Wave Accounting

I've used Wave since 2009!!! I feel like my company grew with it. It's helped me understand all I was doing right (and wrong!) financially in my business. It helps tremendously when filing monthly sales taxes. I keep a habit of staying organized, verifying all transactions and reconciling with my bank accounts. All of this, plus categorizing everything the right way makes tax time an absolute breeze - my taxes are done in two days and I don't need to freak out about it because everything is organized ahead of time and all I do is input expenses and sales.

What I least like about Wave is that a few years ago they stopped support for free accounts. Absolutely no human support whatsoever. Disagree with that big time!!!
Sometimes also a bank connection will be interrupted and you cannot reconnect for many many months and since there is no support, you are left without any help.
I am a small business of one person and I do not need any of the paid features that Wave offers so I could be upgraded to paid support, so I am always stuck in no human support land. It doesn't feel good, especially to someone who has used this software for as long as I have.

I like how easy it was to set-up--that process was straightforward and the interface initially was easy to understand. Unfortunately as we needed to do more after adding a full-time employee, it proved impossible to work with or use.

For payroll you have no options, and even when they recognize this, they don't provide a solution. A good example--we had an employee who had maxed out her vacation hours, but we agreed to let her take a few unpaid vacation days. There was no way for us to do this within Wave (you get paid vacation time or nothing). I chatted and even emailed with various representatives--all of which were super unhelpful, and we ended up wasting a lot of time before just being told this isn't an option. That's another huge con--there is virtually no support. The chat bot is not only unhelpful, but real agents are usually unavailable or there's a 20+ minute wait. The system is also not improving like I'd expect. I was notified today that my card declined for some reason so I followed the instructions that Wave emailed me to try to fix it, and it's like someone wrote them without looking at Wave's website because none of the instructions match. Not only is there not a change payment button but there's a Q/A at the end of the page where a user specifically asked this question, and there's no answer! I kick myself for picking this software, and we're in the process of moving to Gusto right now.

Setting reminders to be sent to clients for payment is the most important feature from wave in my opinion. Also being able to create recurring invoices you you don't have to do the same thing every week or every month. My other favorite is customer statements. Pulling out customer statements and sending to your clients gives you points in terms of professionalism. I also appreciate that when Wave stopped operating in South Africa they recommended Zoho and gave us a year of free use of Zoho. Even though I did not like changing, this was a very thoughtful move by wave.

For some reason wave starting giving limited access to its South African customers and partnered with Zoho for customers to migrate. Even though the apps are similar, they're not the same and it took a little bit of time to now learn Zoho a new app.