Wave is free and built for the simplest books. The divergence starts when foreign currency and evidence requirements enter the picture.
Wave is free, and for a large number of businesses that is the correct price for accounting software. Most of the reasons to leave Wave are reasons to have outgrown it, which is a different thing from Wave being wrong.
Wave does more with foreign currency than it is usually given credit for. Approve an invoice in another currency and it records the conversion rate that applied that day, then posts an unrealized gain or loss on foreign exchange as the rate moves. That is real multi-currency bookkeeping, and it is free.
The limits show up at the edges of that feature rather than in the middle of it. Wave’s own documentation notes that an invoice with online payments enabled has to be in your business currency — so the moment you want a customer to pay you in their currency through Wave, the foreign-currency path and the get-paid path stop overlapping.
The deeper divergence is not about currency at all. Wave has an approve step on invoices, which keeps unapproved sales documents out of the ledger. It does not have a state that means proposed for an ordinary posting, or a place where the receipt behind a categorization lives as part of that posting. For books a person keys in by hand, that is fine — the person is the review step. It stops being fine when software is doing the proposing.
Price, and the clarity of the trade. Wave gives away a double-entry ledger with bank connections and invoicing, and asks nothing for it. If your books are single-currency and low-volume, none of this is a reason to switch, and paying for a ledger you do not need is not a sign of seriousness.
Wave is also simpler to start. There is no chart-of-accounts design exercise, no opening-balance ritual, and no decisions about evidence policy. For a business whose accounting question is “did I make money this year,” that simplicity is the feature.
| Capability | Equated | Wave |
|---|---|---|
| Double-entry general ledger | Yes | Yes |
| Bank feed connections | Yes | Yes |
| Draft state before it reaches the ledger | Every posting | Invoices |
| Foreign currency invoices and bills | Yes | Yes |
| Foreign-currency online payments | Yes | No |
| Price of the core ledger | Paid | Free |
For invoices and bills, yes. Wave records the expected conversion rate when you approve a foreign-currency invoice and posts an unrealized foreign exchange gain or loss as the rate moves. The documented limit is on the payment side — to send an invoice with online payments enabled, the invoice has to be in your business currency.
Not always. It depends on your books more than on the software. If you are single-currency with a small number of monthly transactions, free is the right price. The case for paying starts when the evidence trail has to hold up — foreign-currency receipts, input tax credits, a year-end someone will review.
Equated imports a chart of accounts and you set opening balances from there. It does not replay transaction history, so a migration means running forward from a cutover date.
Claims about Wave last verified August 20, 2026