Wave Accounting is a free, cloud-based accounting platform exclusively for small businesses. It supports double-entry bookkeeping and permits unlimited user access, invoicing, and expense management. Wave Accounting integrates with Wave's invoicing, receipt scanning, payment processing and payroll apps.
N/A
Xero
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
Wave Accounting
Xero
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Wave Accounting
Xero
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
I was not impressed with Xero or ZipBooks simply because they were expensive and still as, if not more, confusing than QuickBooks. QuickBooks is, unfortunately, the standard. I dislike it, and I think it is just a huge corporation trying to steal small businesses money, but …
Wave's price point was in line with what my company needed to manage basic accounting (payable and receivable accounts). It made it easy for me to issue monthly invoices to clients and track when invoices were paid. The software makes these tasks easy to manage and inputting …
Across the board Wave takes the cake on price at $0/mo aside from payroll fees and credit card processing. That aside I'd say most accounting systems are fairly similar, however what I like about Wave is just how simple the interface is and the outstanding customer support from …
It fits a niche of clients that are tech savvy, often self employed and want to manage business and personal finances. We are finding that even as these companies grow new features are allowing them to stay in Wave.
Xero Accounting is the only other app that stacks up to Wave. Wave is free, easy to learn and use, compared to others, has a very good support system, continues to evolve, and has a very dedicated and enthusiastic staff.
Xero and QBO. In my opinion Xero is the best platform. However, it is not cheap. While Wave does provide as gret an experience or as much functionality it does provide the necessities for free. This is great for small or new business who would otherwise be doing their …
Xero had better recommendations and my accountant preferred it even though it wasn't the cheapest, it came out the most recommended. Wave had a free version and a fairly good mobile experience this was our second choice.
Personally, I always hated QuickBooks. I'm sure the online/cloud version is a lot different than the older desktop software, but I never found it to be easy to use and my books were always out of sync. Wave [Accounting] was the first Saas accounting software I tried, but I …
Xero stands out as the industry leader in terms of ease of use, functionality, integration possibilities, usability, and reporting functionality. Having extensive experience with various accounting software as a business owner and mentor, Xero consistently proves to be my top …
I prefer Xero over the other options I have tried because it has a cleaner interface, operates faster on the web, has a strong API relationship with other applications and appears to be gaining ground on Quickbooks in the marketplace. QuickBooks Online is probably the most …
Ignoring pricing, Xero is among the best options available. It has the most complete feature set along with Quickbooks. It is more user-friendly compared to most of its competitors. It has well-designed mobile apps that can actually do something in contrast with most …
Xero has remained simple yet robust for years. They have a few items that make it difficult (what product doesn't), but I feel very confident in partnering with them. I have used (and still use) QuickBooks Online and I have witnessed Intuit continually pull the bait and …
The ease of use and feature sets are miles apart from the competition. The alternatives that I have compared Xero with are just years away from dozens of features which makes a user's life much easier. The competition's localizations are still very far apart, and the …
Xero could be slightly more expensive compared to these products but to me, Xero is the most user-friendly platform. It is very easy to use. Their support page and email support are also great. Apart from the platform, Xero has lots of integrations with other software providers …
Founder and Senior eCommerce Strategist & Consultant
Chose Xero
Xero as a cloud-based solution cannot be compared with the desktop solution, especially when much of our company's business is done online. The more the market moves online, the more desktop solutions will be cumbersome and outdated. Other cloud-based solutions, such as Accounti…
Wave Accounting was used for a small practice without a lot of the accounting considerations a large company would have. For the price, you really can't beat what Wave offers out of the box. All of the basic tools for things like invoicing and expenses are all easy to use. End of year accounting is easy with exports of data.
If they are using foreign exchange I always use Xero. If I need reporting to be customized we always use Xero. If the client is already working in a software and it is working for them we will leave them in the software they are in.
Reconciliation is very difficult with multiple Wave transactions that need to be deleted or merged before it can be matched to a bank transaction.
Payroll worked fine for us but took several days to get it set up. We have switched to another bookkeeping system and another payroll system. Canceling with Wave took several days and they charge $6 for something even though the month was paid for in advance.
Credit card processing is nice and worked fine for us.
Their method of moving between screens was very logical and intuitive which is not a "given" attribute among software packages.
Finding transactions was relatively easy with just common sense.
The use of this software was generally well received in that the accountants did not discredit the software as cheap, poorly organized, or timely to learn. No one at Corporate had a vendetta against using Xero.
It does a good job of allowing the users to drill down to the final detail of an account balance - which is fundamental to the accounting department's needs.
I know that credit card processing is a way for Wave to make money, but I really wish they offered ACH payment on Invoices.
I do cash-based accounting, which means I have to make little journal entries at the start and end of each year to get my books to balance because Wave wants to do everything differently. This should just be a setting to flip, whether you want cash-based or accrual-based.
They use Yodlee for bank connection, which doesn't play nice with 2FA. Pretty much every time I log in I have to re-enter credentials, get a code sent to me, reauthenticate, and know that I'm going to have to do it again next week. Not really on Wave, but wish they could get it together nonetheless.
I would like to have the ability to sign up a holding company and all its trading entities under one subscription, in order to have amalgamated and separate accounting records and reports for each trading entity.
This is pertaining to my own Xero business clients: I would like to have a full featured, customizable practice client support /ticketing and task manager system, with reminders that can be sent to my clients and my team for various tasks due.
I would like Xero to have a cheaper option for their packages that include invoicing and related documents, as in my country we have options with an opposition accounting firm that offers a subscription where clients can create up to 2000 invoices per year for free.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
I am a professional bookkeeper and I have no problems using Wave and all of it's features. I can see that certain individuals who have no accounting knowledge might struggle with a few different features and entries, but that is why Wave has an emphasis in connecting users to Wave Pro's who will walk them through things
Xero has all the features that you need, basically. From chart of accounts, reconciling books, to making annual financial reports. What I'm currently looking for Xero right now is to provide more broader integration with the other apps so we can use it for customer-facing experience also. All in all, everything works well!
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Wave does tend to slow down when filtering your transactions screen especially by date. This is more of an issue when trying to trouble shoot certain transactions or clean-up a set of books.
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
I never had to call Wave Support as we barely experienced any support-related problems on our side. However, I do know a few people that complained about Wave support. It would be nice as well, though if they could have more in your face tutorials for new users or how-to videos should we struggle to do something
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
Wave is FREE for most functions. Payment processing costs no matter where you go (as does payroll or taxes). Wave rises above tools like QuickBooks Online because they know that for our small firm, being nimble is the name of the game. We don't need exhaustive reporting and management like QB offers and we certainly don't want to pay for it
I've used a lot of different accounting systems. Many of them so big and powerful, but a hassle to get set up. Xero is light, inexpensive, and easy to use. When I originally selected them they seemed like they were developing new features at a quick rate as well. I was invited to be part of focus sessions to make the product better. That part has slowed down significantly though.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
Saved many hours through automatic invoices and followups
Saved many hours by allowing transactions to start via bank feeds (ie I don't have to input a transaction and mark it against what is in the bank/cc account; rather, the transaction in the account is where you input the transaction into the books.
Has the scalability my business requires, and not much more.