Good Accounting Software for SME's
January 13, 2022
We use Wave Accounting for all the financial data of the organization (SME.) The payroll, however, was outsourced. The product addresses a …
Wave Accounting
Wave Accounting
Overview
Recent Reviews
Reviewer Sentiment
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Awards
Popular Features
View all 44 featuresAccounts receivable (66)
5.9
59%
Dashboards (67)
5.8
58%
Standard reports (66)
5.8
58%
Bank reconciliation (62)
5.0
50%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Pricing
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What is Wave Accounting?
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…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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8 people want pricing too
Alternatives Pricing
What is Zoho Books?
Zoho Books is an accounting solution that is designed to help small businesses manage their finances. This solution includes dashboards and a wide variety of reports. Business users can automate tasks and set up custom workflows. The vendor offers a 14 day free trial.
What is Sage Business Cloud Accounting?
Sage Business Cloud Accounting (formerly Sage One Accounting) is online accounting software made to simplify life for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and freelancers by providing the functions needed to take care of daily business to-dos. Users can create and send professional quotes and…
Features Scorecard
Payroll Management
6.7
67%
Customization
8.3
83%
Security
6.8
68%
Reporting & Analytics
6.5
65%
General Ledger and Configurable Accounting
5.4
54%
Inventory Management
8.1
81%
Order Management
7.2
72%
Product Details
What is Wave Accounting?
Wave Accounting is a fast growing, free, cloud-based accounting platform exclusively for small businesses (less than 9 employees) offered by Wave in Toronto. It supports double-entry bookkeeping and permits unlimited user access to always-available records and reports, as well as unlimited invoicing and expense management. Wave integrates with expense tracking software Shoeboxed. The software is mobile-accessible.
Wave Accounting integrates with Wave's invoicing, receipt scanning, payment processing and payroll apps, into one relatively comprehensive package. However, the automated payments and payroll functionality must be purchased; the payments addition bills per transaction, and the payroll feature bills by number of employees over a flat rate. To support the free platform, Wave integrates advertisements from business partners. Thus these are a necessary facet of the service.
Wave Accounting integrates with Wave's invoicing, receipt scanning, payment processing and payroll apps, into one relatively comprehensive package. However, the automated payments and payroll functionality must be purchased; the payments addition bills per transaction, and the payroll feature bills by number of employees over a flat rate. To support the free platform, Wave integrates advertisements from business partners. Thus these are a necessary facet of the service.
Wave Accounting Video
Grow Your Business With Wave
Wave Accounting Competitors
Wave Accounting Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Comparisons
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Wave Accounting?
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.
What are Wave Accounting's top competitors?
What is Wave Accounting's best feature?
Reviewers rate Automatic reordering highest, with a score of 9.9.
Who uses Wave Accounting?
The most common users of Wave Accounting are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees) and the Accounting industry.
Reviews and Ratings
(155)
Reviews
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January 13, 2022
Good Accounting Software for SME's
- Xero, Facebook Business Manager (formerly Pages Manager), Google Search Console, DataCamp and BuildSmart
November 08, 2021
Wave accounting FRAUD and malicious practices.
It doesn't in anyway due to the fraud that is inflicted on so many companies!
August 17, 2021
Wave Accounting Review
This was my first invoice company. I had seen Freshly before. Venmo is far less of an accounting tool. QuickBooks seems terrible with a monthly cost. Which is why I hadn't moved companies yet. But I just learned my Website host, Wix, offers it right through my site and Clients can pay there. So, I'm currently going that route.
Wave's price point was in line with what my company needed to manage basic accounting (payable and receivable accounts). It made it easy for me to issue monthly invoices to clients and track when invoices were paid. The software makes these tasks easy to manage and inputting data for accurate accounting and invoicing is a breeze. It really offers a lot of flexibility, so you can use the software the way you need it.
May 03, 2021
Wave is user friendly - easy to use!
I shopped Wave and Quickbooks. I loved Wave's interface and ease of use. It had everything I needed for the free version.
April 29, 2021
Wave Accounting Software
Wave was more user friendly for me as a new entrepreneur. It was intuitive and helped me navigate the accounting process and issues.
The best feature about wave is that they let you use it for free for basic accounting and pay per use payments. But based on my horrible experience with how they cancelled my payments feature, I would never use them again!
December 03, 2020
Avoid Waveapps if you are a non-profit
Wonderful, great support, and many videos on how to do it. Fast response to emails. Does "Fund Accounting" that is required for many non-profits.
March 16, 2020
Wave Accounting - great for micro businesses
As I stated previously, Wave is a free system. It serve you well as non-resident of USA/Canada for your basic bookkeeping needs, as a micro-business. If you are a resident of those countries, you will benefit immensely from the payroll function as well. If you are looking for a country-specific, more powerful system, then I recommend a system such as Sage Business Cloud for your needs. This obviously depends on the size of your company and how powerful you need your accounting system to be.
- QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, QuickBooks Desktop Pro, QuickBooks Online, Sage Business Cloud X3 (formerly Sage ERP X3), Sage CRM and MRI Residential Management
Circling back to the "free" thing again. For a small business, I am getting for free what QuickBooks Online charges no less than $40/month. Moving away from "free," these other solutions I listed above do more, and these would be the right solutions for the right needs. All of the QuickBooks versions include very deep levels of reporting and levels of management that far outweigh the much simpler Wave Accounting platform. Again, Wave Accounting is entry-level after all! The Sage programs run as part of a full-blown ERP solution--generally used for manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and the like--so very advanced and for much larger companies. I selected Wave Accounting because my personal business needs were very basic--invoicing customers, tracking expenses, and sales tax, etc.--and this free solution afforded me all of these things.
January 29, 2020
Very Affordable Accounting Software
Wave Accounting is very similar to QuickBooks Online. The functions of Wave Accounting are very similar to QuickBooks Online. The major difference is that with the low pricing of Wave Accounting, it lacks all of the bells and whistles that QuickBooks Online has like better-improved bank connections. If cost is an issue then my recommendation is that you use Wave Accounting to start with. If cost is not an issue, then I would recommend using QuickBooks Online. Wave Accounting is difficult to set up especially if you do not have any accounting experience. QuickBooks Online, however, is designed to help those that lack accounting skills. Overall, I like using Wave Accounting because of the affordability but it does have its pain points.
December 17, 2019
A great, cheap option for small organizations!
I was not impressed with Xero or ZipBooks simply because they were expensive and still as, if not more, confusing than QuickBooks. QuickBooks is, unfortunately, the standard. I dislike it, and I think it is just a huge corporation trying to steal small businesses money, but unfortunately, I haven't found a software that can quite compare with the full functionality of QuickBooks. Wave at least offers a competent system for free. If they move it to becoming a paid software, I don't know how much more I will continue to recommend it because it does have a lot of limitations still.
Wave feels more geared toward a younger generation. QB feels very old and stuffy, though they're slowly coming around. QB feels much more powerful than Wave but Wave did what I needed it to do. My CPA had never heard of it before so I ended up needing to have both, but Wave being free helped me keep both.
December 04, 2019
Easy to use for someone without accounting or business experience
I chose to keep Wave first because it is free and easy to use but I also could not find anything else that allowed me to create customer categorizations at least not with a free account. There have been a lot of improvements to Wave over the years so the reasons I was looking for a change have mostly been resolved, with the biggest one being that there used to be very long wait times when the program was processing info.
October 29, 2019
Free Wave Accounting hits the spot for small businesses
Basically, we selected Wave because it was a free accounting system. We have not tried another accounting system that is so much better than Wave Accounting that we should leave Wave Accounting. Every time, we find another online accounting system we do a review of the system and then consider its price point and ask ourselves "Does the price and its features justify leaving Wave Accounting?" Every time we have asked ourselves that question, the answer is no. If Wave Accounting continues to develop new features as they have in the past, we will continue to use Wave Accounting.
October 29, 2019
A Simple Invoicing Software for Freelancers
- Stripe
Invoicing is the only feature I was looking for and for that Wave had a better UI, which is why I selected it versus Stripe. I believe Stripe has more functionality, but it was more than I needed for my purposes. That being said, I do use Stripe in conjunction with Wave because it integrates into WooCommerce.
Honestly, it stacks up pretty good except for the ACH transactions. With QuickBooks, ACH transactions were in my account in 2 business days at the 1% charge (that both companies charge).
The support is similar on both sides. I spent 18 days trying to cancel my QuickBooks account and there is no phone number anywhere until I canceled the last time and got a number to call which tried to upsell me. Wave has NO phone numbers and support does not give out any numbers to any departments.
The support is similar on both sides. I spent 18 days trying to cancel my QuickBooks account and there is no phone number anywhere until I canceled the last time and got a number to call which tried to upsell me. Wave has NO phone numbers and support does not give out any numbers to any departments.
August 03, 2019
Not a Wave you Want to Ride
Unfortunately we did not do our due diligence before selecting Wave. We came across them through our payroll provider (ADP) and assumed that it was good since we have had a great experience with ADP. In the future I would strongly recommend others to not just read online articles and reviews, but closely read the comments on the review articles. After the experience we had with Wave we did more research and found that the issues we had were very common. Had we seen the comments before we made the decision, we would have definitely not selected Wave.
August 03, 2019
The best option if you're a freelance worker!
I trialled FreshBooks a while back but they pack too much into the system for what it is. Wave has a super simple UI and dashboard and doesn't feel overly complicated to navigate yet offers all the features everyone is looking for. Being able to customize the system to brand it specifically for your company/business is something other software typically lacks until you pay for a more enterprise version.
December 15, 2018
Powerful Free Accounting and Invoicing for Small Businesses
For the pricing arrangement, the ease of use and the user-friendliness of the app, Wave crushes QuickBooks Online and Zoho Books. FreshBooks was a little bit closer as the two are more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but FreshBooks doesn't offer a non-paid option and they cap the number of customers you can have, which caused me to go with Wave. I've never regretted my decision.
November 18, 2018
Wave Accounting works great for my small business
I was using Billings Pro, and On the Job. I did trials of Due and Sighted. But I didn't like the UI and features of those 2. After testing out Wave, I liked the features, UI, and customization better than the other options. Wave is much easier, and the user interface is very straightforward and simple to use.
November 07, 2018
A wave of approval for Wave
Zoho has many modules that can be integrated, including CRM, but Wave is pretty much ready to use 5 minutes after signing up.
November 07, 2018
Account By Wave Saves you time & resources
Wave allows you to be all in one system, similar to competitors, with scanning receipts and reconciling everything.
November 01, 2018
Ride the Wave! It's awesome!
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!
November 01, 2018
Wave Hello to Your New Accounting Solution - Wave
Wave stacks up well against QuickBooks especially from the price aspect. In addition the features within Wave are comparable to those found in QuickBooks. We selected Wave based on the reviews from other consumers and the ease of use with its web based application. Wave is so user friendly and will make bookkeeping much easier for business owners.