Sage Business Cloud Accounting vs. Wave Accounting

The program is appropriate for use in all business types - especially if the business has many different branches located in different parts of the country/world. The fact that invoicing can be done from a mobile device by use of the friendly Sage One app also makes it easy to quickly conclude a sales transaction by issuing an invoice at the client office - shortens time, leaving more time for business.

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.

• The ability to log in to your accounting data anywhere you have internet. No sending backups to your accountant, no more trying to recover lost data, or having to log in to a server. This cloud hosted solution gives you a lot more freedom and flexibility as I can log in to it from any computer, or mobile device.
• The ability to send professional invoices or quotes to my customers while still at their location. Also the ability to easily track my receivables and stay on top of them as they are always right at my fingertips.
• Project tracking is a great feature. With this module you can send tasks associated with a project to your team without giving them access to your financial information. They can report to you where they are at on the project to help you stay on track. You can track the revenue and expenses associated with this project to make sure you are making a profit.
• Bank integration brings in all the transactions and easily lets you allocate to the appropriate revenue and expense account or match to sales invoices or purchase invoices saving you time in data entry.
• Sage One integrates with Sage Payment solutions or Paypal. By giving your customers more options to pay helping you stay on top of your receivables.
• I love how it imports into the Sage 50 Accounting software for those customers who still need the features and functionality of the desktop software.
• Just released the integration between Sage 50 and Sage One just got easier. The previous versions of Sage One and Sage 50 had the ability to download customer transactions from Sage One including invoicing, other income, bills, expenses, bank transfers and general journal entries to your Sage 50 accounting software.
• With the latest update for Sage 50 you can now automatically upload and map your Sage 50 customer records, vendors, accounts, inventory items, and tax codes to Sage One for a quick, easy setup and perfect record match every time. This makes things so much easier when setting up new customers in Sage One
• Now that important client information flows both ways, you can set up a new client in Sage One in minutes by accessing your Sage One connection wizard (under “file tab” in Sage 50 Accountants Edition) For the customers, vendors and accounts and products and services.
• The other information such as Sales invoices and other income, Bills and other expenses, Bank Transfers, general journal entries flow from Sage One to Sage 50.

• 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.

• The bank transaction reconciliations are terrible if you have to split payments to multiple clients. Often times work will just disappear halfway through the split
• Telephonic user assistance. I have received conflicting info from service reps.
• I prefer the way Quickbooks platform is set up

• 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.

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

There's nothing mechanically wrong with Sage, and it serves our intended purpose. Again, we don't really use Sage to its fullest potential, but for what it does for us, there are few complaints other than the darn fixed assets module

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

The product continues to improve and very excited about the new release coming soon.

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.

My Experience with sage business cloud Accounting is great. You won't disappoint with this software. Your accounting-related problem will be solved. Very easy to use all the features. I would highly recommend this software to all the company who is struggling for managing accounting data. Very user-friendly and easy to manage all the accounting problems.

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

I find the online training was very informative and they answered all my questions. I am also certified in Sage One and provided online training in the program which I have set up several people on and they love how it keeps them organized.

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

I have used Wave Accounting, and while it is an excellent cloud accounting software, it doesn't allow us to work collaboratively with our customers. They both allow me to sign in and work with our clients books within the program, but Wave doesn't integrate into Sage 50 which is a must for clients that I know want to continue to grow.

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

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

• Ability to add-on: Positive ROI can be achieved by building you own customized solution by adding on partner apps. Such apps extend the functionality of the product to accommodate certain business requirements.
• Product is slower than competitors: Negative ROI as product seems to be comparatively slower than competitors when holding other variables constant (ie. browser version, Internet connection speed, etc.) In a busy accounting cycle, this can have a substantial impact. Also, back buttons don't allow for retaining same screen input data.
• Reports functionality strong: Positive ROI due to ability to view data in many dimensions/formats.
• Ability to connect financial accounts: Positive ROI as data from financial accounts automatically brought into the accounts where it can approved for posting, thus eliminating manual entry.

• 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.