Free tools work fine when you're just tracking basic income and expenses, but the moment you start running payroll it gets messy fast. I held out on free stuff way too long and the tax filings alone made me switch. We use [Gusto](https://get.gusto.com/h5v7wwpaqliu) for payroll and it handles the tax filings and onboarding automatically, which saved me a ton of headaches. If it's just bookkeeping, free is fine. If you have employees, paid usually pays for itself in time saved.

So I've been using waveapps for bookkeeping and invoicing for the last 5 years straight. Everything was fine until 2 years ago I moved to an S Corp and needed to add payroll services to my account. Well, as luck would have it I moved to waveapps payroll a few months before the payroll disaster happened with waveapps in 2025... causing issues with payrolls services, missed payments to IRS etc... for 1,000s of waveapps customers... Well, I jumped ship and moved to Gusto in the end of 2025 and its been great ever since. HOWEVER, I received a letter from the IRS stating my 2025 Q2 IRS payments are overdue because Waveapps didn't actually make the payment. I checked my bank statement and of course in July they did pull out $455.75 from my bank to make the payment to the IRS but never made the payment. I contacted support (which is only done from email and takes weeks to months to receive replies) uploaded my bank statement and IRS letter asking for a refund since I had to make the payment manually, but they did take the money out from the account. Well 2 months later, they did an "investigation" they stated they sent out a letter that the responsibility was on ME to make the payment to the IRS due to the internal issues they were having when they changed processors, and I can confirm I did receive a letter HOWEVER they still pulled the funds out of my account that month so I assumed this was sent in error and let them handle it. Fine, not a big deal the fines from IRS on that was like $10. I'll eat that cost. BUT THEY STILL TOOK $455.75 OUT FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT MONTH AND DID NOT PAY THE IRS AND NOW THEY REFUSE TO REFUND ME THAT AMOUNT THEY TOOK! I'm so over the bad service Waveapps provides even for paying customers. I was literally paying for payroll services and this is the treatment we get, bad support, piss poor payment processing for payroll services, the list goes on. Dont support this company, there are a few better alternatives out there for both bookkeeping and payroll services. Save yourselves and use those services instead.