QuickBooks Desktop Premier is an installed version of QuickBooks for general business, contractors, manufacturing and warehouse accounting, as well as nonprofits, professional services, and retail.
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Wave Accounting
Score 7.6 out of 10
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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.
I have used QuickBooks Premier. Compared to that, Wave looks like a very amateurish bookkeeping system. It is however a LOT less expensive. Also, QuickBooks has a TON of bugs that are known but never fixed. Wave tends to have bugs that get fixed in a more timely fashion.
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We really think that ANY typical business would be a reasonable fit for QuickBooks Desktop Premier. While not necessary, even a comparatively unexperienced accounting person could look at the "Home" screen and follow their nose thru typical daily accounting processes without much detailed knowledge. Reporting is simple, looking up customer info and prior transactions is simple, looking up vendors and prior payments is simple... all in all, quite straightforward. I really can't think of an instance where it would be 'less appropriate'.
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.
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.
Support for older versions of QuickBooks ends after three years, then users must purchase the newest version at full price. Renewals should be deeply discounted for existing users.
I would like to see better in-product inventory tracking, so we can choose LIFO or FIFO rather than the ambiguous "average cost" method.
I would like to be able to assign payroll taxes to jobs for better job costing.
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.
Because we have been extremely happy with the product and our organization tends to be creatures of habit. We rarely leave a product that works this well for the latest and greatest. Typically we follow the "if it's not broken, don't fix it rule". While QB does make changes we typically just roll with it. If we do find something we don't like we work through it until we fully understand its functionality.
We switched to a more "robust" software program with the hiring of a new CFO. The migration of historical data and ancillary information has been cumbersome and riddle with errors and issues. In hindsight much of what the new software program was touted to accomplish is not come to fruition. QB Desktop Premier was sufficient for the organization needs
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 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.
This is where QuickBooks falls short. Many times my staff has had questions that have not been able to get resolved easily with a chat or call. I personally have had more general questions that have not been answered easily as well. I think QuickBooks needs to provide the resources of having readily accessible help in order to make it simpler to get solutions.
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
It is important to do your research. There are tutorial videos online that could help new user of this accounting system. These tutorials are straightforward and easily understandable.
QuickBooks Premier handles most of my business functions efficiently in one package. It is not my "everything." I use Replicon for time rather than QuickBooks. I don't want my WIP data interfering with my accounting. I use PaySimple for it's web interface and back office processing. I don't have security issues since I don't have any credit card data in my possession. With today's identity theft environment, I have to protect myself as much as I can. Not having credit card data in my accounting software lets me sleep much better at night. Quicken will do basic accounting but does not have all the double entry accounting systems contained in QuickBooks. QuickBooks Online does much of the basic business functions but I don't like the pricing structure. As a professional accountant, that is very important to me. Bill.com provided a good service but the ability of QuickBooks to add bills and receipts to transactions makes it redundant.
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
Most of our business clients use QuickBooks which makes it efficient for us to work on clients that use the program. We can import QuickBooks data into our software which adds efficiencies to our tax practice.
Having staff that are familiar with the software enables our firm to provide quality service to the clients that use QuickBooks.
We receive referrals from satisfied QuickBooks clients.
