Wave Accounting
Wave Accounting
Wave Accounting
Overview
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.
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Awards
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Popular Features
View all 44 features- Accounts receivable (67)6.969%
- Bank reconciliation (63)6.868%
- Standard reports (67)6.868%
- Dashboards (68)6.666%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Pricing
View all pricingEntry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Multi-currency support and Order entry highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Wave Accounting are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(165)
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June 08, 2016
Wave Accounting Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Wave is being used for my entire organization as we use it for the general ledger, A/R and payroll. It automates many tasks saving our organization time and money. With other software we spent considerable time entering payroll, writing cheques to employees and submitting government remittances. Wave has streamlined this process since employees are paid directly to their bank accounts and government remittances are automatically paid.
- The payroll module is fantastic. The entire process is automated and saves considerable time throughout the process.
- The automatic download of bank and credit card transactions into the general ledger saves a considerable amount of time with data entry.
- Allowing customers to pay invoices by credit card directly through Wave allows for faster collection of receivables.
- The reporting features could be more robust as the number of reports are limited and not a flexible as I would like to see them.
- I have run into issues when trying to export general ledger items. There are inconsistencies with the date formats and as a result the information does not export easily.
46.66666666666667%
4.7
N/A
N/A
47.5%
4.8
100%
10.0
46.66666666666667%
4.7
N/A
N/A
100%
10.0
- Increased staff efficiencies
- Increased customer service
Wave accounting does not have as many features as Quickbooks or Sage 50 but it holds it's own with the market it serves. I use Wave primarily for the payroll functionality and i have recommended that clients who use Sage 50 or Quickbooks use Wave for it's payroll. The importing of the bank transactions is also a great feature but the other competitors have caught up to Wave on this feature. Overall it is a great tool, but only for the right type of client.
1
0
- Vendor implemented
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Wave is my primary accounting program for my business. I am a sole-proprietor business with no employees and prefer cloud based software so I can jump between working on my desktop, laptop, and tablet. I am able to use Wave accounting for all of my invoicing, receiving credit card payments, and tracking expenses. Because it is a full featured double entry accounting program it also is capable of tracking depreciable assets which many other paid online accounting programs do not do.
- Wave invoicing is clean and easy to use to invoice all my clients, including using their mobile app.
- Wave payments is great because you can see the payment details including when the money will deposit into your bank account. It also allows you to save payment methods for recurring payments.
- Wave has excellent customer support, there are various subscription options if you need more dedicated support.
- Wave does a great job of meeting the needs of small business owners by integrating receipts, invoicing, bank import, payroll, and expense tracking.
- There are no preset date options for reports. It would be nice if you could select a quick option when running a report like "this month", "this quarter", "last month", "last quarter". It can bee a little cumbersome to manually enter the dates for a report especially when looking for previous years.
- As a Wave Pro, I have clients who use Wave for Payroll. Under my "collaborator" access I cannot assist them with running payroll or view any payroll reports I have to use their personal login to access payroll. It would be nice to have an option to grant a collaborator more access including Payroll.
- It would be really great to add a credit memo option. That way you could show that a client has a positive balance on their account. I know there are some funky work-arounds for this, but it's not worth the work to use them.
- Bank reconciliation technically exists, but it's not intuitive for someone who is used to reconciling in a desktop software such as Quickbooks.
83.33333333333334%
8.3
N/A
N/A
37.5%
3.8
47.5%
4.8
73.33333333333333%
7.3
25%
2.5
50%
5.0
- Wave has allowed me have a clear picture of my revenue and allowed me to make better business expense decisions.
- Wave has saved me a lot of money because it is a free service. It saves me a lot of time because it automatically imports my bank transactions.
- FreshBooks,QuickBooks Online,LessAccounting
Wave's biggest selling point is by far it's price, because their base product for free. Most people sign-up because of that advantage. But here are my opinions of Wave Vs these three other programs I've worked in.
Wave vs Freshbooks
Wave vs Quickbooks Online
Wave vs Freshbooks
-Freshbooks wins for invoicing because it gives you multiple options for payment processing integration and it gives you an audit trail on invoices to show when a client has viewed as well as paid. It also has a project time tracking option that you can then invoice time entries.
-Wave wins the accounting side because it actually tracks assets and liabilities, not just income and expenses.
-As far as user friendly and accounting knowledge necessary to use, Freshbooks is slightly easier for those with no accounting knowledge.
-Wave allows bookkeepers to use their own account access through the collaborator feature, Freshbooks has "accountant" access but you can only view reports and export journal entries. If someone wants help editing transactions they have to share their login info.
Wave vs Quickbooks Online
-Quickbooks Online wins for customization and range of features especially custom reports, sub-accounts in the chart of accounts, and traditional bank reconciliation.Wave vs Less Accounting
-Wave is better in ease of use
-Wave Payroll offers a Tax service that automates payroll tax filing, Quickbooks Payroll does not do that you still have to hit send
- Overall I found LessAccounting and Wave very comparable products, but LessAccounting is a paid product and Wave's base product is free w/ advertising on the sidebar.
-In the range of features, Wave has more integrated options such as Payroll and Payment Processing.
-LessAccounting has a strong emphasis on education and tries to educate the user on basic bookkeeping processes within the software
-LessAccounting has a slightly better bank reconciliation feature, but only slightly better because you enter the starting and ending statement balances. Neither product are strong on true bank statement reconciliation.
1
Owner and sole-proprietor. I have no other employees at this time so I take care of my own bookkeeping and invoicing.
- Implemented in-house
- Invoicing
- Transaction Entry
- Receipt upload
- Journal Entries
- Credit Memos
Yes
There are three separate Mobile apps for Wave Accounting: Invoicing, Receipts, and Payments (integrates with Stripe).
The invoicing app is really great and easy to create and send invoices to existing clients from the app. It also allows to set up notifications for items such as overdue invoices and payments.
The receipt app has issues with crashing on occasion, but usually is quickly resolved with logging out and and back in. You can quickly snap a photo of a receipt to send to the web app. You still need to login to the web app to review and accept the receipt details.
The payments app is great because it does not require a card reader and uses the phone's camera or allows manual card number entry.
The invoicing app is really great and easy to create and send invoices to existing clients from the app. It also allows to set up notifications for items such as overdue invoices and payments.
The receipt app has issues with crashing on occasion, but usually is quickly resolved with logging out and and back in. You can quickly snap a photo of a receipt to send to the web app. You still need to login to the web app to review and accept the receipt details.
The payments app is great because it does not require a card reader and uses the phone's camera or allows manual card number entry.