Wave Accounting: the free books my nephew runs from his truck

My nephew Danny runs a lawn crew, four guys and a trailer. He texted me a screenshot at 9pm on a Sunday: an invoice he had just sent from the driver's seat of his truck, and the question "is this good enough for taxes?" It was better than what he had before, which was a notes app and a milk crate of receipts.

Here's the thing. If you are a one-person or two-person shop, you do not owe Intuit $35 a month. You might not owe anyone anything. Wave's Starter plan is free. Real double-entry accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning, no monthly bill. I ran my own books on it for three years and paid exactly zero.

I pay for it now, because in 2024 Wave stopped being all-free. They moved auto bank import into the Pro plan, which runs $19 a month, less billed yearly. Danny's account is on Pro and I pay the $19 because he pays me in pulled pork and I am the one who set it up. I have paid both the free tier and the paid one, and here is the honest math.

What it does and what it costs

Numbered, because Danny asks me the same three questions every spring.

The free Starter plan covers invoicing, basic bookkeeping, and receipt scanning. You type in transactions by hand or upload a statement. For a shop with a few dozen transactions a month, that is workable.
The Pro plan, $19 a month, adds automatic bank import, payment reminders, and the AI receipt scanner that actually works. Danny photographs a receipt at the gas station and it files itself.
If customers pay invoices online, Wave takes a cut, around 2.9% plus 30 cents. On a $60 lawn job that is about $2. Danny raised his prices a dollar instead of arguing about it.

Total for Danny: $19 a month and the processing fee when a customer pays by card. Against QuickBooks Simple Start at $35, that is $192 a year back in his pocket, and Danny's books are cleaner than mine were at his age.

The pallet jack version of the story

I explain the difference between Wave and QuickBooks with a pallet jack. A pallet jack is free-ish, needs no license, no key, no fuel, and it moves a real load. If your job is ten pallets a day, a pallet jack is the correct answer and anybody who sells you a forklift is selling you their budget, not your problem. Wave is the pallet jack. QuickBooks Plus is the forklift with the certification and the seat. Sue the plumber needs the forklift for job costing. Danny does not, and telling him otherwise would be selling him a garage he cannot park in.

I'll be honest about the limits, because free software collects them. Support is thin on the free tier. Danny had a bank connection question and it took a while to get an answer by email. Payroll is mostly gone from Wave, so do not plan on running four lawn guys through it. Danny pays his crew by check off a printed sheet, old school, and his tax guy handles the filings. And the 2024 paywall move tells you where this is going. Free plans grow up into paid plans. When the next feature moves behind the paywall, I will look at the invoice before I complain about it.

Who should not use it

If you have employees, inventory, or an accountant who lives in QuickBooks, stop reading and go set up QuickBooks. The accounting wholesale discount I wrote about before beats free sometimes, because your CPA stops billing you cleanup hours. Wave shines for the plumber's son mowing lawns, the woman selling bread at the Saturday market, the guy fixing phones out of a kiosk. Books small enough to lift by hand.

One more thing. Danny's bank, a credit union, took three tries to connect properly in the first week of Pro. He gave up and called me, and we re-linked it in about ten minutes with the credentials on paper this time. If your bank fights you, fight back once, then do it manually for a month and see if you even miss the import.

What to do Monday

Count the receipts in your box. Not the money, the actual slips of paper. If it is under a hundred a month, set up the free Wave account and scan one week of them tonight. The app reads the totals, files them, and the box on your dryer starts shrinking. If your books are past the pallet jack stage, you already know it, and you should be on the forklift with a seat.