Wave

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.

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.

Having a free version for small business owners is truly amazing. The fact that it works so well and is very easy to setup & use is a blessing

I realize every business needs to make money - the latest update which now makes you download the invoice to send as opposed to being able to send from within Wave is nothing more than a small extra step.