Though they have payroll, they do not pay your taxes for you (only in a few select states). You need to do it manually...and at times I've forgotten and had to pay penalty. Now I use square - and they do it all automatically. I didn't know I had to 'turn off' payroll in wave and was charged the $15 a month even though I didn't run payroll for any employees.
Payments...their recurring invoices are good, but you need to do some manual work. They create the invoices and it adds to your sales. When they deposit your money to your bank it adds to your sales as well. So you need to find the one they deposit and manually delete. I asked if there's like a report they generate that tells me everything they've deposited...it doesn't exist. So you could mistakenly delete something, or forget to delete something...and it throws everything out of whack. You could be underpaying or overpaying taxes.
Their 'ACH' requires people to log into their bank. I'm not going to try to convince my customers to click on a link on my invoice and put in their bank credentials.
I have other gripes...there's definitely room for improvement. I haven't seen that much changed in the last few years...not sure if they cut back on their development team or what. I probably should have looked more heavily into Quickbooks since that's the industry standard. I will look into pilot, though.
The bookkeeping...besides mint, I don't have any other experience with bookkeeping. I will look more into Quickbooks, though. Business is growing and need to make everything simple.
Ran into major issues with their accounting product (especially around reporting, and dealing with multiple currencies). Reached out to their team to explain the problem, they agreed it was a significant problem, but didn't really have a desire to fix it. Fast forward 12 months, core problem is still there. My only thought is when your product is free its not always easy to figure out how to prioritize what you work on.
I have found Xero to be the best intersection of function and price for SMB - Quickbooks online also had some significant quirkyness (i.e. one thing Intuit doesn't really highlight is Quickbooks online is not feature complete when compared to Quickbooks desktop - hence there are many desktop features and reports which just don't exist in the online product...)
”Wave jumps significantly in the online accounting standings this year ... the free service only charges you for payments, payroll, and premium support (at $19 per month) ... Not only is Wave the best free small business accounting website, it's one of the best online resources period for its target small business audience: freelancers, contractors, and sole proprietors.”