Wave Accounting Erfahrungen

Vorteile

Wave is ideal for freelancers. Set up is really simple and the interface is user-friendly. I have zero background in financial matters, and with Wave that's totally fine.

The price is also right. There's no subscription or hidden fees, they just take a perfectly reasonable percentage from invoice payments. I asked a financial advisor friend of mine before signing up, and she was pleasantly surprised by the low rates, and told me to go for it. I've been using Wave for over 3 years, and I have never once been hit with a fee outside of the basic rates.

Wave also provides a host of reporting and tracking tools in this basic account. They didn't influence my decision to sign up, but they've proven to be very useful.

And finally a small but really helpful feature, especially if you're a freelancer just starting out: immediate money transfers. Once someone pays your invoice, the money is in Wave, and takes 2-3 days to transfer. For 1% more payment, you can transfer money within minutes. For the cash-strapped freelancer, that can be mana from heaven.

Nachteile

There are no major cons that I can think of. One issue I have is mostly my fault: When I first started using Wave I didn't know what I was doing, and I ended up creating a whole bunch of client and work type records unnecessarily. It would be nice if there were some more in-your-face tutorials, maybe some hover tips for new users. But the messiness is mainly from me leaping in before looking.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Quickbooks Online und Zoho Expense

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

It was the cheapest option, and the most user-friendly looking. I have no background in finance and didn't want complex features built for accountants - Wave has those features, but only if you want them.

Vorteile

The most liked part of is Real-time financial reporting as it provides up-to-date and accurate insights into a business's financial performance, allowing for informed decision-making and monitoring of key metrics.

Nachteile

Wave Accounting does not have advanced features that allow us to directly connect to other systems to import the data through an API instead of manual input.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

Abila is not as user friendly and doesn't work very well with our flexible needs.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Salesforce is very expensive and did not meet our budget and skills.

Vorteile

Wave's ability to automatically categorize and track receipts. Another feature I must mention is the invoicing capabilities. These features are more than essential to the small business owner and are easy to generate on the go quickly with the mobile application.

Nachteile

One aspect of Wave that could be improved is the mobile applications' ability to manage payout accounts. Also, the receipts feature remaining free would be a huge value add for logistics company owners.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Quickbooks Online

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

Cost, UI/UX, Features

Zuvor genutzte Software

Quickbooks Online

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Cost, UI/UX, Features, Receipt Tracking

Vorteile

I love the invoicing services, it is easy to use

Nachteile

I dislike the bank transaction screen and I dislike how bank accounts disconnect and some times when you refresh it will duplicate your transactions

Vorteile

first.. it is free. Hard to beat having a free accounting software, let alone one this useful.It can connect right to your bank account (if you have a good bank)invoicing is super easy and includes tracking so you know if invoices have been viewed

Nachteile

Nothing you can really complain about.Support is almost non-existent, but you're not paying for it and the help docs are decent enough.could be more customizable, but it is accounting software... it doesn't need to be fancy.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

FreshBooks

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

simply put.. it did what I needed without too much hassle and all for free.

Vorteile

The reports are easily customizable, clean and easy to read. Great for taking to accountant or tax preparer

Nachteile

Their app to upload receipts is not very reliable and is pretty low-tech. Also, uploading receipts and expenses straight into the Wave site could be streamlined - there are a lot of things to click to get your expense entered.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Quickbooks Online

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Ease of setup, price

Vorteile

Ever since I started using Wave Accounting, it has ever been seamless to carry out accounting tasks such as AP and AR without following manual procedures.

Nachteile

Unavailability of global enterprise accounting tools is the only flaw so far.

Vorteile

Wave Accounting provides me with a simplified and easy online accounting platform that fits my business size. Since switching from a popular accounting option that was too complex and expensive for my business I have been very happy with the solution.

Nachteile

Some features I need and that I feel would be easy to implement require a workaround to accomplish but the support widget walked me through them.

Vorteile

Ease of implementation and use, mainly iOS mobile application.It allows me to create and forward invoices direct to customer emails.

Nachteile

Even though Wave Accounting has iOS mobile application, it doesn’t offer all accounting capabilities.

Vorteile

It was the best free financial software that could be used on windows as well as on my Android phone

Nachteile

The fact that it was discontinued in my South Africa and only available in the US anymore

Vorteile

It's everything I need in one place. As a small business, Wave is the best solution for me. I can invoice my clients for free, and easily keep my finances up-to-date making tax season worry free.

Nachteile

Wave no longer integrates with CapitalOne Spark Business accounts, so I have to manually upload two bank statements every month into Wave; One for my checking and one for my savings account, both of which are Spark.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise und Zoho Expense

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

Quickbooks is too expensive and more difficult to use. Wave is a miracle.

Zuvor genutzte Software

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Vorteile

The best thing about WAVE is its ease of use. It was so easy to learn to use this. Additionally the invoices are really customizable. There is a huge amount you can do with just the free version but if you upgrade to the paid version you can access a lot more of the accounting features and payment features.

I like that for security reasons the software logs you out at the end of the day. The invoices look very professional and are downloadable and can be sent with a pdf attachment. When a partial payment is made you can send a receipt reflective of how much was paid, how, when and with how much balance left. The software will also alert me when a payment is overdue. You can also add tax and discounts to the invoices.

Nachteile

The only gripe I have is that when I made changes to the invoice parameters, I was unable to delete the old parameters because they had been used in previous invoices. It would be nice to be able to "inactivate" or send to "archive" these parameters.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

FreshBooks

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

This software is totally customizable, will send emails to clients automatically and has an accounting component. It is MUCH better and more professional than anything I could do with pages.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

cost

Vorteile

The best thing about this software is that it is free and offer just as much if not more features than some of its paid competitors. You can also access it online from any PC.

Nachteile

They don't have a robust support line but considering you are not paying for the software, you can't blame them. Plus there really isn't any reason for you to need support as everything is user-friendly and there is adequate help features in the software.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Desktop Pro

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

Wave was free and offer the same functions and services.

Zuvor genutzte Software

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Price

Vorteile

I love the simplicity. We are just a small business, so the primary purpose of using this app is to categorize all my expenses, so once tax time rolls around, I just have to send the tax lady a breakdown of my income and expenses. Once a week or so, I'll log in to check all the transactions it imported from my bank account. It auto categorizes most of them which is awesome, I just have to click the check mark button to verify it was categorized correctly. Then once tax season rolls around, I just run the income statement report and send it to the tax office. I even have created a review account for the tax lady to be able to log in and see my business finances. We are just a simple business so we probably don't use some of the more advanced features, but it does what I want and best of all, it's F-R-E-E. I do also like the payroll and invoicing options if we need that in the future, although that is unlikely for our business.

Nachteile

For some reason, they disabled the ability for deposits to be auto categorized. This is my most common type of bank transactions, since all credit card payments are deposited into my account a few days after they process, so I have tons of transactions I have to go manually mark as the 'Sales' category. I did talk to customer support over chat about this though, and the lady agreed this would be extremely useful so they are looking into this.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

I just tried out Zipbooks, and although I was impressed, Wave just offered more for the price of free. Zipbooks only offered like 2 reports on the free plan, and I really needed the income statement report to show my categorized expenses.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Quickbooks because they are the de-facto standard, and because I would trust their reliablility. However, I just didn't like their price. They have the deal to start off with for the first x months, but it always doubles in price after that period. If Wave didn't exist, i'd probably have gone with quickbooks or paid for Zipbooks.

Vorteile

I use Wave to keep track of my personal finances, from income to spending. In that lens, Wave performs quite well, allowing you to tag transactions that are automatically imported from your bank. It also lets you generate some simple reports such as your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. The interface is simple to use and understand, and I was able to pick it up (coming from an accounting background) in under a few minutes, without having gone through a walkthrough. The included ability to reconcile statements is also quite handy and allows me to verify that all transactions are posted appropriately. The inclusion of receipt tracking and tagging is also quite handy!

The best part about Wave is the price! If you don’t need features such as invoicing and payroll (some SMB’s may find these handy. From a personal perspective, I did not), the accounting software is completely free.

Nachteile

Wave still appears to be in its infancy, although the product has been there for a while. The user interface will frequently be updated (the reconciliation flow changed 3 times since I signed up about 6 months ago), and new features will constantly be added without any notification, often shifting often things around from where you expect them to be.

The reports from Wave are also very limited, so don’t expect any customizable reports as of 08/2019. You get about 12 reports total, some or all of which may not be very relevant to you, depending on your end goal. These reports are completely canned, system generated, and you do not have the ability to create new reports. This may change in the future, but as it stands, this is the current state of affairs.

The receipt tracking feature is definitely handy to have. While Wave will OCR your receipts and tag them to a category, it will actually post an entire transaction to the ledger when you save it down. For those of us with a bank account and credit card linked to auto import transactions, you’ll get a duplicate: one from the CC, and one from the receipt. It would be nice if Wave included some intelligence to automatically match the receipt and transaction together, but for now, you need to manually merge each.

Finally, as a small point, Wave does not obtain any service assurance through SOC1 or SOC2 reports, an issue that most people wouldn’t ever care about.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Xero

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

I mostly chose Wave over Xero for the price. As I’m using this for personal finance tracking, and not a small business, I didn’t want to have to pay Xero’s rather pricy monthly subscription.

Vorteile

This software is 100% FREE to use! No gimmicks, no catches. I was skeptical when one of my clients told me he used this. I did NOT want to lean yet another accounting software, but once I logged in and found out how easy and streamlined this software was to use, I was 100% sold on it! The ONLY fees they charge are IF you decide to use their payroll (I highly advise AGAINST using their payroll, it needs an overhaul), or IF you use them for payment processing of invoices you send to clients. The fees for using their payment processing are similar to those of Square and Stripe and a small price to pay for the amazing software. I would encourage you to use their payment processing so this service can remain on the free billing platform with no monthly charges!

Nachteile

1) Reporting abilities are lackluster! No way to print "no receipts attached" reports for clients. 2) Sometimes has glitches. We will work in this software, then log in later and all of the work we did has disappeared. Major panic attacks more than once! Still having problems with one account in particular. If I log in on an incognito window, the work is there again (sometimes). 3) Payroll systems SUCKS. I do not recommend! Square payroll is our go-to! 4) Chart of accounts is OUTDATED and does NOT match Schedule C nor S-Corporation tax return expense line items. We should be able to customize a chart of accounts the way we want it and be able to copy/paste it into other client accounts 5) Accountant login is great except the list is not always alphatized correctly. We should be able to alphabetize and/or sort by PRIORITY account 6) Need an easier/quicker way to upload receipts

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

FreshBooks

Warum Wave Accounting gewählt wurde

The EASE of use, the FREE software vs. the monthly expese of Quickbooks, How QUICK it is to reconcile monthly.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

Free software; easy to use; quick to learn; ease to reconcile; accountant login

Vorteile

Easy to use if it works but it does not work most of the time.

Nachteile

1) Customer service - lowest level we have ever experienced. The careless approach, lethargic service, bank connection issues and processing delays are beyond imagination in this digital age.
2) They have many exciting features at a lucrative price but the company is in a mess and nothing works.
3) No guarantee on Payroll deposit to your employee account and we have experienced that employees are not getting paid as promised. Yes - Correct. It is that bad.
4) Bank connection issues about 95% time with most of the bank.

At our CPA firm, we were recommending this software to clients. Not anymore. Stay away from this product.

Vorteile

Other than the fact that the software is free to use, I mostly love that it was built for Small Businesses. I Have personally made use of the software since 2013 and recommend it to every business owner that I come across. Most people think that you MUST pay for accounting software to get a good product but this is simply not the case with Wave!

Nachteile

It is difficult to fault this. I guess if anything, I wish it integrated with more platforms such as WooCommerce, and Zoho CRM. With the intergration I would be able to streamline my business process a little better.

Vorteile

Right off the bat, perhaps the biggest pro of Wave Accounting is the fact that it is 100% free. A simple plug & play app that allows users the ability to have an accounting software to keep their books in order. Also, like QuickBooks, the feature that allows users to attach source documents with the transactions is a huge plus. It is very useful in Fiji because our Tax Authority conducts random audits & failure to produce source documents results in huge fines and penalties. The home look as soon as you login is very useful too. It shows the expenses breakdown over a certain period along with other charts like your Profit & Loss as well as your cash flows. Wave Accounting is really good for small & medium business owners who have limited accounting knowledge. The software does the work for them and it is very straightforward.

Nachteile

Perhaps the biggest drawback for me is the difficulty in producing specific reports. I tried to produce an Accounts Payable report to see the Tax Input the business had for the 1st Quarter of 2020. However, the options provided was limited and therefore key fields were left out of selection. Although you could import data from Wave Accounting to Excel, it is very limited. Also, being in Fiji, I noticed that features like Payroll & Banking options are not available here. This was a drawback especially because Bank Reconciliation had to be manually done on an external app or software.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

I chose Wave Accounting because it was free.

Vorteile

The software is FREE for everything other than PAYROLL and PAYMENT PROCESSING. If you don't use those components, there is absolutely no charge. For the most part, it is user-friendly and straightforward, and the quality of its printed invoices, customer statements and reports is top-notch. I really appreciate the ability to create recurring invoices (subscription billing) and view monthly income/expense bar charts for a 1- or 2-year period.

Nachteile

This is bookkeeping software that stresses simple data entry. However, it doesn't have features such as audit trails for transaction entries. With this program, it is possible to generate transactions, generate reports, and then reverse the transactions without any way of knowing that changes were made. Wave attempts to categorize your income and expenditures, but doesn't currently have the ability to remember your categorizations. But the thing I like least about this software is a BUG that causes the program to download bank transactions and incorrectly categorize them as duplicates of previously downloaded transactions if the transaction amounts match. This bug makes it difficult to find transactions when you are attempting to reconcile your transactions.

Vorteile

It seems like it offers the ability to import credit card and bank statements, categorize expenses, and invoice people. Those are the features I want. But...

Nachteile

...I haven't been able to figure out how to smoothly and accurately use the features I want. This app is making my life harder than it was when I just manually typed in all my expenses into a Microsoft Word and added them up with a calculator.

Vorteile

Wave Accounting is a great choice for small businesses looking for free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive accounting software. Here are some of its benefits:Free: Wave Accounting is free software, which is a big plus for small businesses looking to save money.Easy to use: the software is easy to use and does not require special accounting skills. The platform is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to manage your finances.Comprehensive: Wave Accounting offers a full suite of features for managing accounting, including invoicing, payroll, expense and income tracking, and detailed financial reporting.Accessible anywhere: Wave Accounting is a cloud-based solution, which means you can access it anywhere with an internet connection.Integration with third parties: The software is integrated with many third-party tools such as PayPal, Shoeboxed, Etsy and many more, which makes it easier to manage your business.All in all, Wave Accounting is a great choice for small businesses looking for free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive accounting software.

Nachteile

Although Wave Accounting is a good choice for small businesses, there are some points that can be problematic for some businesses. Here are some of its drawbacks:Limited customer support: Wave Accounting offers email-only customer support, which can be a problem for businesses that need immediate assistance.Limitations in payroll management: Payroll management in Wave Accounting is limited to certain regions, which may not be suitable for companies that have employees in different regions or countries.Limited customization: Invoices and quotes in Wave Accounting are not very customizable, which can be a problem for companies that want to customize their documents to make them look more professional.No automatic bank reconciliation: Wave Accounting does not allow automatic bank reconciliation, which can be a cumbersome task for companies that have many transactions to manage.Advertising in the software: Wave Accounting displays advertisements in the software, which can be a distraction for some users.In sum, although Wave Accounting is free and easy to use accounting software, it has some limitations that may not be suitable for all businesses, including limited customer support, limited payroll management, limited document customization , the absence of automatic bank reconciliation and the presence of advertisements in the software.

Vorteile

First of all, it is completely FREE part from other optional extra services that have recently been added at a cost. Very easy-to-use in creating invoices and billing customers. I was able to integrate with my startup business processes and it improved our professionalism. I loved the app because I could easily manage my business finances from my mobile phone, follow up on due payments, track payments, monitor cashflow, and also customize all correspondence with my brand colors and logo.

Nachteile

I was sad when most features were limited to US residents and I also couldn't access the mobile app in the app store for my region. Users outside the USA might have some limitations especially with connecting banks or credit cards and no access to the mobile app

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Zoho Invoice

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Wave Accounting

It was free and easy-to-use

Vorteile

Wave is a great piece of accounting software that rivals Quickbooks and Xero. The biggest winner, which it obvious to anyone who has researched Wave as an accounting platform for their small business: it’s FREE! Both Quickbooks and Xero have fairly low-cost pricing models for small businesses that range all the way to fairly high-cost for larger businesses. Wave, on the other hand, is specifically tailored to the small business, and offers only features popular with those businesses. But, because of this, their base accounting software is completely free. Their only products you would be billed for would be payroll or credit card processing, both of which are priced competitively to Quickbooks/Intuit’s and Xero’s offerings as well.

Wave also offers a lot of the same features, including automatic bank and credit card feeds, customized charts of accounts, multiple businesses on one account, smart expense categorization (software learns over time), and more.

Nachteile

Wave does have its limitations and is more basic than Quickbooks or Xero, especially to us accountants who can see the glaring differences. However, even as an accountant and bookkeeper, I recommend Wave to a lot of my smaller clients whose biggest consideration is cost, simply because you can’t beat free. Plus, a lot of the additional features that offerings like Quickbooks or Xero feature, smaller businesses will not always utilize anyway, so Wave fits them perfectly. All-in-all, there are no large drawbacks.

Vorteile

Wave Accounting is a really great idea. Simple bookeeping for people that don't have "accountant-minds." It gets into a space where programs like Xero and Zoho Books are a little too complicated for non-accountants and creators.

It's got a fantastic UI.

Easy to use.

Fairly easy to setup.

Way more intuitive than competitors like Zoho Books and Xero Accounting.

Nachteile

Support is really slow. I get that it's a free service, and therefore you have paid support working for free customers. But support takes days to get back to you. So once you're setup, it's fine. But if you have a question or two doing setup, like I did, it takes an extraordinarily long time.

Granted, most people using this might not have to deal with multi-currency and Paypal in particular, but it's something to keep in mind.

Also, the bank connections sometimes fail. Although this is a problem with all of these services who use Plaid to get bank data.