I have a few clients who use Wave which is a free bookkeeping software. Whilst it’s great to save some money, it does come with many limitations. How should you decide if a free software like Wave might be the right fit for you?
First of all let’s look at some of the limitations of Wave:
1. Bank feeds are not supported in Australia – this means you will need to manually enter or import all bank transactions
2. You cannot create bank rules – this means that you cannot tell the software how to automatically allocate bank transactions for items which occur on a regular basis. As a result despite having consistent transactions you will need to manually allocate them each time.
3. You cannot enter a budget into Wave to track against.
4. You cannot link Wave to the ATO to do reporting such as Business Activity Statements (BAS)
So this begs the question when is it a good fit?
Well Wave
certainly has it’s place. For someone who is just starting out their business and
does not have a high volume of transactions Wave can be a really cost effective
choice. You can track all your simple bookkeeping requirements and produce
professional looking invoices to send to clients.
When is it time to move onto a paid subscription model software such as Xero or MYOB?
Wave is more time consuming to use due to less automation options. This means when you start dealing with a large amount of transactions it is going to become very time consuming processing everything through Wave. As a rule of thumb at a minimum once you start employing people or hit the $75K turnover for to register for GST it is definitely time to look at upgrading!
If you’re
using Wave and wanting to upgrade or unsure what software package would best
suit your needs get in touch and we can point you in the right direction.