Ottimate vs. Wave Accounting

It is well targeted at restaurants and similar service organizations with complex COGS. It dovetails well with complementary systems like FinTech payments. It wasn't designed by accountants, so there is a bit of roughness. Reporting is very limited: would like to see some SQL / build your own report functionality. Lookups are reasonably robust (filter for amount, time, vendor, etc). It is occasionally unstable but recovers gracefully. From our use case, it would be preferable to have the user approving the invoice ALSO have the ability to attach documents. This is left to the payment approver, who in our case is the "check signer".

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

• OCR
• Workflow
• Support

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.

• Provide better analytics in terms of cost increases per item.
• Provide the ability to create recipes and forward price increases to those recipes for accurate food cost projections.
• Free Bill Pay

• 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.

They have a dedicated support person for each customer who actually knows the product.

Turnaround is usually within an hour or faster.

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 used DocuWare first; great experience; however, it was not made specifically for restaurant clients like Plate IQ is. Plate IQ does a much better job of recognizing common items, and they've continued to add a function that is important for restaurant owners. Restaurant 365, we felt, was trying to be a complete package of accounting/AP/AR/inventory. After looking at each piece, we didn't feel that each of them was as strong as the other.

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?

• In my opinion, it has had zero impact on ROI now that we are paying for an additional year.
• Another negative is that we've spent a lot of time discussing this issue with Plate IQ, to no avail. They feel it's appropriate to charge a company for an entire year of service even though said company emailed to cancel prior to the end of the first year of service.
• We also wasted a lot of time onboarding this company only to find out that the software left a lot to be desired.

• 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