AccountMate vs. Wave Accounting

AccountMate is a great product for wholesale and distributors. It manages the inventory cycles comprehensively, from purchasing to stocking, to sales and delivery. There are a great many tools available to manage inventory, properties, and financials. The availability to have third-party add-ons offers even greater opportunities to meet the needs of the end-user. The system is not really suited for certain types of service industries: legal, medical, and those businesses that invoice on time.

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

• Ease of use
• Ability to easily adapt the solution to fit the needs of the end user
• Integration of data across different platforms

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.

• Custom reports: The current system uses Crystal Reports, which is a bit cumbersome.
• True cloud-based solution is missing

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

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

We use AccountMate for a number of reasons, particularly its ease of use and the ability to customize any part of the system (with source code residing on the end-user system--a HUGE advantage).

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?

• Allows us to quickly gain insight into the current and past performance of the company

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