How to use Wave: the first hour, and what the free plan really covers
Wave gives unlimited invoicing and double-entry bookkeeping at zero. How to set it up properly in an hour, what Pro at $19 adds, and the 2.9 percent cost nobody mentions.
Verdict
Wave is free for unlimited invoicing and double-entry bookkeeping, with no time limit. Set up the chart of accounts and payment terms first. The real cost is 2.9 percent plus $0.60 on card payments.
Do these four things first#
Most people sign up, raise an invoice immediately, and then spend a weekend fixing the books. The order below takes under an hour and avoids that.
1. Business details and currency. Set them before anything else. Wave does not do multi-currency, so pick the right one now rather than discovering the limit later.
2. Chart of accounts. This is the boring step everybody skips and everybody regrets. It is the list of categories every transaction gets filed under. Wave gives you a sensible default; spend twenty minutes adding the categories your business actually uses and deleting the ones it does not. Fixing this after a year of transactions is genuinely painful.
3. Invoice branding and payment terms. Logo, colours, and the terms line. Set the default to what you actually want to be paid in, not 30 days because it was pre-filled.
4. Send one invoice to yourself. Before a client sees one. You will spot the things that look wrong in an inbox that looked fine in the editor.
What free actually includes#
Unlimited
Invoices on the free plan
No cap, no expiry, no card required. Almost nothing else in this market does that.
- Unlimited invoices, estimates, and bills
- Full double-entry bookkeeping, not a simplified ledger
- Cash flow, profit and loss, balance sheet
- Unlimited customers and records
That is a real accounting product at zero, not an invoice generator with a dashboard.
What you do by hand on free#
Bank transactions. On the free plan you enter them yourself. Wave Pro at $19 a month connects your bank and imports them automatically, plus receipt scanning.
The decision is just arithmetic:
| Transactions a month | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Under about 30 | Stay free, hand entry is fine |
| Over about 50 | Pro pays for itself in your time |
The cost nobody mentions#
Wave charges 2.9 percent plus $0.60 per card payment.
| Invoiced by card | Processing cost |
|---|---|
| $5,000/mo | About $150 |
| $10,000/mo | About $350 |
| $30,000/mo | About $890 |
That is the real Wave bill. The $19 Pro plan is a rounding error next to it.
The lever: make bank transfer the default option on your invoices rather than card. Most B2B clients do not care which they use and will take whichever is presented first. That one change saves more than any subscription decision you will make this year.
The same maths applies across accounting tools, which we work through in QuickBooks payment processing fees.
When Wave stops being enough#
Two hard limits, and neither has a workaround:
- No inventory tracking. Any product business needs something else.
- No multi-currency. Invoicing overseas clients in their currency is not possible.
If you hit either, the comparison is in Wave vs QuickBooks, and the fuller picture on Wave itself is in our Wave Accounting review.
The short version
What works
- Genuinely unlimited invoices and real double-entry bookkeeping at zero, which no other mainstream tool offers
- Setup takes under an hour and needs no accounting background to get started
- Pro at $19 a month adds bank auto-import, which removes most of the ongoing manual work
What does not
- Card payments cost 2.9 percent plus $0.60, which dwarfs any subscription saving for an invoicing-heavy business
- On the free plan you enter bank transactions by hand, which is the hour a week Pro buys back
- No inventory tracking and no multi-currency, so product businesses and exporters run out of road
Frequently asked questions
- Is Wave really free?
- Yes, and permanently. The free Starter plan includes unlimited invoices, estimates, bills, and full double-entry bookkeeping with no expiry and no card required. It is not a trial. Wave makes its money on payment processing and on the $19 Pro plan, not by limiting the free tier to a demo.
- How do I start using Wave?
- Create the account, set your business details and currency, then do the chart of accounts before anything else. Add your invoice branding and payment terms, then raise one test invoice to yourself to check how it arrives. That whole sequence takes under an hour and saves rework later.
- What does Wave Pro add for $19 a month?
- Automatic bank transaction import and receipt scanning. On the free plan you type transactions in yourself. If that is costing you an hour a week, Pro pays for itself immediately. If you have twenty transactions a month, it does not.
- What does Wave actually charge for?
- Payment processing, at 2.9 percent plus $0.60 per card transaction. On $10,000 of invoices paid by card that is about $350 a month, which is far more than any accounting subscription. Bank transfer is dramatically cheaper and worth steering clients toward.
Written by
Tashawar Awais
Researcher and editor
Tashawar handles verification and editing. Every figure in a review is checked a second time before it goes out, and anything that cannot be traced to a vendor page or a documented source is either qualified or cut. Where pricing is genuinely unclear, as it is with Canva team plans or Close CRM tiers, the article says so and tells the reader to confirm directly instead of quoting a number with false confidence.
- Second check on every published figure
- Removes claims the sources do not support
- Flags pricing that changes without notice