The banking section of this case study focuses on cash management, bank reconciliation, and bank feed connections. The software must have bank integrations to automatically feed bank or card transactions. The bank reconciliation module must also let users reconcile accounts with or without bank feeds for optimal ease of use. Lastly, the software must generate useful reports related to cash. Wave is easy to use and has a low learning curve, whether you’re in the free or paid version. The interface is clean and not overwhelming, and you can easily find your way around.

Is Wave Accounting still free?

1. This free, easy-to-use accounting software is great for small businesses, especially for eCommerce, but lacks in project management, budgeting, and inventory tracking.
2. Wave’s smart dashboard organizes your income, expenses, payments, and invoices.
3. Wave has helped over 2 million North American small business owners take control of their finances.
4. If Wave isn’t a good fit for you, read through our article on the year’s best free accounting software.
5. Now, many standard features (such as automatic importing of bank transactions) are only available if you purchase a monthly or annual plan.

Make it easier for your customers to pay you right from their bank account. We built our Payroll tool for small business owners, so it’s easy to use AND teaches you as you go. Our money management tools are easy to use separately and more powerful together.

Project Management

Wave allows you to add sales taxes to invoices, estimates, and income transactions. Whenever you enter a transaction with a sales tax, it records the amount automatically in the sales tax liability account. But while you can track your sales tax in Wave, there’s no way to file your returns, which explains its score in this category.

Most accounting software use the double-entry system, though FreshBooks’ cheapest plan is how does listed property affect your business taxes a notable exception. We love that even though Wave is free and freelance-focused, it doesn’t assume freelancers can afford to skimp on financial accuracy. Of course, if you freelance, you don’t need to worry about running payroll either now or in the future. But for small-business owners who want to eventually expand their businesses and hire an employee or two (or more), just know that Wave doesn’t make it easy to add payroll software beyond its own. Merchant Maverick’s ratings are editorial in nature, and are not aggregated from user reviews. Each staff reviewer at Merchant Maverick is a subject matter expert with experience researching, testing, and evaluating small business software and services.

Our tools work together, so you work less.

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. Wave earned high marks for general features, and it could have aced the criterion if users could use account numbers in the chart of accounts. 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. Once you’re approved, you can turn payments on or off for any invoice, or pick default settings for all invoices.

Once logged in, your main dashboard will show your cash flow, profit and loss, invoices, bills and other financial insights. Service or project-based businesses should choose accounting software that can track project costs, revenues, and profits. The software must have tools to track time, record billable hours or expenses, send invoices for progress billings, or monitor project progress and performance. Wave Accounting does a lot for the price—but it can’t do everything. For instance, it doesn’t offer the same built-in time-tracking and project-tracking features you get with most other basic accounting software plans. Unlike with QuickBooks, you can’t manage 1099 contractors with Wave (which is one reason Wave’s better suited to 1099 contractors rather than those who employ them).

Automate overdue reminders and credit card payments to reduce friction and focus on the work. Instant Payout is an additional service offered by Wave subject to user and payment eligibility criteria. A 1% fee is applied to the amount you withdraw from your available balance, in addition to regular processing fees. Deposits are sent to the debit card linked to your account in up to 30 minutes. Deposit times may vary due to processing cutoff times or third party delays. With a Pro Plan subscription, you can connect your bank account with Wave and automatically import your transactions.

The Starter tier allows you to upload your company logo, but you can’t choose from invoice templates and change the invoice color. You can create decent invoices in the Pro plan, but they aren’t as customizable as those in other software like QuickBooks Online. Wave offers a free plan and a paid subscription that costs $16 per month. I docked a few points because there is no introductory discount for new users of the paid tier—but with a full monthly price of only $16, I don’t see this as a big problem.