Very Small Business Owners, Look No Further than Accounting by Wave
December 28, 2016
Very Small Business Owners, Look No Further than Accounting by Wave
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Accounting by Wave
I am semi-retired, with a small home-based business where I teach adults and children to sew as well as do clothing alterations. For most of my worklife I was a writer and editor, and I still do some of that. I use Accounting by Wave to keep track of all my earned income from every source. I formerly used QuickBooks, but it was so complex that I made frequent errors that made my accounting a nightmare. Wave is designed to be user-friendly for small companies such as mine, and can be used by someone without training in accounting. With Wave, many problems are handled easily:
- Categorizing income & expenses by accounts
- Simple reports
- Customizable, attractive, professional invoices
- Easy recurring invoicing
- Ability to send invoices through Wave or through my own email program
- Customers can pay directly from their invoice over the internet
- Wave has a good on-line database of help articles. Additionally, their staff responds to customer service problems and inquiries received via email quickly and completely, even without their premium customer service option. They follow up on inquiries to make sure that the problem has been solved. Plus, I have seen that a few issues that were not supported at the time of my inquiry became updates. This means that they pay attention to the needs of their users and incorporate user suggestions to make the program stronger and better, yet still easy to use.
- I was able to create a unique, custom invoice template in just a few minutes using clip art. Having a professional-looking invoice helps project the image that I want my school to have.
- Setting up additional businesses is easy. My writing/editing business has its own custom invoice template, and I was able to set up deposits from those invoices into an account at a different bank than that used for my sewing school. Wave made it very easy to keep track of both businesses without any danger of confusing expenses and income.
- The receipt function from my smartphone is really handy and easy to use.
- I would like to be able to customize the reminder sent to customers who haven't paid invoices. The boiler-plate text doesn't apply to my situation, so I can't use this feature and have to write each reminder separately.
- I bank with two small credit unions that are not supported by Wave, which means that transactions aren't automatically downloaded to my Wave account. Of course when clients pay using the link on their invoices the deposits are made to my accounts; but Wave can't connect directly to my credit union for other transactions.
- Sometimes it is slow to load.
- I do everything in my small business. Wave has given me the ability to keep good clear books in a fraction of the time I needed using other programs. This has given me more time to use on other activities that help my business grow and succeed.
QuickBooks was overkill for me, with much more features and functionality that I would ever need. It assumed I had been trained as an accountant, so the help was impossible for me to understand. Customer service was not available. I spent countless hours setting up the program and more hours trying to use it correctly.
Accounting by Wave is designed for small as well as larger businesses, and it can be used by people like me who are not trained in accountancy. That it is free is an added bonus.
Accounting by Wave is designed for small as well as larger businesses, and it can be used by people like me who are not trained in accountancy. That it is free is an added bonus.