Wave accounting review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

What zero dollars a month covers

Starter costs nothing and does not expire. Invoices, estimates and the bookkeeping records behind them are unlimited. So a shop billing forty jobs in a July week pays the same as one billing four in February. Income and expense tracking is included. So are the three reports an owner opens most: profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow.

Wave makes its money on the money moving through it. Card payments cost 2.9% plus $0.60 per charge. American Express costs 3.4% plus $0.60. Bank payments, also called ACH, cost 1% with a $1 minimum, as of August 2026. ACH just means the customer pays straight out of their checking account instead of using a card.

Run $18,000 a month of card volume across forty invoices. That is about $546 in processing fees, which dwarfs the software bill you did not pay. Push the same $18,000 to bank payments and it costs about $180. If you invoice in the hundreds or thousands per job, steering customers to ACH is worth more than every plan decision on this page.

Before you route your money through Wave, read what happened to owners who did. One signed up, got approved for card processing, took a first payment, and then watched Wave reverse it. The refund went straight back to the customer after the work was finished, leaving that owner unpaid. Support later said the payment account had been switched off by a risk team over an unverified business, and the license, EIN and business bank account were already on file. Another owner had a hold put on his account a couple of days after he signed up and sent invoices, with "no warning or thorough explanation", and moved his invoicing to PayPal. Two independent accounts are enough for us to say it plainly: take card money through a processor you can call, and let Wave keep the books.

The four things $16 buys you

Four things change when you pay. First, your bank and card transactions import and sort themselves through Plaid, a service that links your bank to the software. You can connect as many banks and cards as you want. No more keying each line off a statement. Second, receipts get captured by phone photo, desktop upload or email forwarding, and the software reads the numbers off them. Third, invoices chase themselves with late payment reminders, and repeat invoices go out on a schedule. Fourth, you can add users. That matters the first time a bookkeeper needs a login that is not yours.

Pro is $16 a month billed yearly, or $190 for the year. Month to month it is $19, which comes to $228, as of August 2026. There is a cheaper half-step. Receipts sells on its own at $8 a month, or $72 a year. So if photo capture is your only gap, the add-on leaves the bank feed where it is. Weigh $96 a year for receipts alone against $190 for receipts plus automatic bank imports plus reminders plus a second login. Once you are typing more than a handful of transactions a week, that $94 difference buys hours back.

Pro also waives the flat per-transaction fee on your first ten card charges a month. That is worth about $6 at most, and the percentage keeps running. Treat it as a rounding error.

Wave works out your sales tax but will not file it

Read the sales tax part carefully. You set up the rates. Wave applies them to invoices. Then it gives you a report showing tax collected, payments you made to the government, and the balance still owing. You can run that report on an accrual basis, which counts a sale when you bill it, or a cash basis, which counts it when you get paid. The report is web only, so it is not something you pull up in the truck.

What Wave does not do is file it. The report tells you the number. Getting that number to your state on schedule stays your job, or your accountant's. The only tax filing that happens inside Wave is payroll tax. That arrives only if you buy the payroll add-on, at $40 a month plus $6 per active employee or contractor paid, as of August 2026. That covers automatic payroll tax payment and filing in all 50 states, plus W-2, W-3 and 1099-NEC forms.

Do the math before you assume the cheap option stayed cheap. Two people on payroll makes the add-on $52 a month, or $624 a year. That sits on top of the $190 for Pro.

Nobody to call before Monday

Free users get an AI chatbot and a help center. A human on chat or email comes with paying. Even then, support runs Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 4:45 Eastern. Trades work Saturdays and evenings. If invoicing goes sideways at six on a Friday in August, you are reading help articles until Monday. For an owner who does the books after hours, that is the sharpest limit here.

Two smaller problems make it worse. There is no demo account. So there is nowhere to practice matching your bank statement against your books before you do it on live records. That is where self-taught owners get stuck. And the reports, free as they are, come with basic filters. Slicing profit by job type or date range is thinner than a bookkeeper would expect.

If you would rather have the work done than explained, Wave Advisors starts at $149 a month billed annually. You get an in-house bookkeeper who sorts your transactions and matches them against your bank statement, plus one 30-minute call a month. That includes a Pro upgrade but not Receipts. No tax filing service is listed under it.

Owners who have needed a human are blunt about what came back. One says Wave is "ok until there is a glitch", and that they waited "for hours at a time for days in a row without a real response", with email going unanswered. Those accounts are not about slow replies. They are about a customer's payment stopping and nobody being on the other end. Weigh that against the $190 a year you are saving.

It barely connects to your job software

The integration list is close to empty. Wave's documented route to anything else is Zapier, a service that passes data between apps. You build and maintain those automations yourself, outside Wave. When one breaks at month end, it is yours to fix.

That matters because the field-service tools a trade shop is likeliest to run all connect to something else. Housecall Pro syncs to QuickBooks Online and Desktop. It lists no Wave connection. Jobber syncs to QuickBooks Online and to Xero. Again, no Wave. So a shop that dispatches in one of those and keeps books here gets two choices: rebuild invoice sync out of zaps, or retype everything.

Our position is firm. Wave is a fine place for the books when the books stand alone. If your jobs and invoicing already live in a field-service platform, pick the accounting software that platform connects to on its own, and pay the difference. A $190 a year saving disappears the first month somebody in the office is matching two systems by eye.

When free stops being the cheap option

The fit is narrow and clear. A new one-truck operation. The owner does all of it. A few dozen invoices a month. Books kept on their own. Starter at $0 is a working setup, and we would stay on it until hand-entry becomes a chore. That usually happens when a second card enters the picture. Then Pro at $16 a month billed annually gives you back more time than it costs. Month to month, cancel any time.

Three readers should spend their money elsewhere. Anyone dispatching through Housecall Pro, Jobber or a similar platform, because your accounting should follow the connection rather than the sticker price. Anyone who needs a human outside weekday business hours, since even paid support closes at 4:45 Eastern on Friday. And any shop with two or three people in the books at once, where software built to hand off cleanly to a bookkeeper earns its higher price.

On the bookkeeping itself, owners back the free plan up. One solo owner left QuickBooks after a jump to $1,000 a year, moved to Wave and found it did everything they needed. A former general contractor now running a drafting and design business says he enjoys doing the invoicing now, and that QuickBooks felt like something he had to be trained on. A bookkeeper who ran Wave before moving their own firm to Xero puts the limit in one line: if you are low volume and do not mind uploading bank statements by hand each month, it is a good free option. That is the same boundary the price list draws, and owners find it in the same place.

What owners actually say