Wave

Free is still the headline. Wave's Starter plan carries unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records at no cost, monetized through card processing at 2.9% plus $0.60 a transaction. The Pro plan at $19 a month or $190 a year adds the parts that make it a real ledger rather than an invoice pad: automatic bank feeds with categorization, receipt capture, recurring invoices, late payment reminders and the standard financial statements. Payroll runs $25 to $40 a month as a separate line. The company has been going since 2010, reports having served 5.9 million small business owners in the US and Canada, and is backed by H&R Block.

For the right client this is genuinely appropriate. A sole proprietor with a dozen invoices a month, one bank account and a Schedule C at year end does not need QuickBooks Online, and paying $19 a month rather than $35 or more is a defensible recommendation. Unlimited users on the account means the firm can be invited in without paying for a seat.

What a firm has to weigh is that Wave is not built to be used this way. The homepage says as much, describing the product as designed for small business owners and solopreneurs "not accountants." There is no accountant or partner program, no wholesale rate, no discount to pass on, and no console listing every client file behind one login. Each client is a separate account with a separate password, and moving between forty of them means forty logins. The nearest thing to a firm relationship is Wave Advisors, an in-house bookkeeping and coaching service starting at $149 a month, which sells the same work the reader of this page sells. That is a straightforward conflict, not a partnership.

The product ceiling arrives quickly too. There is no inventory, no project profitability beyond tagging, no multi-currency of consequence, no class or location dimension worth building reporting on, and a thin third-party app ecosystem compared with QuickBooks Online or Xero. A client who hires two employees, starts holding stock or opens a second entity has to leave, and the migration lands on the firm.

Against Zoho Books, the closest priced competitor, Wave loses on almost every dimension except simplicity: Zoho's free tier covers businesses under $50,000 of revenue with a proper accountant seat, and its paid plans start at $15 a month billed annually with far more depth. Against Patriot or FreshBooks the trade is similar. Wave's real advantage is that clients already know it and it costs nothing to start.

The tier stays dated, on the firm-side reading rather than a product one. Wave is being actively developed, with recent additions to invoicing and the mobile app, so this is not a stalled roadmap. It is dated for this audience because the vendor has chosen to sell direct to business owners and to compete with bookkeeping firms rather than supply them. A practice can support existing Wave clients perfectly well. Standardizing a book of a hundred clients on it would mean giving up client-file management, partner pricing and any commercial relationship with the vendor at all.