Wave Invoicing Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

Xero’s cheapest plan starts at $15 a month and limits you to sending just five invoices a month. Tim worked as a tax professional for BKD, LLP before returning to school and receiving his Ph.D. from Penn State. He then taught tax and accounting to undergraduate and graduate students as an assistant professor at both the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Mississippi State University. Tim is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor as well as a CPA with 28 years of experience. He spent two years as the accountant at a commercial roofing company utilizing QuickBooks Desktop to compile financials, job cost, and run payroll.

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For comparison, QuickBooks actually has an electronic bill pay and time tracking built into all its plans except Simple Start. Wave doesn’t have a feature to accumulate costs by project, accounts payable turnover ratio definition so it’s not great for project-based businesses. However, you can create customized estimates for project bids, but then there is no way to automatically compare actual costs to the estimate. These are why I couldn’t award Wave more points in this criterion. Wave is one of our best A/P software because of its ability to record unpaid bills even in the free Starter plan. However, I docked a few points because I found some weaknesses, such as the inability to input vendor credits, create purchase orders, track transactions by vendor, and attach receipts to unpaid bills.

Wave Pro

While only Wave Pro users can access automated bank transactions and expense categorization, free users can manually categorize expenses by tax category to ensure their data is ready to go by tax time. Wave Invoicing is ideal for freelancers, entrepreneurs or small businesses. The fact that it is free makes it a great option for those just starting out or those who want to keep their overhead as low as possible.

Cash flow tracking

Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services. We believe everyone should be able to make financial decisions with confidence. With plans starting at $15 a month, FreshBooks is well-suited for freelancers, solopreneurs, and small-business owners alike. Enter some basic information about your business’s accounting software needs and we’ll send you up to five personalized quotes for absolutely free. Get your money faster when you offer customers the ability to pay directly from your invoices, starting at 2.9% + 60¢ per card transaction. See pending and completed payments from project-based and quarterly clients in one dashboard to identify revenue ebbs and flows and plan accordingly.

Wave is a free invoicing software that helps small businesses keep track of their bookkeeping needs from one location. It is a user-friendly, intuitive platform even for those with no prior accounting experience. As a free service, it is a good option for freelancers, entrepreneurs and small business owners who would like to keep their overhead low. First, Wave is remarkably customizable—especially considering that it’s, you know, free. For instance, its unlimited invoices are much more customizable (and, in our opinion, more professional-looking) than QuickBooks’ comparatively expensive invoices. You can also customize your chart of accounts (CoA) to include only the accounts you need—useful for freelancers, who tend to have fewer expense and income categories on their books than bigger businesses.

1. Xero lets you add unlimited users in all plan tiers and, similar to QuickBooks Online, can grow alongside your business.
2. Most popular accounting tools have at least a handful of built-in app integrations that make connecting with third-party services as painless as possible.
3. Companies that want to combine project management tasks in their accounting software or are looking for software with a great mobile app that they can use on the go will probably want to look for other options.
4. To review Wave, we set up a free Wave Accounting account that we used to create invoices, record sample transactions and generate financial reports.
5. Most of the people who run these companies are in the business to get rick quickly and sell the company even though they sometime end up in prison for unscrupulous behavior.

Is Wave good for freelancers?

“Wave invoicing makes your life a whole lot easier and takes that worry off you. I’ve tried Quickbooks—it’s a bit more complicated and technical, and takes more time to set up.” Wave has helped over 2 million North American small business owners take control of their finances. Wave has helped over 2 million small business owners in the US and Canada take control of their finances. We also took our expert’s view into accounting when calculating our star ratings. The ability to process orders, and track them from quote to cash. The ability to track and manage the flow of goods or materials into and out of an inventory.

They can receive “editor permissions” and access accounting and reports as well as purchases easily. Xero lets you add unlimited users in all plan tiers and, similar to QuickBooks Online, can grow alongside your business. QuickBooks Online’s at account detailed reporting and transaction tracking is ideal for growing businesses. Wave offers accrual-basis accounting only, not cash-basis accounting. Any connections between you, your bank accounts, and Wave are protected by 256-bit SSL encryption.

I have an extensive history of reviewing small business accounting software. My 28 years of experience as a CPA and an educator, guided by our accounting software case study, helps me understand how the different products compare with one another and how they work propeller industries competitors revenue alternatives and pricing in real-world scenarios. This app is the worse, I set up my account, prepare and send an invoice expecting an AH payment that I configured on the Wave App. 6 days after my account has been canceled for receiving AH payments and the payment made by my client of $3,000 nobody knows where it is. This might be scam, one week and my money does not show up on my bank account. My bad..partly because S Corp book keeping and payroll is new for me.