Wave

Avantages

I use Wave to keep track of my personal finances, from income to spending. In that lens, Wave performs quite well, allowing you to tag transactions that are automatically imported from your bank. It also lets you generate some simple reports such as your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. The interface is simple to use and understand, and I was able to pick it up (coming from an accounting background) in under a few minutes, without having gone through a walkthrough. The included ability to reconcile statements is also quite handy and allows me to verify that all transactions are posted appropriately. The inclusion of receipt tracking and tagging is also quite handy!

The best part about Wave is the price! If you don’t need features such as invoicing and payroll (some SMB’s may find these handy. From a personal perspective, I did not), the accounting software is completely free.

Inconvénients

Wave still appears to be in its infancy, although the product has been there for a while. The user interface will frequently be updated (the reconciliation flow changed 3 times since I signed up about 6 months ago), and new features will constantly be added without any notification, often shifting often things around from where you expect them to be.

The reports from Wave are also very limited, so don’t expect any customizable reports as of 08/2019. You get about 12 reports total, some or all of which may not be very relevant to you, depending on your end goal. These reports are completely canned, system generated, and you do not have the ability to create new reports. This may change in the future, but as it stands, this is the current state of affairs.

The receipt tracking feature is definitely handy to have. While Wave will OCR your receipts and tag them to a category, it will actually post an entire transaction to the ledger when you save it down. For those of us with a bank account and credit card linked to auto import transactions, you’ll get a duplicate: one from the CC, and one from the receipt. It would be nice if Wave included some intelligence to automatically match the receipt and transaction together, but for now, you need to manually merge each.

Finally, as a small point, Wave does not obtain any service assurance through SOC1 or SOC2 reports, an issue that most people wouldn’t ever care about.

Avantages

I love the simplicity. We are just a small business, so the primary purpose of using this app is to categorize all my expenses, so once tax time rolls around, I just have to send the tax lady a breakdown of my income and expenses. Once a week or so, I'll log in to check all the transactions it imported from my bank account. It auto categorizes most of them which is awesome, I just have to click the check mark button to verify it was categorized correctly. Then once tax season rolls around, I just run the income statement report and send it to the tax office. I even have created a review account for the tax lady to be able to log in and see my business finances. We are just a simple business so we probably don't use some of the more advanced features, but it does what I want and best of all, it's F-R-E-E. I do also like the payroll and invoicing options if we need that in the future, although that is unlikely for our business.

Inconvénients

For some reason, they disabled the ability for deposits to be auto categorized. This is my most common type of bank transactions, since all credit card payments are deposited into my account a few days after they process, so I have tons of transactions I have to go manually mark as the 'Sales' category. I did talk to customer support over chat about this though, and the lady agreed this would be extremely useful so they are looking into this.

Avantages

Wave is a great piece of accounting software that rivals Quickbooks and Xero. The biggest winner, which it obvious to anyone who has researched Wave as an accounting platform for their small business: it’s FREE! Both Quickbooks and Xero have fairly low-cost pricing models for small businesses that range all the way to fairly high-cost for larger businesses. Wave, on the other hand, is specifically tailored to the small business, and offers only features popular with those businesses. But, because of this, their base accounting software is completely free. Their only products you would be billed for would be payroll or credit card processing, both of which are priced competitively to Quickbooks/Intuit’s and Xero’s offerings as well.

Wave also offers a lot of the same features, including automatic bank and credit card feeds, customized charts of accounts, multiple businesses on one account, smart expense categorization (software learns over time), and more.

Inconvénients

Wave does have its limitations and is more basic than Quickbooks or Xero, especially to us accountants who can see the glaring differences. However, even as an accountant and bookkeeper, I recommend Wave to a lot of my smaller clients whose biggest consideration is cost, simply because you can’t beat free. Plus, a lot of the additional features that offerings like Quickbooks or Xero feature, smaller businesses will not always utilize anyway, so Wave fits them perfectly. All-in-all, there are no large drawbacks.

Avantages

Wave has absolutely changed my business for the better. It used to take me about 2 hours a month to do my invoicing, which I hated doing, and so I avoided it. Now, I handle monthly invoicing in about 15 minutes. Plus, as new clients come in or one-off projects are completed, I can send the invoices quickly—like 5 minutes. So ease of use is absolutely the first thing I love about Wave.

Second, as a small business owner, I am in charge of acquiring new clients, executing the work, invoicing for the work, and then acting as collections when clients are late in paying. With Wave, I check a simple box that sends reminders to the client when things are past due. What a relief! It's coming from "my accounting department" rather than me. Hallelujah!

Third, the payment process is so easy for my clients! They can pay any way they want—check, credit card, bank, whatever. It's so easy for them, and I have had zero complaints.

It's also fantastic to know when clients have (or haven't) viewed the invoice. And getting the emails from Wave announcing that I've been paid are the best emails of the day.

The fact that all of this amazingness is free? That's just the icing on the cake. Thank you, Wave!

Inconvénients

My only issue with Wave is probably a rare use-case. I manage invoicing for a client of mine. (Side note: Wave made it SO EASY for me to be an admin of her account but not the manager, and I can log into my account to access hers. It is AWESOME!) She sells programs, and her clients generally pay in one invoice. Occasionally, her clients need to pay in installments. It was not easy to set up a recurring invoice for only three months to send to the client, especially without a credit card on file. I had to create three different invoices, and label them as Installment #1, #2, etc. However, I recognize that this is probably a one-off user scenario that not many people would need. And I can't complain when the tool is free, and I found a workaround.

Avantages

The software is FREE for everything other than PAYROLL and PAYMENT PROCESSING. If you don't use those components, there is absolutely no charge. For the most part, it is user-friendly and straightforward, and the quality of its printed invoices, customer statements and reports is top-notch. I really appreciate the ability to create recurring invoices (subscription billing) and view monthly income/expense bar charts for a 1- or 2-year period.

Inconvénients

This is bookkeeping software that stresses simple data entry. However, it doesn't have features such as audit trails for transaction entries. With this program, it is possible to generate transactions, generate reports, and then reverse the transactions without any way of knowing that changes were made. Wave attempts to categorize your income and expenditures, but doesn't currently have the ability to remember your categorizations. But the thing I like least about this software is a BUG that causes the program to download bank transactions and incorrectly categorize them as duplicates of previously downloaded transactions if the transaction amounts match. This bug makes it difficult to find transactions when you are attempting to reconcile your transactions.