For example, Bookkeeping support costs $149 per month, which can be a lot for small businesses. Wave invoicing offers customizable invoices and allows you to add your branding to invoices. If that’s not something you are interested in, you can always use the premade invoice templates and look professional. When it comes to Wave payroll, the monthly fee starts at $20 plus $6 for each employee or contractor for states where payroll taxes must be paid and filed manually. Wave accounting is free, and makes a point of its everyday usefulness for nonprofits, noting that users don’t need training as an accountant to implement it.

How Does Wave Handle Expenses and Bills?

1. However, you can create customized estimates for project bids, but then there is no way to automatically compare actual costs to the estimate.
2. 1 Payouts are processed in 1-2 business days for credit card payments and 1-7 business days for bank payments.
3. However, Wave’s two competitors have notable advantages in terms of features, like banking, A/P and A/R management, inventory, and project accounting.
4. With Wave Invoicing, you’ll be able to track, edit, send and pay invoices from any mobile device.
5. Indeed, it’s earned a place on our accounting software for small business best of list.

We also took our expert’s view into accounting when calculating our star ratings. To learn more about how we rate and review our software, including how we calculate star ratings for each brand we asset retirement obligation definition review, read our software review methodology overview. In evaluating pricing, we considered the billing cycle (monthly or annual) and number of users. If having a good mobile app is important to you, I highly recommend Zoho Books—which aced our mobile app category.

Wave uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to read photos of expense receipts you take with a smartphone and (sometimes) turn them into categorized transactions. The customer support team is very responsive and helpful, according to most Wave accounting reviews. They seem to be knowledgeable about the software and able to solve most issues quickly.

Mobile App

Keep in mind that this comes with a fee of 2.9% plus $0.60  or 2.9% plus $0 per transaction depending on the plan you have. While not built in, Xero has an integration with BILL (formerly Bill.com) and some useful tools like Google Sheets and BlueCamroo, but all other integrations must be made through Zapier. If you have a Zapier subscription, you can integrate a lot of other apps—but it will be more difficult than having a deep integration, such as those offered in other accounting software.

The free (Starter) and paid (Pro) plans offer basic features, such as invoicing, income and expense tracking, and payment processing. Wave allows you to search transactions, design accounting reports and reconcile data across other Wave products. Plus, you can calculate sales tax automatically, customize payment terms and enjoy access to easy-to-understand cash flow insights.

Does Wave use double-entry or single-entry bookkeeping?

Another good tax feature is the ability to track payments and generate 1099’s for your independent contractors. This feature requires either the Pro plan or a subscription to Wave Payroll. Additionally, the free Starter plan does not allow you to connect a live feed to your bank or credit card accounts. However, you can upload your bank statements from comma-separated values (CSV) or Excel files and perform bank reconciliations. See invoice summaries, tap into business reports, receive payment notifications and more using our highly-rated, free mobile app, available on iOS and Android. See pending and completed payments from project-based and quarterly clients in one dashboard to identify revenue ebbs and flows and plan accordingly.

Show clients they’re in good hands by sending business invoices, estimates, and receipts. Automate overdue reminders and credit card payments to reduce friction and focus on the work. 1 Payouts are processed in 1-2 business days for credit card payments and 1-7 business days for bank payments. Deposit times may vary due to processing cutoff times, third party delays, or risk reviews.

You can set up multiple sales tax rates, apply them to invoices, and generate reports to help with tax compliance. Ease of use gets the highest weight in this case study because we want to give more credit to easy accounting software. For this section, we considered customer service, support network, and a subjective expert opinion score.