Pros & Cons
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- Exceptionally easy to use
- Smart, focused feature set
- Good invoice and transaction management
- Excellent mobile apps
- Free version works great for some sole proprietors
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- Sparse record templates
- Lacks time tracking and projects
- No automatic categorization of transactions
Wave Specs
| Accept Payment Online from Mobile | |
| Accept Payments Online | |
| Chat Support | |
| Convert Quote to Invoice | |
| Create Estimates | |
| Create Invoice from Mobile | |
| Create PDF Reports | |
| Create Quotes | |
| Create Recurring Transactions | |
| CRM Integration | |
| Customize Invoice Layout | |
| Double Entry | |
| Email Invoice from Mobile | |
| Live Support | |
| Mobile Access | |
| Multi-Currency | |
| Offers Invoice Templates | |
| Payroll | |
| Phone Support | |
| Predefined Expenses | |
| Support Days and Hours | M-F, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., ET |
| Training Available |
Wave used to have only a free tier, but the small business accounting service now offers a paid version as well. The good news is that its free Starter edition might still be sufficient if you are a freelancer or gig worker, while the Pro version is reasonably affordable. Moreover, Wave is exceptionally easy to use, features excellent invoice and transaction tools, and has great mobile apps. Significant improvements have been made since our last review, affecting account reconciliation, payroll, performance, and security. For all those reasons, Wave earns our Editors' Choice award for sole proprietors who don't require payroll. If you need detailed record templates or time and project tracking capabilities (among other features), however, FreshBooks and QuickBooks Online remain our top picks for service-based businesses and those that sell both products and services.
Price: An Impressive Value
As mentioned, Wave's free version, Wave Starter, is perfectly capable if you are self-employed and don't need features such as digital receipt capture or online bank transaction imports. It still supports most core accounting features, including bill management, customer payments, records (for customers, products, and vendors), sales forms (estimates, invoices, and statements), and reports. You can manually enter income and expenses. If you pay for any add-on, such as receipt scanning ($8 per month) or payroll (starting at $40 per month), you receive live chat and email support. Otherwise, you need to make do with an automated chatbot and online help resources.
Everything else is available as a part of Wave Pro ($19 per month), the level I reviewed. This includes many critical features, such as the ability to connect to bank accounts for importing (and categorizing) transactions, reconcile bank accounts, and send forms automatically through Wave. You can configure Wave to automatically add attachments to transactions, create reusable message templates, and send payment reminders, too. This version supports multiple users (with roles). Adding customer payments, payroll capabilities, or seeking help from a bookkeeper (starting at $149 per month) incurs additional costs.
Like Wave Starter, Zoho Books’ free version doesn't support bank connections. But it offers some features that Wave Starter doesn't, such as automated payment reminders, bank reconciliation, mileage tracking, and sales receipts. Its Standard edition ($20 per month) offers more features overall than Wave Pro. Patriot Software (starting at $20 per month) is another low-cost accounting application that larger small businesses could consider. Most services I review cost more, including QuickBooks Online (starting at $38 per month).
Setup Steps: Standard Questions, Simple Records
Wave's setup process is straightforward and easy to understand. After you answer some questions about your business, you can customize the app by, for example, modifying estimate and invoice forms, setting up sales tax, and specifying your currency of choice. As mentioned, Wave Pro supports multiple users. If someone other than you needs access, you can choose among multiple roles for them that dictate what they can view, edit, enter, and delete.
You can add customer, product, or service, and vendor records as you need them, but it’s easier to create them up front before you start working with transactions and sales forms. You can also import existing lists of customers from a CSV file, as well as vendors from a CSV file or your Google Contacts list. Wave’s templates don’t allow as much detail as those in top alternatives, including QuickBooks Online, but they’re sufficient for the forms the service supports, including estimates, invoices (one-time and recurring), and statements.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)Another thing to consider as you prepare to use Wave is that it supports integrated apps that may provide features you need (for an additional fee). Options include Acuity Scheduling (appointments), Driversnote (mileage tracking), and MinuteDock (billing and time tracking). You can also connect Wave with Google Sheets to generate key financial reports. Xero offers hundreds of add-ons, but I prefer Wave’s options, which more closely relate to accounting.
Interface and Ease of Use: Terrific Usability
Accounting can be complicated, but Wave simplifies it by offering an impressive user experience. Its colorful, professional design looks attractive, and smart navigation tools make it easy to understand and use. It’s not quite as aesthetically pleasing as FreshBooks, but I'm a fan.
Once you start entering your company’s data, the dashboard becomes quite useful. You have to scroll a bit to see everything, but you get a great overview of your finances with links to deeper details. This page displays your account balances and a list of overdue invoices and bills prominently. Cash Flow and Profit and Loss graphs, as well as an expense chart, provide critical overviews of your current financial status. You also get tables of invoices payable to you and bills you owe, as well as a table that shows your net income. This screen provides links to common tasks, such as accepting credit cards and adding a customer.
Wave supports double-entry accounting, which should please accountants. Among other things, this means that the software maintains a chart of accounts and handles debits and credits in the background. It helps automate account reconciliation—which benefits from enhancements and simplifications compared with last year—so you can square away your balance in Wave with your bank and credit card statements. This system also makes it easier to find duplicate, incorrect, and missing transactions.
Transaction Management: A Good Amount of Detail
Most accounting solutions allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts. As mentioned, Wave's Starter tier doesn’t, but the Pro version does. To set up these connections, you need to provide your login credentials and occasionally answer security questions (depending on the financial institution). Once Plaid (an industry-standard third-party account aggregator) verifies your identity, your transactions flow into Wave in simple registers that display (in order) each entry’s date, description, account, category, and amount. An Action column appears at the end of the row with options that allow you to, for example, edit the transaction and upload a receipt you scanned.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)When you open a transaction, you get more information and can edit its details. You can add customers and vendors, append a sales tax, specify a type (deposit or withdrawal), split the transaction among categories, upload a receipt, and write a note. Most accounting applications guess at the correct category and allow you to change it. Wave brought all of mine in as Uncategorized, so I assigned them myself. Accurate categorization is crucial in accounting, as it significantly impacts your reports and income taxes.
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Sales Forms: Customizable and Attractive
Wave comes with three professional templates for your invoices. You can add a logo and customize much of the form’s content by specifying default terms and entering a custom title, subheading, and footer. You can also change the labels on your invoice columns. You might want to have them read 'Products' or 'Services' rather than 'Items', for example, or 'Hours' instead of 'Quantity'. Estimates have some of the same options. Wave offers to send invoice reminders a specified number of days before or after the due date.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)Once you create an invoice, you can save it as a PDF file and view it as the customer would on both a desktop browser and a mobile screen. New since our last review is the ability to manage the premade templates for the default message that accompanies invoices. You can even add dynamic fields, such as Invoice Due Date and Invoice Number.
Wave supports recurring invoices, too. And it’s easy to create customer statements. You can choose between sending a list of their outstanding invoices or their complete account activity. The landing pages for invoices and estimates provide useful, detailed overviews of your activity, along with the status of your sales forms (such as Draft, Overdue, and Unpaid).
As mentioned, Wave doesn't come with project- or time-tracking features.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)Expenses and Bills: Multiple Receipt Import Options
If you use Wave's mobile apps (available for Android and iOS), you can snap a photo of a receipt. Wave uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read the data from your receipt and turn it into a Wave transaction.
This worked fairly well in testing, although the app detects receipts and snaps photos so quickly that you don't often get a chance to ensure proper framing. Wave picked up the date, description, and type reliably, but it often missed the amount (this is dependent more so on the size and quality of the original receipt). Of course, it's possible to fill in any blanks the scan misses. You can also use a unique email-forwarding address so that you can email copies of receipts to your Wave account. Or you can upload a scanned receipt directly into Wave and attach it.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)You can’t pay bills through Wave like you can with QuickBooks Online, but you can record them, mark them as paid, and track their status.
Reports and Taxes: Helpful Insights
Wave generates 14 reports, some of which relate to Wave Payroll (the company supplies full-service payroll in all 50 states). You shouldn't expect much more, given the site's scope, but it does offer the standard financial reports that accountants like to run and analyze: Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and Profit & Loss. More general, useful reports include Aged Receivables and Purchases By Vendor. Reports aren't very customizable, but you can export them as CSV and PDF files.
H&R Block owns Wave. If you want to leverage the company’s resources to prepare and file your income taxes, you can upload your accounting records directly and connect with a Block Advisor.
Privacy: Is Wave Safe to Use?
Bank data connections with Wave are read-only and use 256-bit encryption. The company houses its servers under electronic and physical protection. Wave is also PCI Level-1 certified for handling credit card and bank account information. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is optional for the site and required for both bank connections through Plaid and payroll. You can read more about the company's privacy and security policies on its website.
Mobile Apps: Effortless Remote Access
Wave’s mobile apps don’t replicate absolutely everything from the desktop browser version, but they cover enough that you can get a lot of work done away from your computer. The abbreviated dashboard appears to be effective, allowing you to create and view customer and product estimates, invoices, and records. Your transactions appear here, and you can add new ones.
(Credit: Wave/PCMag)I didn’t encounter any image or text degradation issues, unlike what I have experienced with the apps in the past. They simply look and work great. As mentioned, the receipt scanning tool worked well for me.