Wave

What do you like best?

I'll start by explaining that I'm a professional bookkeeper who learned Wave in order to serve a couple of new clients who were already using it. Since then, I've recommended it a couple of times to people who needed a step beyond Excel for accounting at the lowest possible cost. Wave's basic version is free, and what you get for $0.00 is a lot. The bank feeds are robust. Reconciliations are set up as I prefer, "hard coded." The basic reports are all available in summary and detail formats (income statement, balance sheet, and general ledger). Splitting transactions is easy. All this makes it a great solution for small businesses that don't have overly complex accounting requirements.

Wave also supports set-up of customer invoices and statements and vendor bills, and receipt uploads. Receiving payments through Wave does incur transaction fees. And they have a paid payroll add-on.

My top favorite feature though is the way in which Wave has set up transaction search and edit functions. Wave's approach to mass transaction editing makes it very quick and easy to do bookkeeping catch-ups when needed as compared to any of the other accounting apps I've used.

What do you dislike?

The reconciliation process is a bit odd in terms of workflow order. I'd prefer to match transactions to the bank statement before I get a "reconciled" message.

I've also not been able to figure out yet how to set up payroll liability accounts in Wave for manual payroll transaction entry. Latest idea that just occurred to me is to try creating a "Discounts" income account that makes it possible to track the money that comes in and out of payroll liability accounts. Doing it this way, of course, could add a bit of complexity to reading the income statement.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I've used Wave for a client who needed to maintain personal bookkeeping records with more ease than she had been doing. Wave also gives her the ability to easily "pull" all her charitable contributions, which helps with the tax filing.