App Awareness Month – Wave Accounting

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. Everyone’s favorite holiday – Tax Day – is this week, so we’re focusing on applications that make reporting and accounting easier. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Wave Accounting – Pro Accounting for Small Businesses

Wave Accounting makes managing accounting and finances possible for small businesses without having to hire a dedicated employee (or outsource the work). The software connects to your bank accounts and automatically imports transactions – or you can upload electronic bank statements. And the more you use Wave, the more intuitive the product becomes – manually categorize a transaction once and the next time the same transaction occurs, Wave will automatically categorize the action for you.

Wave can handle personal expenses too! The product creates separate dashboards for business and personal expenses and if you make a business purchase from your personal account or vice versa, Wave lets you categorize the purchase while handling the accounting on the back-end.

Plus if you live in Canada (don’t worry, it’s coming to the US soon), Wave will manage your company’s payroll as well, just $3 per employee.

Google Apps Integration

Wave Accounting can operate as a standalone service, though it is very popular among small businesses using Google Apps for Business. Signing up for Wave with Google Apps provides Single Sign-On capabilities, and of course direct access from Google’s navigation bar. Even better, bills, invoices and reports can be exported directly to Google Docs.

Why We Like It

Wave Accounting can cut accounting hassles for the vast majority of small businesses. Many small businesses do not have a dedicated accountant, so an easy-to-use tool like Wave can really make a big difference to whomever handles finances. This tool is robust enough to completely replace Quickbooks and is beautifully automated in many different ways.

Another plus for small businesses? Everything but payroll integration is completely free, with no usage limits.

You can install Wave through Google Apps Marketplace or at waveaccounting.com and check out the Chrome extension too!

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: It’s great for time tracking!

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.