For example, QuickBooks Online doesn’t have a free plan, but offers four paid plans, accounts payable definition each with additional features, making it a great choice for scalability. With the higher-tier QuickBooks plans, you have access to inventory management, billable expenses and project profitability tools, none of which are offered with Wave. Wave Accounting does a lot for the price—but it can’t do everything.

Features

“Wave invoicing makes your life a whole lot easier and takes that worry off you. I’ve tried Quickbooks—it’s a bit more complicated and technical, and takes more time to set up.”

How is Wave different than QuickBooks?

Wave’s smart dashboard organizes your income, expenses, payments, and invoices. There are four plan options provided on QuickBooks Online, which has the closest plan choice to Wave’s free account being its Simple Start plan, which requires you to charge 12 dollars each month and supports one user. The next option is Essentials with what is a billing cycle + how to set one up a fee of 20 dollars per month, and it supports up to three users.

Getting started

1. We collect the data for our software ratings from products’ public-facing websites and from company representatives.
2. If you want to accept online payments, it only requires you to pay the normal transaction fees by using any other application.
3. There are also add-on Intuit services like QuickBooks Payroll or QuickBooks Time.
4. Zoho Books offers a robust free plan, along with a range of paid plans that feature workflow automation.
5. Wave Accounting is ideal for micro businesses with fewer than 10 employees, contractors, freelancers and other service-based businesses on a budget.

In terms of price, Wave is a free application, which requires you to pay nothing to use all accounting features. Meanwhile, QuickBooks Online provides a more extensible product, which enables single user able to scale up to a more robust version without the risk of losing data or having to start from the start with a different application. The majority of accounting applications on the market today are created to be so easy to use, which needs little training or support for users. Nevertheless, as it is easier, it doesn’t mean we don’t care about product support. In this section, both Wave and QuickBooks Online provide a great selection of tools and resources, which help you make it easy to go through, and robust user communities available to help you have well-informed users. However, there is no replacement for live product support, here we go for it.

You can also customize your chart of accounts (CoA) to include only the accounts you need—useful for freelancers, who tend to have fewer expense and income categories on their books than bigger businesses. NerdWallet’s accounting software ratings favor products that are easy to use, reasonably priced, have a robust feature set and can grow with your business. The best accounting software received top marks when evaluated across 10 categories and more than 30 subcategories. Learn more about how we rate small-business accounting software.

Customizable invoicing

However, if your business plan includes growth, make sure you will have to figure out an application that can grow with your business. At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don’t guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.

Have an eye on the big picture so you can make better business decisions. Our robust small business accounting reports are top 4 use cases of automated bookkeeping in 2023 easy to use and show month-to-month or year-to-year comparisons so you can easily identify cash flow trends. Give your customers the option of paying with one click using a credit card, bank transfer, or Apple Pay. Finally, the choice is depending on you for choosing Quickbooks Online or Wave.

If you have a question or issue, you can browse the help center or reach out to Mave, the automated chatbot. If you do want live support, you’ll need to invest in an Advisor or paid service. NerdWallet independently reviews accounting software products before determining our top picks. We collect the data for our software ratings from products’ public-facing websites and from company representatives.

You don’t have to enter a credit card number when you sign up. In addition, Wave’s mobile app lets you send invoices and track payments on the go. The app offers a receipt scanning feature as well, but you have to pay a subscription fee to access it.

Let’s start by going through the Wave accounting app and the details of this software. Wave accounting software is totally free and you can sign up for an account on their website at ease without any credit card required. Overall, Wave is a web-based software, which means you can log in to your account at any time, with any device as long as you have an internet connection.