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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 11/17/2024) 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.

A “Perfect” new Windows computer setup (if you still have access to your old computer):

General notes:

1)      Passwords, passwords, passwords. If you know (all) your passwords, you should have a fairly smooth transition from your old computer to your new one as per below steps. But way too often we don’t know our passwords, and handling this ends up taking up all the time for the transition. If you don’t know your passwords reset them and write them down!

2)      Microsoft (Office) 365 - make sure to subscribe as it gives you 1 TB for OneDrive (cloud storage and backup) and everyone uses Word, Excel and to some extent Outlook Classic. There really is no good way around this anyway! Microsoft OneDrive can also be a life saver in general!

3)      OneDrive turns out to be one of your best friends, so we all have to stop disliking it! And remember to utilize its Backup service as well unless you are backing up your data elsewhere. Consider keeping Outlook.pst files away from OneDrive (if they are used at all) as they copy back and forth between computers and are often fairly large in size.

Old computer:

)      Remember to login to your browsers on your OLD computer as favorites, passwords etc. will then follow you to your new computer once you log in to the browsers there!

2)      Rearrange/move the c:\users\XXXXX data on your old computer so that ALL important user data resides in the c:\users\XXXXX\OneDrive directory. Now allow OneDrive to update fully – this could take many hours so prepare your time accordingly. This step will allow for a very smooth data transition to your new computer now and in the future! You should i.e. make sure to set the power settings on the computer to NOT go to sleep too fast to make sure that the process finishes without going to sleep! If you don’t have access to OneDrive, you can copy your data manually over your network connection or use an external USB hard drive for this.

New computer:

1)      Set up or login to your Microsoft Office 365 subscription on your new computer! Make sure to open/login to OneDrive as all your data from the old computer will now start pouring in. This could take many hours to complete, so make sure that allow time for this. You can i.e. make sure to set the power settings on the computer to NOT go to sleep too fast to make sure that the process finishes without going to sleep! If you didn’t have access to OneDrive and didn’t already copy your data a your network connection, you can start copying your data from your external hard drive now.

2)      Setup your email accounts in Outlook Classic if you are a “Pro” Email user. Your Email accounts could take many hours to fully update depending on the size on your mailbox(es). Don’t use the “Outlook New” if you are used to the regular Outlook (called Classic now). Outlook New should really be called Outlook Free, Express, Minimum, Standard or something like that as it’s NOT a full Outlook product the way Outlook Classic is! Remember to setup any signatures and rules needed here and TURN OFF “Conversations” if/as needed!

3)      If you are a QuickBooks Desktop user, remember to install (or check if installed) the Microsoft XPS Documenter Writer as it’s needed to create PDFs in QB. This can be done via the Control Panel, then “Uninstall a Program” and lastly “Turn Windows Features on or off”.

4)      Setup/install security software! At least make sure that Microsoft Defender is active and works as a “bare minimum-security product” on your new computer!

5)      Make sure to install your printer and test the scanning part, if available!

6)      Always make sure to have/install at least one extra browser in addition to the built-in MS Edge. This can be i.e. Google Chrome of Mozilla Firefox.

7)      Log back into your browsers and stuff from your old computer/browsers should follow you here. And remember to set ALL browsers to show favorite bar AND to remember the last session!!! Open tabs from your old computer will need to be re-opened manually or done via the History.

8)      Now install programs that are unique to your computer. You can see installed programs on the old computer via i.e. the Control Panel and “Uninstall a program” or “Add/Remove Programs”.

9)      Remember little things like checking or activating the Windows System Protection (System Restore) and i.e. disable “Automatic Restart” on System failures.

P.S. Please note that these instructions are general notes and do NOT go into specifics as to how to do each step. Alls document would get way too big and complicated to look at if all steps were fully explained. These instructions assume that the user performing these actions are at least a “Windows Super User” 😉

A “Perfect” new Windows computer setup (if you still have access to your old computer):

General notes:

1)      Passwords, passwords, passwords. If you know (all) your passwords, you should have a fairly smooth transition from your old computer to your new one as per below steps. But way too often we don’t know our passwords, and handling this ends up taking up all the time for the transition. If you don’t know your passwords reset them and write them down!

2)      Microsoft (Office) 365 - make sure to subscribe as it gives you 1 TB for OneDrive (cloud storage and backup) and everyone uses Word, Excel and to some extent Outlook Classic. There really is no good way around this anyway! Microsoft OneDrive can also be a life saver in general!

3)      OneDrive turns out to be one of your best friends, so we all have to stop disliking it! And remember to utilize its Backup service as well unless you are backing up your data elsewhere. Consider keeping Outlook.pst files away from OneDrive (if they are used at all) as they copy back and forth between computers and are often fairly large in size

Old computer:

4)      Remember to login to your browsers on your OLD computer as favorites, passwords etc. will then follow you to your new computer once you login to the browsers there!

5)      Rearrange/move the c:\users\XXXXX data on your old computer so that ALL important user data resides in the c:\users\XXXXX\OneDrive directory. Now allow OneDrive to update fully – this could take many hours so prepare your time accordingly. This step will allow for a very smooth data transition to your new computer now and in the future! You can i.e. make sure to set the power settings on the computer to NOT go to sleep too fast to make sure that the process finishes without going to sleep! If you don’t have access to OneDrive you can copy your data manually over your network connection or use an external USB hard drive for this.

New computer:

6)      Setup or login to your Microsoft Office 365 subscription on your new computer! Make sure to open/login to OneDrive as all your data from the old computer will now start pouring in. This could take make hours to complete, so make sure that allow time for this. You can i.e. make sure to set the power settings on the computer to NOT go to sleep too fast to make sure that the process finishes without going to sleep! If you didn’t have access to OneDrive and didn’t already copy your data over via your network connection, you can start copying your data from your external hard drive now.

7)      Setup your email accounts in Outlook Classic if you are a “Pro” Email user. Your Email accounts could take make hours to fully update depending on the size on your mailbox(es). Don’t use the Outlook New if you are used to the regular Outlook (called Classic now). Outlook New should really be called Outlook Free, Express, Minimum or something like that as it’s NOT a full Outlook product the way Outlook Classic is! Remember to setup any signatures needed here and TURN OFF “Conversations” if/as needed!

8)      If you are a QuickBooks Desktop user remember to install (or check if installed) the Microsoft XPS Documenter Writer as it’s needed to create PDF’s in QB. This can be done via the Control Panel, then “Uninstall a Program” and lastly “Turn Windows Features on or off”.

9)      Setup/install security software! At least make sure that Microsoft Defender is active and working as a bare minimum security on your new computer!

10) Make sure to install your printer and test the scanning part, if available!

11) Always make sure to have/install at least one extra browser in addition to the built-in MS Edge. This can be i.e. Google Chrome of Mozilla Firefox.

12) Log back into your browsers and stuff from your old computer/browsers should follow you here. And remember to set ALL browsers to show favorite bar AND to remember the last session!!!

13) Now install programs that are unique to your computer. You can see installed programs on the old computer via i.e. the Control Panel and “Uninstall a program” or “Add/Remove Programs”.

14) Remember little things like checking or activating the Windows System Protection (System Restore) and i.e. disable “Automatic Restart” on System failures.

P.S. Please note that these instructions are general notes and does NOT go into specifics as to how to do each step. This document would get way too big and complicated to look at if all steps were fully explained. The instructions assume that the user performing these actions are at least a “Windows Super User” 😉