Item: Wave Accounting
Rating: 1
Author: Sean Stewart

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Wave as our primary system to track expenses, invoices, and payments. We also used Wave to process credit card payments. We use Wave Accounting software company-wide. At first, it appeared to be great way to track invoices and easily receive payments via credit card. The website itself has some nice features.

Pros and Cons

Logging invoices and payments as it is relatively easy and fast.
Integration with our payroll system (ADP)

Customer service needs a lot of improvement! It is extremely difficult to contact support as they do not provide a dedicated customer service line and it takes a long time to get a response via email.
Credit card payments have been extremely problematic and are often held up for an unreasonable amount of time (several days and longer).
Complete lack of communication if an issue arises and lack of support getting any kind of resolution.
No longer linking with our account and no notification when it occurred.

Return on Investment

Unfortunately the issues that we have had with Wave potentially cost our company thousands of dollars in lost revenue from credit card transactions, an unreasonable amount of staff time resolving issues, and damaged relationships with some of our clients.
Good way to get everything up and running but the issues with the credit card processing negated any benefit.

Alternatives Considered

PayPal Payments, ADP Streamline Payroll and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

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.

Other Software Used

ADP Streamline Payroll, PayPal Payments

Likelihood to Recommend

Wave is fine if you only use it for accounting but I would urge others not to use Wave for credit card processing. Apparently our account was either not set up correctly and we received no notification, or the link to our bank account to deposit credit card payments was broken, again with no notification. When trying to resolve the issue we received little help from customer support. In fact their reaction was to no lover service our account for credit card transactions. When asked why, we were given reasons that were untrue and when confronted with evidence contradicting their claims Wave would provide another reason. We have since moved on to another credit card transaction provider and have not had any problems.

Not a Wave you Want to Ride

Overall Satisfaction with Wave Accounting