A Wave Alternative For The Business That Ran Out Of Road Doing The Books By Hand

Anything that keeps the ledger and produces the reports without being Wave. On this hub that means QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks and Zoho Books. The useful question is not which product has the longer feature grid, because at this end of the market they will all hold an invoice. It is who enters the transactions and who reconciles them.

Wave sells software and gives most of it away. We sell the work. The five hundred covers the chart of accounts, the setup, the migration, the bank rules, the integrations and the monthly reconciliation, and the people who built it are the people who answer when you call. Wave’s own nearest equivalent is Wave Advisors, not the free plan.

Yes, by five hundred dollars a month, and there is no version of this page where that changes. Starter is free and stays free, and Pro is nineteen a month for the entire business however many people use it. What you are weighing is not two prices. It is whether the bookkeeping is going to get done, and by whom.

Your Zoho licenses, which Zoho bills to you directly at their published rates, and anything that is properly an accountant’s job rather than a bookkeeper’s, such as filing a tax return or signing off statutory accounts. Everything involved in making the books work and keeping them right is inside the figure.

If you are billing a handful of clients and you are willing to sit down every week and enter the transactions, do exactly that. Starter is free and it is a genuinely good product for that case. The reason people stop doing it is not that Wave failed them. It is that the weekly twenty minutes quietly stopped happening somewhere around month four.

Often not, and finding that out now is far cheaper than finding it out in month four. If you invoice a few clients a month and your bank balance already tells you most of what you need to know, five hundred a month of bookkeeping is a solution looking for a problem. We would rather say so on the first call.

No. Opening balances, outstanding invoices and unpaid bills move first, because those are what the business is actually chasing. Older closed history follows once the live position reconciles. Splitting it that way means nobody waits on a full migration before they can raise an invoice.

Nobody stops invoicing and nothing goes dark. Your existing Wave account stays exactly where it is until the new ledger has closed a full month and the two agree. Cutting over is a decision you make once you have seen the numbers match, not a date we impose on you.

It is a common route here and the export itself is straightforward. Where it gets fiddly is agreeing the opening position, because a ledger nobody has reconciled in a while does not really have one yet. We work that out before anybody signs anything, so the tidying up is known rather than discovered.

No to both, and the arrangement is deliberately dull. The Zoho account is in your name, the ledger is yours, and if you stop working with us you keep every record and carry on. Nothing about leaving is designed to be awkward.

One flat figure with nothing metered behind it. Five hundred a month covers the chart of accounts, the invoicing and recurring billing setup, the bank feeds and reconciliation rules, the financial reporting, the integrations into whatever else you run, and the user permissions.

No, and be wary of anybody who does. A migration meets transactions nobody has looked at properly in years, and a first reconciliation usually turns up two things the business had never noticed. What we will commit to is that those surprises are ours to absorb rather than yours to be invoiced for.

What came in, what went out, what is still owed to you and what you still owe, alongside anything we changed in the ledger and anything odd enough to be worth mentioning. It is a page rather than a deck, and it is written so somebody who never opens the accounting system can still tell how the business is doing.

Four to eight weeks to a first clean monthly close in most cases, and longer where several years of unreconciled history have to be sorted out first. The honest variable is not our speed, it is how quickly somebody can answer questions about transactions from two years ago.

Thirty days’ notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The Zoho account stays in your name, the chart of accounts stays exactly as it is, and the documentation comes with you. There is no exit fee and no data to pry out of us, because it was never ours to hold.