Create graphs, charts, and dashboards to see at a glance where your income is coming from and which expenses are cutting into your bottom line. You can then dig down as deep as you like with expense tracking and customized reports to manage your revenue, categorize expenses, and find cost-cutting opportunities. You’ll also experience peace of mind knowing your personal financial information is backed-up and secure. Wave Money is currently available to single-owner businesses in the United States with a Wave account. Once you create an account, we’ll notify all new eligible businesses by email.

• This is particularly true if you don’t have much accounting experience and would like an easy-to-use, fully functional tool.
• Wave Accounting can be a great option if you run a very small service-based business or don’t need more advanced features that alternatives might offer.
• It automatically calculates taxes and prepares tax filing reports.
• Accounting teams in service-based businesses, such as consulting firms or marketing agencies, might find Zoho Books’ billable time tracking feature useful.

Before you commit to accounting software, it’s in your best interest to shop around and compare all your options. Unlike QuickBooks and FreshBooks, Wave Accounting is completely free to use. It can allow you to manage all your accounting processes without paying a dime.

Tools that help you make money moves

Yes, switching from other accounting apps or products to Wave is easy! See our step-by-step guide on how to import bookkeeping data into Wave here. Any connections between you, your bank accounts, and Wave are protected by 256-bit SSL encryption. You can invite your accountants, bookkeepers or other business partners to Wave via email and designate their user roles. They can receive “editor permissions” and access accounting and reports as well as purchases easily.

Additionally, its centralized dashboard simplifies global transaction management with the ability to make payments, manage approvals, track payment status, and generate reports within a single platform. Among QuickBooks product offerings are add-ons for payroll, a bank account, advanced accounting, employee time tracking and e-commerce inventory management. QuickBooks expense tracking lets you automatically capture information from receipts and track miles, features that make QuickBooks more flexible for a variety of businesses.

Wave makes money through our optional, paid money management features include online payment processing, payroll software, and access to personalized bookkeeping services and coaching through Wave Advisors. These features help keep our invoicing, accounting, and business banking (currently only available to sole proprietors in the US) free. If you’re interested in using payroll software, you can start a free 30-day trial when you sign up for Wave.

As a business accounting solution, ProfitBooks helps track account payables and receivables, manage inventory, and collect payments online. It offers pre-installed invoice templates that you can customize by adding your company logo, showing/hiding items, changing column names, etc. It lets you log various expenses, including utility bills, rent, employee salaries, and office supplies.

Find effective ways to grow your business

Additionally, it offers employee cards with predefined usage restrictions to simplify expense tracking and improve budget control for managers. All the products in this list are dedicated online accounting tools with account receivables, accounts payable, bank reconciliation, general ledger, and financial reporting as core features. Wave Accounting offers free software, meaning you won’t need to submit a credit card or payment information to use it. It can help you manage your bookkeeping, accounting and invoicing processes through a few internal integrations. Businesses with high inventory volumes can use ProfitBooks to control spending and prevent unexpected expenses.

QuickBooks Online

Easily monitor and keep track of what’s going on in your business with the intuitive dashboard. The quick summary allows you to stay in control of your business finances, including a task list of outstanding items. Know how a general ledger works with double-entry accounting along with examples when an invoice is viewed, becomes due, or gets paid, so you can stay on top of your cash flow better than ever. Only pay for what you use and simplify annual audits with workers’ comp built for small business owners.

What’s the difference between QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier?

Similar to other reputable cloud-based accounting software products, Wave encrypts the data you share with it and monitors its server facilities 24/7. Although accounting and invoicing are separated into two different product sections on the Wave website (shown similarly below), they don’t require separate accounts. These solutions are integrated within your dashboard and you’ll access them both through your single Wave login. After providing a few basic details about your business — name, type, currency you use, address — you’ll have instant access to your free account. Wave is PCI Level-1 certified for handling credit card and bank account information.

In addition, Wave allows you to manage multiple businesses on one free account and uses double-entry accounting, which is ideal for accountants and tax time. Manually creating invoices in Microsoft Word or Excel can be time-consuming and difficult to manage. Digital invoicing empowers your small business by automating invoice processing and saving time by tracking key invoice data like upcoming and outstanding invoices.

Wave Accounting is free, but you will have to pay processing fees if you choose to accept invoice payments online. Wave also offers paid products for payroll, coaching and mobile receipt scanning. Once logged in, your main dashboard will show your cash flow, profit and loss, invoices, bills and other financial insights. From the dashboard (or the Banking menu on the left-hand side), you’ll be able to connect your bank and credit card accounts to automatically download and categorize your transactions.

This accounting software is designed especially for self-employed individuals and freelancers like you, and can be easily customized for any size business and any type of goods or services you provide. Payroll software saves you time so you can focus on the best parts of running your business. And, in the long run, an online payroll software provider like Wave can save you a lot of money by reducing human error so you can avoid tax penalties (and who doesn’t love saving money?). For information on credit card rates, visit Pricing for details.

However, like most free products, Wave has its limitations, especially compared to more scalable small-business accounting software. One of its biggest drawbacks is its lack of higher-tier plan options for growing businesses that require a richer selection of features. It simplifies VAT accounting across countries, eliminates manual calculations, and saves time by generating customized reports. As an accounting tool, Ramp uses machine learning to analyze merchant names, locations, and purchase types and categorize transactions into relevant expense categories (e.g., travel, office supplies). It lets you build automated workflows for transaction reviews and approvals. Its spend analysis functionally identifies areas to optimize spending and provides recommendations on which subscriptions to cancel, which vendors to negotiate with, etc.