users.
So what makes Wave so popular?
First off, you can’t beat the price tag. Wave is completely free, and unlike other free programs, there are no artificial limits on invoicing, contacts, items, or other features. The only thing you have to pay for is adding payroll, payment processing, or professional bookkeeping. The company has also been rolling out update after update to make Wave a robust software with tons of features geared specifically toward small business owners. They were the first software to offer an integrated lending feature, coming to the scene a whole year before QuickBooks Online’s lending platform. A brand new Wave design and Wave logo, along with more recent updates, such as automated expense tracking, cash-basis accounting, and a lightweight ecommerce feature, have made the software even better.
That being said, there are still quite a few areas where Wave could stand improvement. There’s no project management feature, limited time tracking, limited inventory, and poor mobile apps. Additionally, you can’t add multiple users, making it unscalable for larger businesses. But, despite these drawbacks, Wave is still the best free accounting software out there.
Need those features? Take a look at Quickbooks Online
Read on to see if Wave is the right choice for your small business.
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Table of Contents
- User Reviews
Pricing
Rating: Excellent
Wave “has always been and always will be free.” Unlike most free plans, Wave doesn’t limit you to a certain number of invoices, customers, or transactions, making it one of the best free options out there. The company generates revenue from their credit card processing, payroll, and bookkeeping services and uses this revenue to keep the software completely free and your screen ad-free as well. Your account can be canceled at any time.
Here are some of the features available with Wave:
Free Plan
- $0/month
- Unlimited invoicing
- Unlimited estimates
- Contact management
- Expense tracking
- Accounts payable
- Basic inventory
- Reports
Extra Costs
There are several additional Wave products that you can purchase for your business:
- Payroll: Wave offers two payroll options: tax service payroll or self-service payroll. Tax service payroll means Wave handles your payroll and payroll taxes for you. The service costs $35/month + $4/month per employee and is available in California, Florida, New York, Texas, Illinois, and Washington. For the other 44 states, there’s self-service payroll which costs $20/month + $4/month per employee. With self-service payroll, Wave will still calculate your payroll for you; you’re just responsible for filing your taxes. Payroll by Wave also now supports 1099 contractors as well as employees.
- Payments By Wave: Wave offers payment processing to allow you to accept payments directly from customers. Wave charges 2.9% + 30¢ per credit card transaction (including Amex and international cards) with a processing time of two days. For ACH payments, Wave charges 1% per transaction with a processing time of two to seven days.
- Bookkeeping: Wave has recently added a unique bookkeeping service called Wave+. There are two options depending on the level of support you want. You can purchase the Accounting Coach service for a one-time fee of $249. This includes hands-on training from a personalized accounting coach who will teach you the basics of accounting and how to use Wave, so you can successfully do your own bookkeeping. Or, you can purchase the Bookkeeping service, starting at $199/month. This gives you a designated Wave bookkeeper who handles your accounting for you. Contact Wave for more details.
Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed
Cloud-based; no downloads or installation required.
Hardware & Software Requirements
Rating: Good
As cloud-based software, Wave is available on nearly any device so long as you have an internet connection. Up-to-date versions of browsers are recommended but not required. The company also features two iOS apps — Invoice by Wave (iOS 9.3+) and Receipts by Wave (iOS 8+) — as well as two Android apps — Invoice by Wave (4.1+) and Receipts by Wave (4.1+).
Specific Size Of Business
Wave is ideal for small businesses. The software is designed specifically for the small business owner to use no matter what kind of bookkeeping background they come from. The software supports multiple companies and offers personal accounting as well. A direct Etsy integration also makes Wave an ideal accounting software for Etsy sellers.
Wave does offer payroll, but the software isn’t scalable enough for larger businesses as it doesn’t support multiple users. You can grant access to collaborators who have view-only access or view and edit access where they can “create and send invoices, manage transactions, and generate reports.”
Wave is available in multiple countries, but its payment processing services are only available in North America.
Need those features? Take a look at Quickbooks Online
Accounting Method
Rating: Fair
Cash-basis and accrual accounting; Wave’s cash-basis accounting is limited to choosing to run reports as cash-basis or accrual.
Ease Of Use
Rating: Excellent
Wave’s newly redesigned UI is well-organized and easy to use. The only downside is that there’s no back button, but navigating the software is still pretty simple. Wave takes very little time to set up and get used to — and it doesn’t require a background in accounting. The company also offers good customer support options, including an accounting guide and optional accounting coach, to help you learn to balance the books and use the software.
Features
Rating: Good
For a free software program, Wave offers an impressive, robust feature set that rivals even some paid accounting software programs. Here are some of the features you can find in Wave:
- Dashboard: Wave users have been asking for a dashboard for a long time and Wave delivered. The dashboard features charts and graphs to give you quick insight into your business. They include graphs for Overdue Invoices & Bills, Cash Flow, Bank Accounts & Credit Cards, Profit & Loss, Payable & Owing, Net Income, and Expenses Breakdown. I particularly love the expenses breakdown feature, where you can see exactly where your money is going.
- Invoicing: There are only three Wave invoice templates, but the templates are attractive, modern, and customizable. Not only does Wave make it easy to send invoices, but they also make it easy to take control over your whole invoicing cycle by prompting you to schedule reminders, record payments, and send receipts. Wave offers recurring invoices as well. This feature is particularly well developed and allows you to choose a time zone when setting the recurring schedule, so your customers can receive their invoices at the optimal time no matter where they are. Wave also has a nice invoice dashboard where you can see overdue invoices, outstanding invoices, the average number of days it takes your invoice to get paid, and your next payout. The only downside about Wave’s invoicing is that you have to add sales tax on each individual item and you can’t add discounts (you have to manually calculate them using a new item line).
- Estimates: Wave makes it easy to create estimates and convert them into invoices. There is no way to duplicate estimates at this time.
- Client Portal: Wave offers a basic client portal but only for invoices. Your customers can view their invoice and pay it directly online. I’d love to see the company add a client portal for estimates where you can approve, decline, or comment on estimates.
- Contact Management: You can add contacts and vendors in Wave. You can record basic contact information, such as name, billing address, shipping address, phone number, etc.
- Expense Tracking: To track your expenses in Wave, you can connect to your bank account, import bank statements, or manually add expenses. Before, Wave’s expense tracking had hardly any automation, and users complained about duplicate transactions. Now, Wave has added bulk transaction categorization, transactions matching, and the ability to merge duplicate transactions. Note: Like almost all software using live bank feeds, Wave partners with Yodlee, which may violate some banks’ Terms and Conditions. Consult with your bank to see whether live bank feeds are a good choice for you.
- BankReconciliation: Wave also offers a bank reconciliation feature, so you can balance the books.
- Accounts Payable: Wave allows you to enter bills and record bill payments. The only drawback is that you can’t set recurring bills.
- Chart Of Accounts: Wave offers a customizable chart of accounts that is organized to make accounting as simple as possible for business owners. The software also offers fixed asset management.
- Inventory: Wave’s inventory feature is more of a glorified item list. You can add an item name, a description, and the sales price, and you can mark whether you buy or sell that item. If you mark buy, there’s nowhere to enter a purchase price, so when you go to create a bill, you have to adjust the price manually every time. There’s also no way to add an inventory stock level or set inventory reminders.
- Time Tracking (Payroll Only): If you use Payroll by Wave, the business owner can track and input employees’ time. There is no way for employees to have access to Wave and track their own time, which seems like a big oversight.
- Reports: Wave offers 12 reports, including a brand new cash flow report. You can also create customer statements in the software. The reports are customizable, and Wave makes it easy to compare them to past periods. You can run cash-basis or accrual reports.
- Journal Entries: You can easily record journal transactions in Wave.
- Checkouts (Beta): One of Wave’s most exciting new additions is a light ecommerce tool called Checkouts. Instead of generating a sales invoices, you can generate a checkout link that you can then send to multiple customers at once. You can send that link via email, text, or add them to your WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace website. Wave remembers your past checkouts, so you can easily send them to customers when needed. This tool is ideal for businesses that do home shows, classes, regular service packages, or just want an easy way to quickly bill multiple customers at once. Contact Wave or sign up for a free account to see this feature in action.
- Sales Tax: With Wave, you can set an indefinite amount of sales tax rates in Wave. You can also set compound taxes and differentiate between recoverable and non-recoverable sales tax. You can add a default sales tax rate to items as well.
- Multi–Currency: Wave supports 160+ currencies and exchange rates are updated daily.
- Importing/Exporting: This is where Wave is lacking. Wave offers very basic importing capabilities. You can only import contacts via .csv or google contacts or bank statements via .ofs, .qbo, .qfx, .aso, and .csv. There’s no way to import items or services. You can export most data via .xcel or .pdf and can print information as well.
- Lending: Wave partners with OnDeck to bring small businesses built-in lending. OnDeck offers flexible financing options and is one of our top loan choices. Read our full post on Lending By Wave: Everything Small Businesses Need To Know for more details.
Customer Service & Support
Rating: Poor
Wave offers a decent number of support resources to customers, but their response times are quite slow. Phone and chat support are only available for payroll or credit card processing customers. So, if you have a question that can’t be answered in the Wave Community or their Help Center, your only option is email. Emails take a day to be responded to. If you have a pressing issue, don’t expect a quick answer.
On the plus side, Wave has a very comprehensive Help Center, so hopefully, you won’t need to contact support much. The company also just added a brand new Wave Community. Here are all of the ways you can reach Wave:
- Support Form: You can contact Wave’s customer service team through the in-software support form.
- Phone & Chat: Phone and chat services are available for Payroll, Credit Card Processing, and Lending inquiries. Contact Wave for more details.
- Help Center: Wave provides a comprehensive Help Center with helpful how-to articles and guides. These articles and guides are well laid out with easy to follow steps and plenty of screenshots for us visual learners.
- Community: There is a brand new Wave Community where you can interact with other Wave users to find answers to questions, business tips, and inspiration from other people who have successfully used the product.
- Wave+: As we mentioned earlier, Wave now offers Wave+, an additional bookkeeping service that gives you more support.
- YouTube: Wave used to have a very developed YouTube channel with over 85 videos. Now, they only have 14 videos, and there aren’t many that demonstrate the software or teach you how to use features.
- Blog: Wave features a comprehensive blog with tons of articles and advice for small business owners as well as company announcements and updates.
- Social Media: Wave has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
User Reviews
Rating: Good
Negative Reviews & Complaints
Wave reviews are generally positive across the board. There are a few recurring issues that users have with the software; however, I was highly impressed to see how many of the complaints Wave addressed in their latest software update and redesign. The verdict is still out on how users feel about the redesign, but here’s an idea of issues users had in the past:
- Slow Servers & Downtime: Wave has always had an issue with slow servers and downtime. While there haven’t been any recent downtime reports, a few users still complain about the software’s loading speed.
- Poor Mobile Apps: Customers dislike that there are multiple Wave apps instead of one central full-featured Wave app. They also report multiple bugs in the apps. A new centralized app is in the works, but there’s no release date at this time.
- Limited Features: Users want more reports, better bank transaction categorization, payroll for independent contractors, a dashboard, and mileage tracking. While Wave hasn’t addressed all of these issues yet, they have added a new cash flow report, automatic transaction categorization, 1099 payroll support, and a dashboard.
- Difficult To Find Bookkeeper: Several users complain that it’s hard to find an accountant familiar with Wave. Wave’s latest Wave+ bookkeeping service aims to fix just that.
- Lack Of Integrations: Several users complain about a lack of third-party integrations.
- Expense Tracking Errors: Several users had an issue with duplicate transactions and multiple users report having to often reconnect to their bank accounts.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
For the most part, Wave receives high praise from its users and ratings have gone up since our last review. The software gets 4/5 stars on Software Advice, 4.4/5 stars G2Crowd, and 9/10 stars on Trust Radius. In addition, Wave is BBB accredited and boasts an A+ on their site. Here are some of the aspects users enjoy about Wave:
- Price: You can’t beat free, and Wave users agree.
- User-Friendly: Users like the fact that it is easy to learn, easy to navigate, and easy to understand, without all of the typical accounting jargon.
- Saves Time: Users also appreciate that Wave saves time, not just because it is easy to learn but also because it is cloud-based and has mobile apps.
- Personal Accounting: The ability to manage personal and business accounts in a single place is a favorite with business owners, particularly freelancers, independent contractors, and ecommerce shop owners.
- Good Feature Selection: One of Wave’s most loved aspects is its robust feature set. Users especially like the receipt scanner, expense tracking, and multiple company support.
- GoodInvoicing: Users appreciate that Wave offers professional-looking invoices that are easy to create and keep track of.
Here is what a few users are saying:
I like Wave because it’s free. For most small businesses you really don’t need a ton of complicated features (depending on what you do), and for me this software fits the bill perfectly. It syncs my bank accounts, lets me label stuff so my accountant can sort through it at the end of the year, and did I mention it’s free?
Great for business beginners and advanced users. Compared to all the other cloud accounting choices it holds it’s own. Why make your business accounting difficult, isn’t running a business difficult enough?
Was VERY simple to integrate into my woodworking business. Since most if not all my transactions are electronic, categorizing my expenses has never been simpler. Thanks for eliminating my shoe box.
I’m in awe of this software. I’m a small start up and I’ve gone through at least 10 or 12 other platforms with a Goldilocks effect of “This layout is too unimpressive” or “This makes payment too laborious for clients”…until Wave. It’s just right.
Integrations & Add-Ons
Rating: Poor
Wave offers a limited number of integrations, although they do support a much-needed Zapier integration which connects Wave with 1000+ add-ons. The integrations Wave directly connects with are PayPal, Etsy, and Shoeboxed. You can also use the new Checkouts (beta) feature to create buttons on websites like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. API is available for developers.
Interested in accepting online payments from your customers? Read our comprehensive merchant account reviews to learn the pros and cons of popular providers and see which payment processing option is best for your business.
Security
Rating: Good
Wave currently uses 256-bit data encryption as well as a read-only version of banking information to protect privacy. The company uses Amazon Web Services to store its data. Data is regularly backed up and servers are monitored 24/7. Contact Wave directly for more security details.
Final Verdict
Wave has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. The company has addressed many customer complaints in its latest redesign, including adding 1099 payroll support, duplicate transaction management, expense transaction automation, and cash-basis accounting. The brand new checkouts feature is one-of-a-kind and is a great addition for business owners who need to quickly charge multiple customers.
However, there are a few features the software is still lacking. There’s limited tax support, no project management, limited time tracking, and no additional users, which rules the software out for a lot of businesses. Hopefully, with Wave’s update track record, they will add these features soon and up their customer service response times while they’re at it.
Until then, the software is still a good solution for small business owners looking for a simple, easy to use accounting software that won’t break the bank. Wave’s customer support resources and new Wave+ service make it easy for people with limited accounting experience to learn the software. It’s also great for Etsy shop owners and other ecommerce businesses using Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress.
If Wave sounds like it might be a good fit for your business, give it a try! After all, it’s free.
Chelsea Krause
Chelsea Krause is a writer who has specialized in accounting for two years and is a QuickBooks Certified User. She has a BA in English & Creative Writing from George Fox University and studied at the University of Oxford as well. She has been quoted in Forbes and her work appears in Startup Nation, Small Business Bonfire, and Women on Business.
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To learn more about how we score our reviews, see our Accounting Software Rating Criteria.
Wave is a free and user-friendly online accounting program. It's extremely popular, but, as you can read in our full Wave review, the Cloudwards.net team feels that its paid competitors just have that little extra bit of edge when it comes to advanced bookkeeping.
Table of Contents | Rating | |
---|---|---|
Features | Excellent | |
Pricing | Excellent | |
Invoicing | Excellent | |
Expenses | Very Good | |
Reporting | Very Good | |
Financial Statements | Good | |
Support | Excellent | |
User Reviews & Comments |
Excellent
Visit Wave
Designed for non-accountants, Wave makes setting up your account quick and bookkeeping easy. It syncs with bank accounts and credit cards and, if you’re tracking receipts for tax purposes, you can just snap a picture with the app. It offers an easy invoicing system that automatically updates when they’ve been paid, too.
If you’re tired of receipts falling out of your wallet every time you buy a cup of coffee, or can’t remember if you invoiced a key customer for last month’s business, Wave is a great option for doing your books in the cloud. Let’s have a look at one of the best accounting solutions on the market.
- Free, with pay-as-you-go for additional services
- Sync data from credit cards, payment processors & bank accounts
- Multi-currency option
- User-friendly & simple interface
- Transactions backed up in the cloud & secured with 256- bit SSL encryption
- Cannot track time
- Charges for payroll processing
- Automated Clearing House transactions carry 1 percent fee
- Percentage & per-transaction credit card fees
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Wave’s basic features include everything that its competitors charge monthly fees for. Easy, automated and unlimited invoicing allows you to stay on top of incoming revenue. Its income and expense tracking tools provide an up-to-date snapshot of your business’s financial health and it has online payment options, as well.
Once linked, Wave syncs with your bank and credit card accounts. It generates standard reports, which businesses can use to guide bigger decisions.
It does not offer the ability to track the time and expenses related to projects, fixed assets or inventory functions, but not all business need those functions.
All of Wave’s basic features are free, while its competitors, such as FreshBooks and QuickBooks Online, charge monthly fees for the same.
Overall, Wave offers an amazing value for the money, especially since you don’t have to pay to use it. Payroll and credit card processing are the only services it charges for, but, as we’ll address below, if you have fewer than 18 employees, Wave is still more cost-effective than competitors.
Pricing
Wave makes its core accounting functions available for free. For comparison, competitors FreshBooks and QuickBooks Online charge monthly fees ranging from $10 per month to $60. Check out our FreshBooks review and QuickBooks Online review for more information.
Where Wave does charge fees, payroll and credit card processing, it’s worth comparing the options. Wave currently provides tax services in six states. It charges a $25 per month base fee plus an additional $4 per month per employee to do so. For all other states, the monthly fee is $20 plus $4 per month per employee.
In contrast, QuickBooks Online’s basic payroll service is just $19 per month plus $2 per employee for each of its pricing plans. That is less expensive, in terms of both monthly fees and per-employee fees. QuickBooks Online’s full-service payroll option is $49 per month plus $2 per employee fee. It’s available throughout the U.S.
QuickBooks Online vs Wave
Once you employ more than five people, you’ll pay more for Wave than you would with QuickBooks Online’s Simple Start plan with enhanced payroll. With full-service payroll, though, Wave remains more cost-effective up to 18 employees. That said, since it only offers full-service in six states, it might not be an option for you.
FreshBooks only offers payroll processing through apps. The most popular one, Gusto, costs $39 per month plus $6 per employee per month. Even with monthly plans that cost less than QuickBooks Online, it’s not a good value if you need payroll processing.
With Wave, ACH payments are subject to fees of 1 percent of the transaction, with a $1 minimum. Quickbooks processes them for free.
If most of your customers prefer to pay by credit card, you should take into account the different fees charged for credit card processing. Wave charges 2.9 percent of the transaction amount plus a 30-cent transaction fee.
QuickBooks Online charges the same percentage, but its per-transaction fee is only 25 cents. That’s if your customer pays using a card through the invoice, though. For manually entered credit cards, the rate jumps to 3.4 percent of the transaction amount plus 25 cents per transaction.
FreshBooks charges the same for credit card transactions, as well, except for American Express. Its take increases to 3.5 percent plus 30 cents per transaction for that card.
When deciding which cloud-based software accounting system to use, consider the average amount of credit charge transactions your business processes each month. Percentage and per-transaction fees add up quickly. If your business doesn’t need inventory tracking or fixed asset functions, Wave is a strong contender to meet your needs.
Invoicing can be a time-consuming process that many people avoid. Wave’s invoicing system lets you spend less time chasing money and more time making it.
Navigate Wave with the main menu on the left side of the screen or by clicking back and forward arrows.
To find invoicing on the main menu, expand the drop-down menu under “sales” and select “invoices.” Setting up a new customer is simple, click on the “add a customer” box on the left side of the invoice. A pop-up will appear for you to enter the customer’s details, including contact information, billing and shipping addresses.
After that, complete the invoice’s fields, which are standard bookkeeping invoices. Wave won’t send an invoice until you approve the draft. The service automatically sets up invoices so your customers can pay online. When you click “send,” another window pops up so you can send a message with the invoice, send it as a .pdf or send a copy to yourself if you want.
Wave then gives you the option to select when and how often you want reminder emails to be sent to your customers if their invoices haven’t been paid. FreshBooks only lets you send up to three payment reminders, while Wave offers up to seven options for follow-up. Quickbooks Online doesn’t offer automatic payment reminders.
Recurring Billing in Wave
Wave recently added automatic recurring billing, which will be a useful, time-saving feature for those who have clients that they bill monthly for goods or services.
When a customer sends a payment through Wave, the system records it for you. To log other payments, select “record a payment” from the drop-down menu next to the invoice on the main invoices screen. If your client has a credit card on file, charge it, or record payment by cash or check.
The process of setting up and sending an invoice takes less than five minutes for a new customer and even less if the customer you’re invoicing was already entered in Wave. Like FreshBooks and Quickbooks Online, Wave offers customization options for your invoices by adding a logo or changing colors.
Expenses
Business owners who don’t track their expenses won’t have a good grasp on their business’s profitability. Without real-time tracking and staying on top of entering expenses, your business could be in the red for weeks while still showing positive cash flow if items haven’t cleared yet.
To create a bill, you can select “bill” from the options under “create new” on the dashboard. Alternately, from the left-side navigation menu, expand “purchases,” then select “bills.” The first path takes you to the standard bill form. The second will require you to click “create bill” on the next screen.
In the box on the right, enter the expense’s details and add a vendor, then scroll down to “category” and look under “expense accounts” to enter the expense type. You can also click the “add expense” button. If you do, Wave marks it as an “uncategorized expense” until you change it. Expenses can be assigned numbers and have notes added to them, as well.
Note that, while you can add lines to the bill, there is no place to add taxes. If you’re required to pay taxes on your bills, you won’t be able to separate and track them separately.
If you want to know how much you’ve spent on mailing supplies in the last three months, you can in a few steps. Filters on the transaction screen let you search for all the expenses in a category by date range, status or type. Quickbooks Online offers the same feature as a “search” function, but it takes more steps. Wave also has a handy pie chart on the main dashboard.
Wave’s software pulls in expenses from synced bank accounts. If you pay bills by check, manual entry is a snap. Just click on the arrow button to the bill’s left, click “add payment” and fill in the details.
Wave doesn’t offer recurring payments. Even if your electric bill is the same each month, you’ll have to enter it over and over again. According to comments in Wave’s support forums, it knows users want the feature, but, as of March 2018, isn’t planning to add it. If your business has a lot of fixed expenses, the lack of this time-saving feature could be a deal-breaker.
After logging in to Wave, the dashboard on the first screen will give you an up-to-date report on your business.
Cashflow, profit and loss, overdue bills and invoices are all there. With cashflow at the top, it’s easy to see money flowing in and out. Wave calculates your net income and breaks down your expenses, too, which you can see if you scroll down.
While that’s all you probably need on a day-to-day basis, clicking “reports” on the navigation menu will present the three standard financial statements: profit and loss (also called income statement), balance sheet and cashflow. Those are statements every business person should consult on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis to monitor their business’s performance.
Other reports related to taxes, customer and vendors dig deeper into different areas of your business.
Wave puts reports on the amount of sales tax you’ve collected and paid under the “stay on top of taxes” section. It also includes information on wages and payroll taxes there.
The sales tax report is laid out intuitively and the information it presents is easy to follow. It calculates your net tax owed from the sales subject to tax you made and sales tax you paid on your purchases. Unlike QuickBooks Online, you can’t pay your sales taxes through Wave.
The only two customer-focused reports are “income by customer” and “aged receivables.” The “income by customer” only shows income. It doesn’t net after expenses for a gross profit by customer and the only customization option is the date range.
The “aged receivables” report looks nice, with overdue invoices laid out in columns, includings “30 or less,” “31 to 60” and more. You can see the gross total and the totals for each bucket at a glance.
Similar to the customer reports, the vendor reports are limited to “purchases by vendor” and “aged payables.” Their layouts and appearance are the same as the customer reports.
The last set of reports Wave provides are labeled “dig deeper,” but, with only three reports available, you can’t go very deep. They are just basic reports that an accountant or auditor would request: account balances, the trial balance and the general ledger.
Unlike Quickbooks Online, neither Wave nor FreshBooks has an ad hoc reporting feature or customizable reporting. You don’t get a broad selection of reports from Wave and it only lets you change the date range on them.
Financial Statements
Wave puts the core financial statements at the top of its reporting options. There, you can find the profit and loss, balance sheet and cashflow statement.
Wave doesn’t offer financial statement reports that calculate percentage change, nor does it allow you to how line items are grouped. You can change the date range and select a comparison period. That’s it for custom options.
Smaller businesses won’t need to prepare a discussion of results for upper management or a bank. They can probably calculate the information they need to guide business decisions from the basic financial statements.
As your business grows, though, you might want more functionality and tools to help you make decisions. Wave doesn’t give you that.
If you’re considering a new cloud-based accounting software program, you’ll want to think about the amount of support you’ll get if you have issues. While Wave is intuitive, even the most technology-savvy user can run into problems.
On its support page, Wave publishes guides that cover the basic tasks for setting up a new business. It also has troubleshooting tips and a guide to accounting concepts and principles if you want to do it all yourself. “Featured content” contains links to blog posts, videos and free webinars that Wave hosts for its users.
![Wave App Review Wave App Review](http://www.entrepreneurshiplife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wave-app-review-2.jpg)
No matter where you navigate in Wave, if the left-hand menu is open, you’ll see a “help?” button. Clicking on it will bring up a box on the screen’s right where you can enter your question and search the help library.
If you can’t find your answer in the help library, click “contact us” and the box’s contents will change to a screen where Wave asks what you need help with. Then, you can send an email with up to five attachments to illustrate your problem. Many help libraries will make you jump through hoops and try to force you back to the help library. It’s nice that Wave doesn’t do that.
Only customers who use Wave to handle their payment processing can contact help by phone. Everyone else has to go through the email system. Overall, Wave puts thought and effort into anticipating your questions and answering them through resources on its website.
The Verdict
Wave gives business owners the ability to see their business’s financial condition at a glance. Payroll, invoicing and credit card payments all sync together, enabling you to check on your business’s health without waiting for an accountant to reconcile your books at the end of the month.
You don’t need training or tutorials to use Wave’s interface. Its learning curve is much less than Quickbooks Online’s, but steeper than FreshBooks’s. That’s primarily because it has more features than FreshBooks, though.
Wave doesn’t offer fixed assets management, so you’ll still have to track everything in an external spreadsheet. A business with many fixed assets to track and depreciation to calculate might want to look at other cloud-based accounting software. The same is true if you’re a product-based business that stores inventory on site.
Wave’s standard reports are basic and don’t offer customization options. Once your business reaches a certain level of complexity, you may outgrow them and wish you could dive deeper. Evaluate your long-term growth goals and potential before going with Wave.
If you’re a small business owner without much money to spend on accounting software, and you need to get your books up and running quickly, Wave is an excellent choice. The time between signing up for its service and getting your business’ accounting on track is minimal and cost-conscious small businesses will appreciate that it’s free.
If you’ve tried Wave, what did you think? Did you end up using its service or going with a competitor? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks for reading.
Wave Review
Simple yet effective accounting for small business.
Wave is a free and user-friendly online accounting program. It's extremely popular, but, as you can read in our full Wave review, the Cloudwards.net team feels that its paid competitors just have that little extra bit of edge when it comes to advanced bookkeeping.Visit Wave