Wave vs. QuickBooks: Accounting Software Comparison

Wave has two plans:

• Starter: Free for one user.
• Pro: $16 per month for unlimited users.

The Starter plan offers unlimited bookkeeping and an online payment charge of 60 cents plus 2.9%. With the Pro plan, you get everything in Starter — plus automatic bank imports, automatic late payment reminders, receipt capture, and unlimited users. For the first 10 online payments, Wave will charge only 2.9% per transaction.

QuickBooks Online is more sophisticated than Wave, which is why it’s understandable that it comes at a higher price:

• Simple Start: $30 per month for one user.
• Essentials: $60 per month for up to three users.
• Plus: $90 per month for up to five users.
• Advanced: $200 per month for up to 25 users.

For small businesses, our top recommended plan is Plus. It comes with five users, class and location tracking, inventory tracking, and project profitability. You can also enjoy the financial planning feature, which lets you create budgets based on real-time data.

QuickBooks Online gives you the ability to design invoices, customize templates, and add custom fields. You can also add the company logo and details to make invoices more personalized. It even allows you to print invoices and send them to customers. QuickBooks will send invoices to the email address of the recipient, requiring fewer steps for your bookkeeper. 

When you enable payment reminders, QuickBooks will send email reminders to customers automatically so that you don’t have to do it manually.

In Wave, invoicing is rather straightforward. However, some invoicing features are locked behind the Pro plan. For instance, you can only edit invoice templates and send invoices via email with Pro. 

So, if you want the free Starter tier, you’ll have to send invoices to customers manually by sending a PDF invoice copy via email. But if you only need to send a few invoices, such as fewer than five per month, manual sending would not be that big of a deal.

QuickBooks Online’s A/P features offer a lot of flexibility for both service-based businesses and inventory sellers. If you sell inventory, you can easily convert POs into bills. Inventory items can also be added to the Products and Services menu. For service providers, you can create permanent service items so that you can later add them to invoices.

If some vendors prefer check payments, QuickBooks Online has a check printing feature. This comes in handy since you don’t need to write checks manually. Moreover, subscribing to QuickBooks Bill Pay makes bill payments easier because it enables you to pay vendors within QuickBooks. Therefore, there’s no need to transfer to your online banking app to wire payments.

While Wave may not be as powerful as QuickBooks, it offers decent bill tracking and A/P tracking. You have complete oversight of unpaid bills and, if you have the Pro plan, then you can attach captured receipts to bill entries. However, Wave doesn’t have recurring bills like QuickBooks. So, if you have vendors that bill regularly, you may want to consider if not having a recurring bills feature is a worthy compromise for affordable pricing.

QuickBooks Online offers useful inventory features, such as the ability to record POs, track stock levels, set reorder points, and compute inventory cost. Whenever you record a sale, QuickBooks will compute COGS automatically and deduct the inventory sale from the inventory account and stocks.

Aside from that, you can store important inventory information, such as descriptions, optimum stock levels, and stock keeping units (SKUs). QuickBooks can also record returned inventory whenever customers return it.

Wave doesn’t have inventory tracking features. If you still want Wave, you’ll have to track inventory separately and make periodic adjusting journal entries. You may also consider third-party inventory management software and Zapier integration if you want to streamline processes.

Users can add multiple bank accounts and have them reconciled in different ways. If you don’t want to connect your bank account, you can either upload the PDF bank statement or perform manual reconciliation by comparing your paper statement with the QuickBooks register. The system can handle timing differences and account for bank service charges and interests automatically.

If there are ever book reconciling items that have not yet been recorded, you can save the reconciliation for later while you add missing book entries. Aside from bank reconciliations, you can print checks in QuickBooks.

Wave’s bank reconciliation only works if both Wave and the bank statement have the same recorded entries. This feature is useful for payments and purchases using debit or credit cards. However, if you have deposits in transit or outstanding checks, Wave won’t recognize those items because it doesn’t deal with timing differences. 

Hence, Wave’s bank reconciliation is fine if you only record transactions when they clear the bank. However, it won’t work if you record payments when issued and deposits when checks are received.

QuickBooks Online has 107 built-in reports in its Reports page, and you can generate any of those reports with a few clicks. QuickBooks will redirect you to a different page where you can customize the report by changing the report headings and modifying the columns. 

Its custom report builder can help you create special reports that are based on existing reports so that you can generate the report that you need. See the complete list of QuickBooks reports in the QuickBooks Help Center.

There are 13 reports in Wave, which include the essential financial statements. Other reports are purchases by vendor, aged payables, income by customer, and aged receivables to name a few. Though Wave has few reports, we believe they are enough for microbusinesses or occasional sellers.