Wave Accounting

There is very little more I can ask for with Wave for my small business. It is free for the features I need and allows me to take only ACH or credit card payments with a reasonable fee and I only pay the fixed percentage when I use those features so I can just turn it off and get a check from a client and not pay anything. Great Flexibility!

I am really impressed for a free offering. Everything looks and feels professional and I'm able to focus on running my business and not learning accounting.

..., but I need them to help me figure it out. I have a full-time salaried job as a copywriter and a few self-employment careers, like freelance writing, voice acting. I've always found doing my taxes to be a nightmare. I'd spend months stressing about it and trying to calculate income and expenses. Originally, I was adding up all my expenses with a calculator. When I discovered I could put things into Excel, it got a bit easier add numbers. And then about 4 or 5 years ago, I started using a new accountant, and he suggested Wave to me. I was excited to hear that it would important my bank and credit card statements, and that I could then quickly and easily categorize everything. I was sure this would save me so much time and stress. But I found Wave very hard to use. I wasn't sure how to create my own categories. I could never tell if my statements had been uploaded completely, and I would often wind up with duplicate transactions. And I still can't find a way to view the categories after I've allocated transactions to them. I tweeted to Wave a lot, and they were nice enough to send one their IT guys to sit with me in a coffee shop for a few hours. He watched as I tried to do things and he gave me help. He said this was useful to him, to see what people might be having trouble with. And, I figured I would then be ok. But I'm still having a lot of trouble. I'm not asking a lot. All I want to be able to do is import my bank statements and credit card statements, and categorize all the transactions. And being able to invoice people would be nice too. And it seems that his app has those features. But I still find it very complicated. I don't understand the categories. I can't find where the totals are. And lately, my mbna Mastercard has been saying it can't link to Wave. So tonight, I went in and started deleting all the transactions from 2014, hoping that I could start fresh and be sure that everything was imported correctly. But now I see that mbna won't give me the data files for before August (that's an mbna problem, not Wave) and I can't undelete what I deleted. And there's no way to get support without paying for it. But I don't want to pay until I'm confident the site can do the simple things I need it to do. Anyway, I'd love to support a local Toronto company. And I appreciate that someone from the company sat with me in person. And I see people reviewing positively, saying it makes a freelancers life easy. Someone even tweeted today that Wave makes doing accounting fun. But I just don't understand how people are able to use this site. If someone from the company, or one of the satisfied customers, could explain to me how to use this site properly, I'd love to be converted. But at this point, I fear I need to cut my loses and simplify my life by paying for some other software. I just want to be able to file my taxes and concentrate on my creative projects.

I like that I can do my own bookkeeping and light accounting and this keeps me relatively sane come tax time. I highly recommend Wave to anyone who's willing to learn at least a bit about accounting! With Wave Payments and Wave Payroll, the software works well for self-employed folks just getting started and will grow with them as they add to their team.

I have had a wonderful experience using Wave Accounting and have encountered no problems at all.