Tired of Intuit / QuickBooks Accounting Software and pricing?

"Ultimately, WaveApps ought to be everyone’s (at least small businesses) number one choice for (mostly) free accounting software (in our humble opinion) that gets the job done without costing anything or too much.
While its features could be a little more comprehensive, you really can’t complain when you consider the asking price, user-friendliness of its dashboard, and excellent invoice organization features."

See the full and honest WaveApps review from 2/15/2023 (updated 11/17/2023) by Hosting Data here.

And for full transparency below is a list of things that we wished were a bit better (but this has NOT stopped us from using WaveApps) as of 3/1/2023!

0) Needs to have 2FA soon!
1) Would be nice with the option to email from custom domain - even if you can get around the issue by creating a PDF and sending stuff from your own domain via i.e. Outlook.

2) Needs a bit better streamlined import options to be able to i.e. migrate from QB (even with Google Sheets integration)! 
3) Why would the customer and vendor import templates NOT have the STATE in it (unless you use the Google Sheet integration)? It has the rest of the usual address lines. You may want to use The Google Sheet integration here since the integration allows a few more fields to be imported, i.e. mobile phone.
4) How do you set starting balances? It would be nice with a little guidance/video here - even if the chat box is rather good!
5) A full backup/restore function is missing/needed for emergencies!

6) How do we handle bulk transactions? We just imported 5,000 historical invoices, but we can't set them as PAID in bulk!
7) Items 2 and 6 make it next to impossible to bring over your historical stuff! The system seems better geared to start over!
8) The invoice import function has a BUG where a customer can NOT have two invoices in a row - then the import wants to incorrectly see them as one invoice!
9) Wave Connect also seems to have a limit at around 600 - 1,000 lines or less before it starts struggling with validating i.e. invoice items.

10) The invoice system (and probably also the estimate system) calculates the sales tax vaguely incorrect compared to QuickBooks as it creates sales tax for each line item 
and rounds up and down instead of creating sales tax on the total and then rounding up and down.
11) We can't seem to set a customer to NO sales tax (but the line item can be deleted MANUALLY - one line at a time - for every single invoice)!
12) The discount field doesn't seem to want to take numbers after the decimal, so we can't give i.e., 12.5% discount :-(

13) We cannot enter i.e. twenty bills through the month and then "reconcile" or pay them in bulk (i.e. according to CC statement) at the end of the month. For us this becomes a potential waste of time when we must pay our CC bills as it's back to doing/paying one bill item at a time versus doing it in bulk for i.e. twenty items according to a CC statement. We are not 100% if we are doing this stuff in QB the "wrong way". Maybe credit card entries are NOT "bills" and should be handled via a CC account that can then be reconciled like a bank account?
14) We wish that WaveApps could handle Purchase Orders (PO) as one of our companies relies on this function in QB (a bit unusual for a small business). This is most likely a showstopper for businesses that use POs with their vendors.
15) We are not sure how to record a CC payment where there is a CC fee involved, but we may figure it out later. It seems that using WaveApps will take care of it automatically. Otherwise, it looks like we need to use "split payments" (which to us looks like it has an error when using Payment Processing Fees).
16) We don't use QB for creating manual vendor checks, but a lot of small businesses do. So, we suspect that they would miss being able to print checks. We could be wrong and "don't care" as we don't need it.
17) Sales tax seems to be a bit easier to handle in QB, so hopefully WaveApps will catch up a bit here. But it can be done if a bit manually, so it will work for now for us.
18) We are missing the option to have a date per invoice item in invoices and estimates as we can do in QB.
19) WaveApps does NOT do Customer Jobs as some people are used to using in QuickBooks.
20) Last but not least remember that QuickBooks is better known than WaveApps at this point, so if you are i.e. selling your business, you may want to stick with accounting software that a seller will know.

Summary: Above is NOT stopping us from using the FREE WaveApps as the alternative is i.e. QB, Xero or ZohoBooks at around $40 per month. This expense is too high for certain types of businesses like ours. So, we will find the best way around working with WaveApps and its small quirks ;-)

Below were our steps to get started using WaveApps accounting Software:

1) Initial signup
2) Initial setup
3) Now imported customers, products, vendors, and invoices (which took forever since we have over 3,000 invoices on over 10,000 lines).
4) Now we setup the following functions quickly in WaveApps: Payments, Chart of Accounts and Connected Bank Account(s).
5) It looks like we would "simply" have to set beginning balances on our QB accounts via Accounting then Transactions and finally under More, Create Journal Transactions (or use Bulk Journal Transactions in Google Sheet via WaveApps Connect). This may take a little bit of time to make sure a smooth and error free transition from QB can be done.
6) And finally, now we could compare P/L and balance sheet between QB and WaveApps to make sure that we had our accounting in order.