Wave has a generous free version with access to invoicing, expense tracking, financial reporting, customer and vendor management, tax reports and mobile app. Higher-tier QuickBooks accounting plans add even more features, such as time tracking, inventory management, bill management, profitability forecasting and more. However, if you have a lot of bills to pay, the lack of bill payment capability in Wave may be an issue. In contrast, QuickBooks offers five software packages with a price cap of $200 per month and no free option — earning it a lackluster value score of 3/5.
- They also report some issues with its integration with Stripe and PayPal.
- Wave and QuickBooks are both simple to use, however QuickBooks Online takes longer to set up than Wave since it is more sophisticated.
- You may fill out a form and wait for a call from one of their customer service employees if you are unable to make the call.
- It’s not a big deal, but something to keep in mind, especially during tax season.
Wave’s invoicing and payments system includes a lot of automatic features for categorizing your outstanding accounts and reminding customers to pay you. Choose from three invoice templates, or customize your own to align with your branding. Wave also offers automatic recurring billing so you can ensure that you get paid by ongoing customers every month/week/quarter.
With an employee offboarding checklist–sometimes called a “termination checklist”–you won’t skip any part of… In Wave, it provides the integration with PayPal, Stripe, Etsy, and Shopify, together with numerous CRM and email marketing apps. What is more, more than 1000 apps are available on this app that allows integration with Wave through Zapier to connect the web in an automatical way. Both the two Wave and QuickBooks Online apps provide quality integration with other software apps. Just like Wave, QuickBooks Online enables you to enter the bare minimum during the setup process and also insert the rest to the web as you go. QuickBooks Online is just like Wave by having a vertical menu bar to the left of the screen that provides you with access to all system functions.
When to choose Wave
Of course, you can always work in this cost to your invoice so, your services cover the payment cost. Now the cost comes into play; the accounting and invoicing services are free, but the payment feature comes at a price. The accounting software is 100% free, and there are no trials, limitations, or hidden fees. It includes invoices, accounting, and receipt scanning and your data is secured by 256-bit SSL encryption. Creating a culture of accountability can be difficult without having the right technology to support your efforts.
Yeah, you’ll pay quite a bit more, but it’ll likely be worth it to help you scale efficiently. If you’re a (really) small business or a freelancer needing bookkeeping, Wave will likely have everything you need for free. And as long as you don’t have any plans of rapidly expanding, you can’t beat that. QuickBooks also has options to customize your template, but you only get one option for a template design. Not a big deal, but I expected the paid platform to have more options than the free one. Invoicing and accounting (plus much more) are free and unlimited for everyone.
Very often you will already be using some other B2B software in your company and it’s much wiser to select apps that integrate well with one another. With that approach you can guarantee a smooth exchange of data between your teams and services, which can really reduce time spent on migrating between one service and the other. All plans include customer support, integration with apps you already use, and secure bank connection.
Can you integrate Wave with QuickBooks?
The availability of live chat and phone support is crucial if you encounter issues that need immediate assistance. You must request for a callback, which isn’t bad since you don’t have to wait on hold. To learn why Wave is our leading free accounting software, read our review of Wave. With that said, QuickBooks Online is the more expensive of the two tools, since Wave is free to use.
QuickBooks:
Its reporting features, integrations, user-friendly apps and multi-plan scalability will help you plan for growth and expand far into the future. Additionally, QuickBooks Online integrates with more payroll providers than its own in-house payroll software. For instance, you can integrate your QuickBooks accounting replacement value software with Gusto, even though QuickBooks Payroll and Gusto are direct competitors. Although you can use Zapier to integrate Wave with other products, Wave Payroll is the only payroll software Wave directly, seamlessly syncs with. Crucially, Wave also lacks a mobile payroll app for both employees and employers.
There’s also an optional payroll feature available in Wave if you have any employees you need to pay. Just keep in mind, small business accounting does not need to be tangled, especially when you have found the tools that are perfect for your business. For a price, both Wave and QuickBooks Online provide supported bookkeeping services. Wave uses Wave Advisors to provide users with professional bookkeeping solutions, while QuickBooks Online users can buy the QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping add-on to help them with their books and reports.
However, its capabilities are limited and since it doesn’t offer any around-the-clock, it’s pretty useless for businesses operating outside typical working hours, earning it a tepid support score of 2.5/5. Wave has a feature called Wave Advisors that connects you with an accountant or bookkeeper. You can also invite your own accountant or bookkeeper to access your Wave account. Both Wave and QuickBooks Online have received positive reviews from users on sites like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, etc. However, they also have some negative reviews and complaints from users who faced issues or limitations with the software.
Customers
The only caveat to this feature is you have to watch how QuickBooks categorizes each expense. It is usually correct, but sometimes the accounting software guesses and files it away incorrectly. It’s not a big deal, but something to keep in mind, especially during tax season. The QuickBooks home dashboard is more focused on reporting the status of your accounts, including giving you views for profit and loss, expenses, and overviews of your account balances. You can also examine their product details, such as modules, tools, options, plans, prices, and more. See whether the solution lets you to customize some of its processes to guarantee it complements your own business workflows.
What’s great about these solutions is they both can be custom-tailored to fit and act as a large or small business accounting software. Today I will go through each separately, then provide a side-by-side comparison, and by the end, you’ll have an answer for your business. If you are a freelancer or marketer with no permanent staff or inventory, other accounting tools work just fine (and are cheaper). BUT if you have a built-out team AND/OR sell physical products, Quickbooks starts to pay off BIG time.
Customer Support in Wave vs. QuickBooks
While both platforms have digestible dashboards, I found it a lot harder to locate features on QuickBooks than on Wave. I had to rely heavily on QuickBooks’ search function to find many of its features, and there were even times I had to Google where to find the feature. Now, a good chunk of that is probably user error, but I shouldn’t have to go digging to find my invoices. And then when it did load my location’s sales tax requirements, it didn’t automatically apply that to my invoice or even let me override whatever was going on to manually apply the rate. With QuickBooks, you can enter your location, and QuickBooks will figure out the requirements for your area. But when I went to configure it, the app booted me out of my invoice draft and I lost all my work.