Wave vs QuickBooks Online: Comparing Cost and Features

Choosing between them mostly comes down to whether you need a solution that can scale with your business. And as long as you don’t have any plans of rapidly expanding, you can’t beat that. When you create your first invoice in Wave, you’re guided to create a template first.

What percentage does Wave invoicing take?

1. Wave is a well-rated payroll solution that offers a self-serve employee portal, time tracking and payroll processing for both employees and contractors.
2. This is why we’ve awarded Wave a perfect value score of 5/5 in our in-depth research.
3. It also has plans to roll out Intuit Assist—an AI-powered accounting assistant that can highlight important trends in your data and complete tasks automatically.

While human error will always play some role in security breaches, you can be confident in your accounting platform when it comes to keeping your information safe. With QuickBooks Checking, you can get integrated bookkeeping plus instant deposit of your payments, plus 1% APY interest on your balance (as of July 6, 2022). Then I discovered invoicing software—a game-changer for my business. It’s incredibly important to track all of the ways you generate and use money.

Customers love Wave

If you’re on a tight budget, it’s a pretty easy choice between the two platforms, as you can use Wave for free. Meanwhile, Wave’s Pro plan includes additional features that help businesses keep track of bank transactions, receipts, and payment reminders. Wave’s feature set is limited to bank reconciliation tools, income and expense tracking, invoicing, basic reporting, and a mobile app for sending invoices on the go. This might be more than enough for freelancers and very small service-based businesses.

So if all you’re looking to do is send invoices, save some money and go with Wave. It’s super easy to create an invoice with Wave, and you can use that template to speed up the process in the future. There’s also a preview feature, so you can see how the invoice will look to your customers.

Payroll

Both Wave and QuickBooks offer solid invoicing features and capabilities for small businesses. The QuickBooks estimates tool allows you to create, send, and track the status of proposals for existing or new clients. Even when comparing Wave vs. QuickBooks, or any QuickBooks alternative for that matter, there’s no doubt that QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting software solutions for a reason. If you’re in need of sturdy customer support, QuickBooks beats Wave, hands down. QuickBooks offers support via phone, email, and even live chat, and its Enterprise users even benefit from 24/7 assistance, which is why we gave it a near-perfect research score of 4.5/5 in the category. When you enable payment reminders, QuickBooks will send email reminders to customers automatically so that you don’t have to do it manually.

For the first 10 online payments, Wave will charge only 2.9% per transaction. In our evaluation, we found that QuickBooks is the better solution for most small businesses. With its robust A/R, A/P, and inventory features, we see it as a go-to and safe pick for businesses wanting access to important accounting features. However, Wave can be the better choice if you don’t need to track inventory and require simple tracking of income and expenses. QuickBooks Online is one of the world’s most popular accounting software solutions, so it integrates with hundreds of third-party business apps. QuickBooks Self-Employed, QuickBooks’ accounting plan for freelancers, is .

QuickBooks includes an option to add on accounting, which adds bill management, inventory and job costing capabilities in addition to expense tracking. The platform also includes receipt capture and mileage tracking, so you can automatically gather all the information you need to claim expenses for tax purposes in one place. Wave doesn’t include a time-tracking feature, so you’ll have to track hours separately and enter them manually for hourly work. Wave is an absolutely free accounting software (yes, you read it right). If you add the ability to accept payments, you pay processing fees, and payroll is an additional $20/month, plus you pay a per-employee fee. Pricing varies depending on your needs, but the QuickBooks Online Simple Start plan (for 1 user) starts what is contributed surplus on a balance sheet at $25/month.