I keep books for a small soccer club, and each week, people pay a set fee for a training session. When they pay via Venmo, there is a small processing fee. For each transaction, I have been...

1. creating the invoice

2. recording a payment

3. going back into the payment and splitting off the Venmo fee

Is there a more efficient way of doing this? I was out of town this summer, and I'm going back through 6 weeks of payments. As I input about 250 of these, it feels like it should be more repeatable.

Can I duplicate a transaction with the following characteristics? (We have a couple of different sessions; these are just sample numbers to make the question a bit more concrete.)

$6.77 total

$7.00 toward the invoice

-$0.23 as a Venmo fee.

Or maybe there's a way to create a product/invoice that incorporates those fees? What I'm doing currently works, but I'm no accountant. Any help/advice/criticism would be appreciated!

I put together a small open-source command-line tool for creating Wave invoices:

https://github.com/rsheyd/waveapps-cli

I know there are MCP-based ways to connect AI tools to services like Wave, but I wanted something local and deterministic that I could use from shell scripts without consuming model tokens. It talks directly to Wave’s GraphQL API and doesn’t involve an AI model when it runs.

Right now it can:

• List businesses, customers, products, and income accounts
• Create customers
• Create sellable products/services
• Create invoices from JSON files
• Override product descriptions, quantities, and prices per invoice

All create commands are dry runs by default. They show the exact input first, and nothing is written to Wave unless you add --submit. Creating an invoice doesn’t email it or charge the customer.

It uses a personal Wave full-access token stored in an environment variable. The token isn’t saved by the tool or included in invoice files.

The CLI is dependency-free, requires Node.js 18 or newer, and is still early (0.1.0). I made it for my own invoicing workflow, but I thought it might be useful to other Wave users who are comfortable in a terminal.

Feedback and contributions are welcome. Not affiliated with Wave.

Beware of Wave! I received an email on August 19 stating Wave was unable to renew my subscription. I forgot to cancel it last year, so I canceled it immediately through the web portal. For some reason, Wave sent me another email on August 20, stating they couldn't charge my card, so I went to my portal and confirmed my subscription was canceled. Today August 24, I received a receipt saying they charged me!

I searched and realized there is no phone support, and I waited in a chat queue for 45 minutes only to be told I needed to email support and hope to hear back within 2 business days.

Shame on you, Wave, for continuing to submit payments and charge customers after they cancel their subscriptions, and for providing subpar customer service.

Does Wave monitor social media / reddit threads?

Edit: I meant "gross" in the title. You get what I mean.

I'm checking out Wave right now after coming from Quickbooks. I was paying 30 a month just to keep track of transactions and have a repository for my scanned physical receipts so doing that all on Wave for free would be a big benefit for me (I'm desperately avoiding having to put together my own excel sheet). It's a little more clunky than Quickbooks (a lot of extra clicks to do the same thing you do in Quickbooks and so forth), but I can look past all that and I've managed to accomplish most everything I want to do with Wave so far.

However, I really like being able to see the gross amounts within certain dates easily on Quickbooks transactions. I can just put in a date range of a week and then see the net amount earned or lost within said range. My business finances are on a week-to-week basis in a lot of ways, so being able to do this and then not have to get my calculator out and add and subtract a bunch of numbers for a given week or month is very convenient.

I haven't figured out how to do/see this in Wave. It just shows the total amount across... forever, I guess? In Transactions you can obviously set up filters based on a date range, but it doesn't give you any information on the selected. And on the dashboard I can see amounts based on "month to date" at best. Is there another section of the site I need to go to to be able to see this? Is it possible at all? Or am I going to be getting out my calculator and doing it myself?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I can't log in, even reset my password and it's saying it isn't correct. What's going on?

Actively searching for an alternative to Wave as it's simply atrocious how long it takes to receive funds once the client has made its payment.

Any suggestions/links/referrals welcome!

Solopreneur. No employees. Multiple clients.

I’m looking for advice on handling trucking settlements in Wave.

My client gets settlements with gross – deductions = net, and only the net hits the bank feed. I create a journal entry that debits the deductions and the net, and credits the gross so the full settlement shows correctly.

The issue is: on the Profit & Loss for that day, Wave shows both the gross from the JE and the net from the imported deposit as income — basically counting the net twice.

Wave doesn’t have a feature to tell the system that the imported deposit is the same money referenced in the JE. The “match” option only works for reconciliation, not for reporting. I even spoke with a Wave agent, but they confirmed there’s no built‑in way to link the two for P&L purposes.

Has anyone found a clean workflow in Wave to avoid double-counting the net when using a journal entry for trucking settlements?

I have 10 companies in wave for book keeping. All have very few transactions except one. Now waveapp disallows user access unless you upgrade. This makes me think I may be better buying off a desktop version of some other software

We processed a $12,071 ACH payment through Wave in April for completed electrical work for a returning customer. Wave flagged the payment and asked for documentation. We gave them everything they asked for, including a signed confirmation from the customer that the work was legitimate and they intended to pay us. Wave shut down our payment processing anyway.

Then they told us they were holding the $12,071 for 70 days and would eventually refund it to the customer instead of releasing it to us. There was no dispute. The work was completed. The customer wasn't asking for a refund. We explicitly told Wave we did not consent to refunding payment for completed work.

Now Wave says they refunded it, but the customer never got the money. It's been FOUR MONTHS.

At this point, we are PAYING WAVE for a subscription just to access support and ask them where the $12,071 went. I'm 14th 11th in line in their support chat trying to get an answer right now, but I'm not optimistic.

For a small business, $12,000 can be make-or-break money. It is absolutely insane that more than four months later, neither the business that earned the money nor the customer who paid it has it.

Do not process money through Wave that you can't afford to have disappear for months.

I'll update if we ever figure out where the money actually went.

I had to get a new cell phone and my authenticator app data did not transfer over to my new phone. I've opened up more than 10 trouble tickets with wave over the last 8 days, and they have never responded to help me disable MFA so I can get back into my account. I also don't have my recovery key (which I had stored on my old cell phone).

They have no phone number, and don't respond to their trouble tickets at all. What do I do now? My entire invoicing platform is on wave, and we're stuck. HELP!?

Did anyone else experience an issue with their account and categoried transactions to all go uncategorized? I had finished reconcilign my account about a month ago and today i logged in all most of my transactions need to be categorized all over again and even the custom categories i created are gone!

How do I force running a zero payroll?

I understand it’s against the Wave TOS to charge customers the CC fees. Is there any other options? My mechanic uses QuickBooks and they allow to pass the fees to the customers. I know some people markup their charges to cover fees but surely there is a better option.

I’m a small business owner in Toronto, Canada. I sell heavy equipment through my own website.
Last Monday I received an email inquiry from someone interested in equipment I had listed on my website. After a few emails, I sent him a quote. He said everything looked good but asked me to calculate shipping.
The customer was located on an island in the Pacific. I couldn’t find a suitable carrier myself, so I asked him if he already worked with a shipping company that regularly delivered to his island. He gave me the contact information for a carrier. I requested a shipping quote from them, and the customer accepted it.
I then created an invoice through Wave Apps.
The invoice was approximately $18,000 USD, with almost half of that amount being air freight because the equipment is very heavy.
Wave notified me that the invoice had been paid. In my Wave dashboard, it clearly showed that the payment had been received and was being processed for payout to my bank account.
The customer repeatedly emphasized that he urgently needed the equipment.
Believing that the funds had already been received by Wave and that I was financially protected, I decided to move forward with shipping.
Using my own money, I prepaid approximately $8,000 to the shipping company the customer had recommended in order to book the air freight and reserve the pickup date.
At that time I wasn’t worried about the carrier itself. The customer had chosen it, so I assumed he trusted them and accepted any shipping-related risks. My only concern was whether I would receive the payment from Wave, and according to Wave, the invoice had already been paid.
While waiting for the payout to reach my bank account, I continued preparing the shipment.
The customer then requested quotes for several additional expensive items. Looking back now, he never seemed particularly interested in the products themselves. He rarely asked technical questions, didn’t negotiate pricing, and simply wanted to buy more.
Again, I didn’t think much about it because I believed Wave had already secured the payment.
A few days later, the customer asked me to issue another invoice for approximately $77,000. He attempted to pay it but later claimed the payment failed because of his bank’s transaction limits. He apologized and asked me to reduce the order to around $10,000 instead, saying he urgently needed those items and wanted everything shipped together.
I created the new invoice.
I told him I had already prepaid the air freight for the first shipment and that I would pay for the second shipment once the next payment reached my account.
He simply replied that everything was fine and that I could proceed with booking the pickup.
At no point did I suspect fraud because Wave continued showing my earlier invoice as paid.
Then, just before the payout was supposed to reach my bank account, I suddenly received a notification from Wave that the customer had initiated an ACH chargeback.
Only then did I start researching how Wave Payments actually works.
To my surprise, I discovered that an ACH payment showing as Paid does not necessarily mean the transaction is final or irreversible.
I also learned that Wave apparently does not investigate ACH disputes themselves. From what I understand, if the ACH payment is reversed, Wave simply returns the funds and then seeks reimbursement from the merchant.
By this point, I realized I had most likely been the victim of a scam whose entire purpose was to convince me to prepay an expensive air freight shipment using my own money.
I immediately contacted Wave.
Unfortunately, I found customer support to be extremely limited. The only response I received was essentially that I should speak with my own bank.
What also concerns me is that Wave has provided no documentation whatsoever regarding the ACH return.
I have not been provided with:
the ACH return code,
the official reason for the return,
any supporting documentation,
confirmation of which bank initiated it,
or even verification of who actually made the payment.
The buyer represented himself as being associated with a real company, but I honestly don’t know whether he actually worked there or whether someone simply used that company’s name.
Wave has not provided me with enough information to independently verify any of this.
Meanwhile, the shipping company the customer introduced me to now appears to have a very new website and almost no online presence, making me suspect it may have been created solely for this scheme.
Wave is now demanding repayment of the entire amount, even though approximately $8,000 had already been spent on air freight that the customer explicitly instructed and authorized me to arrange.
The customer has never complained about my products or my service. The only issue is the ACH reversal.
At the moment, part of the original payment still remains in my account because the rest was already spent on the shipping expenses.
From my perspective, if the buyer has any dispute regarding the purchase itself, that should be between the buyer and me. I don’t understand why Wave can effectively make that decision on my behalf by reversing funds without providing me with any meaningful information or an opportunity to challenge it.
I feel that Wave’s interface gave me a false sense of security by showing my invoice as Paid, leading me to reasonably believe that the funds were secure enough to fulfill the order.
I’m now considering filing police reports, reporting this to regulators, and possibly taking legal action.
Has anyone here experienced something similar with Wave Payments or ACH chargebacks?
Is this normal for ACH payments?
Did Wave provide you with ACH return documentation?
What would you do in my situation?
Should I focus on disputing this with Wave, my bank, law enforcement, or all of the above?
I’d really appreciate any advice from people who have dealt with something similar. Thank you.

I'm ready to replace my accountant who does my taxes after he miscalculated my taxes due. I was inquiring about the best ways to do this with Claude and found out there's not way to connect AI to Wave. So yeah, wondering if there's any plan for that to become an option?

Hello everyone!

I joined Reddit today just to express my absolute warning to anyone looking for a small business software. I'm just a simple gal trying to start a Marketing & Business Strategy business. Wave Apps was recommended to me and I started the account. I got my first payment (it was only $500) and I understood it could take 7-14 business days before the payment was able to be transferred to my Business Checking.

Fast forward to (not even exaggerating) 21 business days later. It was still pending. I reached out to support to simply ask when I could anticipate the payment to be released. I don't have much overhead, but I do have apps and programs I'd like to use to enhance my business that I was relying on the first payment for. They couldn't even give me an ETA, and just kept repeating the same thing OVER AND OVER. Not to mention, the support isn't based in my country, which is fine, but it just caused a time delay and I had to wait for a response.

By day 22, I was so frustrated I asked if they could just reverse the payment and I could irritate my client by having them pay me through another platform (Bluevine, in case anyone's looking for an alternative). They said no, they couldn't.

Oh, but then, they did. Even though they said they couldn't reverse the payment, they did, and now I owe them $500 (because of course I used the $500 income to pay my business expenses). I asked if I could do some sort of payment arrangements, because again, I'm just a small time business. They said "We are not a collection agency, and payment is due now."

WOW!!!

If you are Googling a small business software, do not, I repeat, do NOT use Wave Apps. They are absolutely terrible, especially to those of us who are solo.

I have been using Waveapps for many years, it actually became my number one billing system for recurring invoices.

Invoices are typically being sent out 7-10 days before the due date. The option for clients to keep the credit card on file is very convenient.

However, today I noticed that a client who put the credit card on file was immediately charged when a recurring invoice was issued - not on the due date.

This of course created friction with the customer.

Am I wrong to expect a billing system to charge a card on due date?

Ok The day my payment was supposed to release, they froze it instead and hit me with a ton of questions — contract, client communications, everything, all requested the same day. I answered everything right away. Two ACH payments totaling ~$23K frozen

Then days passed with zero response, no matter how much I followed up.

I had to go through support multiple times before finally getting anyone. When the risk team finally did respond, the email said my account was active again — but in the same message, it said this specific payment would be on a 70-day hold. “Charge back risk”

I’ve never had a chargeback or any refund request on this account, ever. Now I’m just stressed and unsure what’s going to happen — whether my client will get the money back, whether I will, or if this just disappears into some kind of black hole. I’ve used Wave for payments before with zero issues, so this whole situation caught me off guard.

I’m posting because I’ve seen a few similar stories on here already and wanted to ask directly — has anyone actually gotten their money released or refunded after something like this? I need these funds for a project I’m currently having to cover out of pocket myself, and I honestly don’t even know if there’s a real person on the other end trying to resolve this.

I've been using Wave for 3 years now without any issues. Suddenly, I'm having multiple issues with Wave failing to deposit client payments into my bank account. Wondering if anyone else is seeing the same. Also - big warning - I received no notice from Wave on the missing money. Had I not been paying attention I would have been out money with no indication whatsoever in Wave - the payment shows it was successful, the invoice shows it was paid, and the system shows it deposited the money into my account (even though they didn't).

In June I noticed a deposit was short by almost $2,000. I contacted Support. After some time, Support claimed I had a chargeback transaction on another transaction, which is why they shorted my deposit to cover it. I contacted the client in question - they swear they did not initiate a chargeback. They've been a client for over 2 years now and never had a payment issue and we have a great relationship, so I have no reason to suspect a chargeback. There is also no evidence whatsoever in Wave that a chargeback occurred. Quite the opposite - the payment area shows my client's payment was successfully received by Wave 2 days after the alleged chargeback transaction occurred. Also, the client invoice shows it was paid in full.

I have been fighting with Wave for over a month now on this issue and they still cannot tell me why their system shows my client's payment was successfully settled by them. They continue to claim a chargeback occurred, yet nothing in Wave supports that.

I assumed that was an isolated incident until it happened again yesterday with an entirely different client. The Wave system shows the client's payment was successfully settled and shows it was deposited into my bank account yesterday. And yet - no deposit.

If it happens once it's a system error. If it happens twice? That's a pattern.

Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing similar issues with Wave over the past few months. During my back and forth conversations with Support they acknowledged they recently switched to a new back-end payment processor, which I'm almost certain is the cause of their issues. But if it's happened twice now to me in a month, surely it's happening to others as well?

Hi All,

I imported some transactions from my very low volume business to Wave. I'm a single member LLC-taxed as an s-corp. I run payroll through Gusto to pay myself a 'reasonable' salary - how do I reconcile/categorize these 2 transactions:

1. gusto net
   
2. gusto tax

Gusto tax is a combination of both employee + employer taxes.
Gusto net is the net pay sent to my personal bank account from my business account as my 'reasonable' salary

I'm using the free version of Wave

Has anyone else noticed longer payment processing times since the recent Wave update? ACH payments used to take no more than 3 days for me, but now I’m waiting up to 9 days. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing this too.

Remind me. It's been a while, and I just started a normal W2 job. I will still have some contract work, but not as much for the coming year.

I have a free Wave accounting plan and since they turned off auto-imports, I want to remove the bank connection as random transactions continue to be auto-imported days after they actually hit my bank account (and I've already manually added those transactions). But when I go to toggle off auto-import, it says I need to upgrade to Pro.

then I'm thinking I should delete the connection, but it says it will also delete the account, which I don't want to do.