Wave: Small Business Software Wave Financial
With Wave Invoicing, you’ll be able to track, edit, send and pay invoices from any mobile device. In addition, Wave allows you to manage multiple businesses on one free account and uses double-entry accounting, which is ideal for accountants and tax time. Wave’s mobile app (available for Android and iOS) is much more useful than before. The dashboard looks good, and you can create and view customer and product records, estimates, and invoices.
Is Wave Right for You or Your Business?
Wave is a free invoicing software that helps small businesses keep track of their bookkeeping needs from one location. It is outstanding checks 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. Create beautiful invoices, accept online payments, and make accounting easy—all in one place—with Wave’s suite of money management tools.
Invoice on the go
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. With Wave’s Pro Plan, you can set up recurring invoices and automatic credit card payments for your repeat customers.
You shouldn’t expect much more given the scope of the site, but it does offer the standard financial reports that accountants like to run and analyze, like Balance Sheet and Cash Flow. Reports aren’t very customizable, but you can export them as CSV and PDF files. It worked fairly well in testing, though the app detects receipts and snaps photos so quickly sometimes that you don’t get much of a chance to ensure proper framing. Wave picked up the amount, date, description, and type but missed the categorization.
- You can accept credit cards and bank payments for as little as 1%2 per transaction.
- The quick summary allows you to stay in control of your business finances, including a task list of outstanding items.
- If you pay for any add-on like receipt scanning ($8 per month) or payroll ($20 per month), you get live person chat and email support.
- Today’s leading accounting platforms offer standard security features, such as data encryption, secure credential tokenization and more.
Invoice on-the-go and get paid faster
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. Wave might try to categorize some transactions automatically, but it didn’t guess many of mine correctly. The app learns as it goes, however, so it should categorize similar transactions automatically as how to calculate marginal cost you continue to use it.
We provide different levels of support, depending on the plan and/or the add-on features you choose. You can’t pay bills through Wave like you can in QuickBooks Online, but you can record them and mark them as paid, as well as track their status. 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.
Your customers can pay the invoices you send them instantly by credit card, secure bank payment (ACH/EFT), or Apple Pay. And by enabling Wave’s payments feature, you can accept credit cards and bank payments, and get paid out in as fast as 1-2 business days1. While Wave is free to use, it doesn’t offer multiple plans to increase its functionality. It lacks some of the useful features you may find in other tax software accounting software, such as project management, time tracking and inventory management. While several accounting software services provide a free version of their software, the free version usually limits the number of users, number of invoices per month and integrations.
Not only can you customize the invoices to fit your brand, but you can also set up recurring invoices and automate credit card payments for repeat customers. Once invoices have been sent, you can easily track the status of each invoice to see if they are viewed, unpaid or Overdue. All payment information automatically syncs with the free Wave Accounting software included in your service, making accounting easy. While its limitations do not make it an ideal solution for every business, Wave is a particularly appealing option for freelancers who are just starting out. Everything else is available as a part of Wave Pro ($16 per month), which I reviewed. This includes many critical features, including the ability to connect to bank accounts for importing (and categorizing) transactions and send forms automatically through Wave.