Wave Online Accounting Counts On Small Businesses

Like other online accounting services, such as Outright (see Outright.com Available In Google Apps, Wave can automatically retrieve transactions histories from a user's financial accounts.

"We integrate with 10,000 financial institutions for pulling data in and beginning to auto-categorize transactions," said Simpson. "This includes banks, credit unions, credit cards, PayPal, brokerage accounts, and mortgage companies. Wave Accounting also allows users to manually enter income and expenses.

In terms of integration with other applications, Wave Accounting supports some integration with Google Documents. "For PDF documents such as receipts, users can manually enter the data into Wave Accounting, and associate the PDF to that transaction, using Google Docs as a document repository," said Simpson.

Wave Accounting currently offers nearly a dozen business reports, including balance sheets and income statements.

Some of Wave Accounting's benefits are those common to all on-line services, Simpson noted, notably accessibility, collaboration and off-site data. Users can access data from any Internet-connected machine (give or take browser constraints). A user can work with a bookkeeper, accountant or business partner without having to exchange workbook files, by extending edit or view-only access to balance sheets, income statements, and other reports.

As with all cloud-based applications, data resides online, so there is no need to do regular backups to off-site.

Unlike some other accounting tools, such as Intuit QuickBooks (see QuickBooks 2011 Now Available Wave does not yet support invoice payment, but, said Simpson, "We view this capability as important."

While Wave Accounting does not do tax preparation, "It provides all the information you need for doing taxes at year-end," said Simpson.

Like other SaaS, cloud and web-based accounting services and other financial tools for businesses, such as Intuit QuickBooks Online, Outright, WorkingPoint, Xero, FreshBooks, and Invoice.com, Wave Accounting is browser-based, with all data being stored online. According to Simpson, "We do not support Internet Explorer 6, but support all other OSes and browsers."

Wave Accounting is available now. According to Simpson, mobile applications for iPhone and Android platforms are coming soon.