To help move your information into Wave, check out Wave Advisors. Learn more about Personalized help with Wave Advisors.
1. Set up your Wave account
When you create a Wave account, Wave creates a chart of accounts for your business based on the business type you select. If you have other accounts that you use, add a new account or category to reflect them.
If you add sales taxes to your products or services, create your taxes in Wave. Learn how in Add, edit, or delete a sales tax.
2. Create outstanding invoices and bills
Outstanding invoices and bills can affect your account balances. To avoid double-counting balances during the switch to Wave, recreate any unpaid invoices and bills in Wave first. Learn how to Create an invoice or Create a bill.
As you create your invoices and bills, add your customers, vendors, and products.
3. Set up Wave’s online payments feature
If you want to offer customers the option to pay directly through their invoices, set up Wave’s online payments feature. This simplifies the payment process and streamlines your accounting.
4. Export reports from Freshbooks
To prepare to enter account balances in Wave, export these reports from Freshbooks:
- Collected (cash-based) profit & loss statement for the transaction date range you will enter into Wave.
- Balance sheet for the last date of your transactions.
- Collected (cash-based) tax summary for the same date range as your profit & loss statement.
Since you are entering outstanding invoices in Wave, cash-based reports prevent double counting of balances.
5. Enter account balances in Wave
In Wave, on the left-side menu, click Accounting > Transactions. At the top right corner, click Add transaction > Add journal entry.
Wave operates on a double-entry accounting system, which means debits must equal credits. Your Freshbooks reports will not differentiate between debits and credits. To help with entering your transactions in Wave:
- From your Freshbooks Profit & Loss Statement, enter income as a debit, and expenses as credits.
- From your Freshbooks Balance Sheet, enter cash on hand and bank balances as a debit, and loans as a credit.
- From your Freshbooks Tax Summary, enter Collected Taxes as a debit in the Tax Liability row, and Less Expenses Taxes as a credit in the Tax Liability row.
Since Wave doesn’t carry over Freshbooks transaction history, keep a copy of your Freshbooks data for your records.