Accounting has become easier, thanks to the computer revolution. Before computers were invented, bookkeeping was done with the help of pen and paper. Now, even accounting professionals prefer using software for the same purpose.
Bookkeeping is practiced in all types of business regardless of their size, revenue and number of employees. It gives a clear picture of the current financial state of an organization. Most offline and online accounting software are paid, and you’ll need to pay at least 200 dollars to use them.
For cash-rich businesses, this price tag is not very high. Most of the small business prefer a free application instead of paid and for them, wave invoicing and accounting is an excellent option as it is online (cloud based), free and powerful.
Today, we’ve shared a full review of the free Wave Invoice and accounting software. You must be wondering why online accounting? Well, as your data is stored online on the cloud platform, there are little chances that data will be damaged or lost. If you use software, you’ll have to use a backup tool on a regular basis to keep your data secure.
Best free online accounting software for 2017
Getting started
Before you create an invoice or a report, you must create a free account with Waveapps.com website. This site will accept an email address and a six letter password as your login credential. You will not be prompted to verify your email id.
When you log into your WaveApps account, you’ll be requested to enter the details about your business. You’ll have to enter your company name, address, category, currency type, etc. You can skip this step and start using the wave invoice maker straightaway.
Let’s have a look at the relevant modules of this free online accounting software.
UI and UX
The interface of this online application is beautiful. It has a top navigation bar that provides links to open help page and account settings. To go through tutorials on this invoice maker or to get online help, visit the help section.
To manage your account, change profile/business settings or to integrate services like PayPal, Etsy, Shoeboxed, hover the mouse cursor over the accounts link.
Wave free online accounting software features
Creating and managing invoices in Waveapps is an easy task. To create one, follow the below steps:
1- Click on create invoice button and enter the customer name, address, city, zip code, country, state province.
2- Enter the details of each product you’ve sold. In this section, there are fields to add product quantity and price. You can also add recoverable or compound tax for individual inventory items.
3- Total amount will be calculated on the fly. Now, click on save and view button.
Your invoice has now been created, and you’ll be able to see it on the preview page as shown in the below image. This page shows two new menu items i.e., more and send. The more menu has options to customize, print or to make the invoice recurring. You can also set reminders for customer payment or export the invoice as a PDF file through this menu.
When reminder has been added, the customers will be automatically made aware of their payment due date via an email. You can add a logo, memo, footer text or change accent color of an invoice by navigating to the customization page. This page includes options to manage your products, customers, and payments.
The other menu i.e., send enables you to send an invoice to customer’s Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo email addresses. The invoice can also be shared or accessed online via a link.
Other features
If the customer has paid the bill/invoice, click on the add payment button, select an appropriate account, mode, enter memo and hit the “pay” button. Wave supports part payment too.
Financial snapshot: Your income will be displayed on the homepage of your account in a graphical format.
Accounting: For more accurate reports, you can upload your bank statement or connect your bank account with wave app. The supported file formats are QFX (QuickBooks), OFX (Microsoft Money), doc, simple accounting, and CSV.
All money transfers via your bank account will be displayed in the transaction section of this site. You can create as many accounts you want. You can check their balance anytime. Wave accounting modules are good, and they’re easy to use.
Reporting: You don’t need an accountant to create a balance sheet, ledgers, sales tax report, journals, trial balance, income statement reports as Wave creates them for you. The report will be accurate as it is created automatically by the server.
Payrolls: This feature is available only for business owners located in Canada and the United States.
Apart from invoices, users are allowed to create bills too. The bills will be considered as an expense, and they’ll be highlighted in the reports.
Pricing: Wave is a free online accounting software. It is not ad-free. It has a 160 x 600 ad banner on the right-hand side of your account. The advertisement will not distract your attention. If you don’t want to see it, install adblocker extension for Chrome or Firefox.
Requirements: As this is an online application, most of the computation are handled on the server that hosts waves app. Thus, there’re no special requirements for using this utility. You just need to have a web browser and internet connection on a Mac, Windows or Linux OS powered PC.
Support: Folks at wave will solve your query within 2 or 3 days. You’ll have to submit a request for help. As of now, there’s no phone support for the free version of this free accounting and invoicing tool.
Security: The data will be secure as the site uses HTTPS protocol.
Cons and Pros of Wave free online accounting software
Pros: Free, clean interface, accurate calculations, and options to export information in some formats.
Cons: I used this application over a high-speed internet connection. Sometimes, Waveapps took some time to fetch data from the database i.e., it is a bit slow.
Conclusion
Wave application is being constantly improved to offer a good experience to the users. It might not as old as Quickbooks but in a very short span of time, Wave has attracted 100000+ users. Apart from its slow response time, I was not able to find a single drawback of this application. Wave is the best free online accounting software for this year.
