Just Use Wave Starter — Free Bookkeeping for Creators

You’re pulling income from five directions at once — YouTube AdSense hitting your bank account on the 21st, a newsletter sponsorship paid net-30, two brand deals invoiced separately, and a Gumroad product sending payouts whenever it feels like it. Come January you have no clean record of what actually came in, and your accountant is asking for numbers you genuinely cannot produce. That’s the creator bookkeeping problem. It’s not complicated — it’s just scattered.

Just use Wave Starter.

Why Wave

Wave Starter is genuinely free — not free-with-a-catch in the way most “free” software tiers work. Unlimited invoicing, unlimited expense tracking, unlimited income categorization, and basic P&L reports. No credit card required to sign up. No cap on clients, projects, or transactions. For a creator earning from a patchwork of platforms, that’s the right starting point.

Creator income maps cleanly to Wave’s income categories. YouTube AdSense, Substack payouts, Gumroad deposits, and one-off brand deal invoices all land in Wave as income transactions you can label and categorize. You’re not dealing with inventory, job costing, or payroll — the things that make bookkeeping software complicated. Wave’s free tier was designed for exactly the level of complexity solo creators actually have.

The workflow on Starter is manual: you connect your bank on the Pro tier; on Starter, you import transactions yourself or enter them by hand. For creators pulling income from 2-4 sources with under 30 transactions a month, that’s maybe 20 minutes at month-end. It’s not glamorous, but it’s functional and it costs nothing.

Here’s where you need to pay attention before committing: Wave quietly removed transaction-level CSV export from Starter accounts without making it prominent. If your plan is to hand a tidy CSV to your accountant or CPA at tax time, you’ll hit a wall. The workaround is manual — you can use Wave’s Google Sheets integration (Wave Connect) to pull data out, or copy-paste from the interface. Neither is elegant. If clean accountant exports are non-negotiable for you, upgrade to Wave Pro at $19/month, or reconsider whether FreshBooks fits better from the start.

Payment processing on Starter is 2.9% + $0.60 per card transaction. Pro waives the $0.60 fixed fee on your first 10 card transactions per billing period, which adds up once you’re collecting invoice payments at volume. ACH bank transfers are 1% with a $1 minimum on both tiers — the cheaper option if your brand deal clients will pay that way.

The upgrade math is simple: if you’re reconciling more than 30 transactions a month manually, Wave Pro’s automated bank imports via Plaid at $19/month will save you the time. If you’re processing enough paid invoices that the $0.60 fee waiver compounds, Pro pays for itself. Otherwise, Starter handles everything.

• Wave Starter ($0): unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, income categorization, basic P&L, manual transaction entry
• Wave Pro ($19/month or $190/year): adds automatic bank transaction imports via Plaid, OCR receipt scanning, auto-categorization, priority support, and the fee waiver on card transactions
• Payment processing: 2.9% + $0.60/transaction on Starter; 2.9% on Pro (first 10 transactions per month, then 2.9% + $0.60); 1% + $1 minimum for ACH on both

One limit worth naming explicitly: Wave does support foreign currency accounts and uses xe.com rates for conversion in reports. But the workflow is manual — you enter custom exchange rates yourself when recording payments on foreign-currency invoices. If you’re collecting regular payments in GBP or EUR from UK or EU brand deals and want that handled automatically, Wave’s multi-currency support is workable but friction-heavy. FreshBooks handles it more cleanly at the Plus tier.

Why Not FreshBooks

FreshBooks Plus is the honest upgrade path, not a competitor to dismiss. At $43/month for up to 50 billable clients, it includes everything Wave Starter has plus time tracking, client portals, project-level reporting, and cleaner multi-currency handling. If you’re running 10 or more invoiced brand deals a month — sending professional proposals, tracking revision hours, collecting payments in multiple currencies — FreshBooks earns its price.

The reason Wave beats FreshBooks for most creators is that most creators don’t need all of that. You’re not billing hourly. You’re not running client portals. You’re categorizing income that already arrived in your bank account and making sure your P&L is clean for tax time. Wave does that for free. Paying $43/month for FreshBooks when you’re managing four income sources and sending six invoices a year is spending money on headroom you won’t use.

The flip side: if you cross into territory where you’re actively invoicing clients at volume, the $43/month for FreshBooks Plus is worth it. Wave is passive bookkeeping for scattered creator income. FreshBooks is active client management for creators who’ve pivoted toward agency-style work.

Why Not the Rest

QuickBooks Online starts at $38/month for Simple Start. That’s $456/year to do what Wave does for $0. QuickBooks earns its price for businesses with employees, inventory, or complex multi-entity structures. A solo creator tracking AdSense deposits and Gumroad payouts doesn’t need any of it. The feature set is genuinely impressive and genuinely irrelevant for this use case.

Xero ranges from $15/month (Early) to $78/month (Established), with pricing increases arriving October 2026 that push Early to $27/month and Growing to $59/month. Xero is built for businesses with accountants who drive the workflow — it assumes someone comfortable customizing a chart of accounts from scratch. Solo creators don’t need that depth, and they’ll pay for it either in dollars or in setup time. Xero makes sense if your accountant specifically requests it. Otherwise it’s overhead.

Zoho Books has a free tier, but it caps at $50,000 in annual revenue. If you’re a creator earning past that threshold — and many are — the free tier evaporates and you’re looking at $20/month for Standard. The setup burden is also higher than Wave, and the ecosystem advantage (deep Zoho CRM integration) only matters if you’re already running your creator business inside Zoho. Most aren’t.

QuickBooks Solopreneur is $20/month with a predefined chart of accounts you can’t customize. That matters for creator income because your revenue categories don’t fit neatly into Intuit’s predefined buckets. You can’t reclassify AdSense as a distinct income stream the way you can in Wave. It was designed for the W-2-plus-side-hustle situation, not for a creator with four platform payouts and two brand deals. Wave Free does more, for nothing.

When to Revisit

Wave Starter stops being the right answer in a few specific situations. If your monthly transaction count consistently clears 30 and manual reconciliation is eating your time, upgrade to Wave Pro at $19/month — the bank import automation is what you’re paying for. If you cross $10K/month in revenue and find yourself actively managing client relationships with invoicing, proposals, and revision tracking, move to FreshBooks Plus. If your accountant explicitly needs double-entry accounting access and clean audit trails at tax time, note that FreshBooks gives accountant access on every paid tier; Wave requires Pro for collaborator roles beyond basic access.

The signal to leave Wave entirely is when bookkeeping stops being a month-end tidying task and starts being a daily operational need. That’s when FreshBooks starts earning its cost. Until then, the free tier handles the job.