LessAccounting vs. Wave Accounting

If you are an entrepreneur and you want to focus on building your business, start with Less Accounting. It's a full-blown accounting system that has a simple implementation and it can connect to your financial accounts to automate many parts of the business. Our 1st four years of business, we worked without a bookkeeper at all due to the level of automation.

It is not limited in any regard and is not simply for invoicing or tracking hours, it more or less does everything. Perhaps one area that it wouldn't be ideal is for firms that need to have more rigid accounting, with charts of accounts etc for industries that are audited or highly regulated.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Categorize Expenses Automatically
• Profit and loss Statements
• Interfaces with Credit Union

Incentivized

• 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.

• With the flexibility comes room for folks not adhering to specific accounts. There is no numeric chart of accounts so at times you will see 2 line items for a single item. We tend to overcome this limitation with extensive tagging.
• Invoices and sales orders don't have an obvious way to assign credit to specific salespeople or consultants. We reached out to LA and they have shown us a different way to do this which we'll try soon.
• The visual interface can use some sprucing up. It's easy to navigate but I believe the navigation can be slightly improved. I do find myself hitting the back button to get into other parts of the app.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It works, it keeps our historical data and is easy to use

Incentivized

Easy to use for clients with no accounting background and the price is right.

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

WAVE is always available when we need it ! Peter

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.

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

easy to use and east to train on ! Our WAVE clients enjoy the ease of use

I had been with QuickBooks for a few years (unwillingly) at the behest of accountants. It took me a while to realize there were other options out there and I needed to begin a hunt to find them. I found LessAccounting. While it's not the most appealing software, it sure helped me see the breakdown of things and allowed me to reconcile my books without feeling like I needed a degree in Accounting.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Once they out grow what is ability to move up to a more robust system?

• + Less time worrying about my accounting
• + actually reconciling my books at the end of each month or quarter
• + being able to access my P+L anytime!

Incentivized

• Wave has been ROI positive for our company. With not having to pay for the service we can use our money for growing our business.
• The fees on credit card transactions for invoices are reasonable especially as we don't pay a monthly subscription.
• The invoicing feature has made our lives easier for us and our customers. The invoicing piece and AR tracking has been ROI positive as well.

Incentivized