Review: Wave
July 05, 2018
Review: Wave
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Accounting by Wave
Wave is responsible for handling my company's bookkeeping, tracking estimates and invoices, and budgeting. Wave handles essentially everything related to finances for my business.
- Wave can create invoices, send invoices to clients, and notify me once an invoice has been received. It also tracks when invoices are due and allows me to check paid invoices off my list. It's extremely helpful when my previous methods of tracking invoices was updating an excel sheet. A simple feature included with invoicing is the software keeping track of what number invoice I'm currently on, so it's quick to reference different invoices.
- Bookkeeping with Wave is fairly intuitive. You can connect any of your desired bank accounts to Wave and import your list of transactions. Wave keeps a database of clients, and though it means creating entries for each client (specifically recurring ones) you can tag clients onto income in the bank account. You can also create specific line items for budgets and tag transactions under whatever budget item you wish. There are many ways to use bookkeeping and budgeting with Wave and I've been very pleased to keep everything categorized under one software rather than using multiple applications.
- Other features I've not used extensively yet that Wave includes are: estimates, cash flow reports, payroll, tax charts, etc. I'll be using estimates and reporting later this year, but I'm still impressed with how much versatility the software allows for.
- The only disappointment I've had with using Wave so far is how delayed transactions can be with the bank connection. This is likely because of how slow the turnaround can be for check deposits and other transactions to register in the bank (24 hours or more) but it means I need to reference my bank account's website instead of Wave if I have checks arriving on payroll day.
- Wave is free. As a small business owner, it's difficult for me to commit to using too many different software because costs add up. Wave is a very competitive application with many features. I don't think I can go elsewhere at this point. It's far too attractive.
- Wave does have paid features relating to payroll and bank account transfers. I prefer to handle incoming payments through checks manually so I don't worry about bank transfers. For some, this might be a concern, but you are likely paying for this no matter what you use.
- Wave has saved me a considerable amount of time going back and forth between my bank's website and excel sheets. This is immeasurable to me. Keeping invoices in one place is also a big deal. I really love this software.