Simple Money Management That Gives Small Businesses a Unified View of Their Financial Health

In a Nutshell: In a perfect world, all small businesses would rise and fall based on their products and services. But the logistical challenge of managing a solopreneurship or microbusiness causes many to fail before they give themselves a chance. That’s why so many up-and-coming firms in the U.S. and Canada trust Wave to handle their invoicing, payments, payroll, and accounting. The simple, easy-to-use Wave platform unifies and automates financial management so entrepreneurs can spend less time handling administrative tasks and more time following their passion.

Across the web, the numbers say it’s hard to get a small business off the ground and on the road to sustainability and growth. Data from the U.S. Small Business Administration, for example, indicates less than half of new firms survive for five years.

Yet other statistics show Americans are more than willing to accept the risk of starting a business to reap the potential rewards. The Small Business Administration counts around 35 million small businesses operating in the U.S. today, comprising 99.9% of the total number of companies and generating 43.5% of GDP.

It goes to show that entrepreneurship is in America’s DNA. At any given time, tens of millions of entrepreneurs are churning through the process of starting, scaling, and possibly even stopping a small business to start a new one.

We’re willing to wager that very few of those millions started a company to learn how to design and send invoices, send and receive payments, and balance the books. Instead, they aspired to succeed at satisfying some form of customer demand by drawing on their creativity and capacity for hard work.

Hundreds of thousands of the savviest use the Wave platform to streamline essential invoicing and accounting tasks. In doing so, Wave gives those owners and managers the data visibility they need to assess strengths and weaknesses and build tactics and strategies for proactive success.

Not to mention more time to do what drove them into business in the first place. Chief Strategy Officer David Axler said Wave combines essential managerial functions and banking partnerships to provide a comprehensive system of record for small-business decision-making.

“Regardless of your bank, Wave can automate your books and help you feel more confident,” Axler said. “Our job is to make running your business a seamless experience.”

Axler said Wave — owned by the H&R Block tax preparation service — explicitly targets smaller businesses with a message of simplicity that stands in contrast to the complexity of platforms geared more toward the enterprise level.

“As part of the H&R Block family, we’re in a unique position to tap into the brain trust of one of the largest U.S. tax guides to bring education and access to small business owners,” Axler said.

As a business owned by H&R Block, Wave focuses on providing a firm foundation of financial documentation for tax time, Axler said.

“We make sure you’ve got a complete record you can feel confident about,” he said.

Providing that tax documentation is part of a larger commitment to help users understand their finances in snapshot form. To get there, Wave concentrates on providing just enough of what you need to make things work at an elite level without bogging you down with needless details and options.

“The Wave dashboard gives you a sense of what’s going in and out in any time period,” Axler said. “By looking at a Wave snapshot of where you are today, you can also see the trends that have gotten you there.”

And that helps you understand where you’re going. Wave provides context for decisions entrepreneurs must make to help the business move forward.

For example, you can explore the implications of adding a contract or employee — or not adding one — with confidence in knowing exactly where you stand.

That’s the value of bringing invoicing and accounting together to where your books give you a precise view of your expenses, revenue, and profitability. In contrast to platforms tuned more toward the patterns of eCommerce, Wave targets service providers whose unit of value is typically time and who get paid via invoice.

Particularly if you’re a business of one, building a financial tool stack of four or five tools to mimic what should be a seamless offering would be counterproductive. As we’ve said, bringing those tasks together under one roof shortens the learning curve.

A shorter learning curve means less time spent on tasks that aren’t the mission. And that means more time for the things entrepreneurs go into business to do. Decisions that further the passion of the business have the most power.

“We give them more time to think about their customers and competition,” Axler said. “They’re diving a little deeper into not just what’s happening, but why.”

Understanding the lay of the land is the key to confidence. Wave gives users a complete view of customer activity. Wave data analytics sheds light on variables such as customer contact and payment patterns.

“You’re able to see things like which of your customers have outstanding accounts, when’s the last time you talked to them, and how fast they’re paying,” Axler said.

At the same time, Wave automates much of the management activity in these areas — tasks that would typically rest on the shoulders of the owner or manager, including customer statements, invoice creation, and payment reminders.

Before Wave, those and other tasks would have required extensive manual work with a steep and probably frustrating learning curve. Learning the ins and outs of yet another software is perhaps the last thing most entrepreneurs want to do.

Following up on unpaid invoices, for example, is a skill some never master. Yet ensuring payment is a prime responsibility of all business owners.

Wave has the terminology and approach to be a trusted partner in collections.

“Wave can play the proverbial bad guy and knock on the door to say, hey, you probably just forgot to pay me,” Axler said.

Axler said customers appreciate that while they’re doing their work, Wave is working in the background to make sure customers are paying on time in a non-intrusive way. That said, there is also a clear reminder they need to pay. On top of that, Wave then provides them an easy way to complete the transaction online via credit card or ACH bank transfer.

Axler said Wave increases the effectiveness of follow-ups because of the professionalism it exudes. The invoicing that fuels the system is an entirely white-labeled product that gives businesses ultimate control over the look and feel of how they approach their customers.

That means the product is totally customizable to the small business owner’s logo, look, and feel. But it’s also fully templated, so harried managers don’t need to create items from scratch unless they want to. What’s more, Wave automatically populates data fields for business and customer details to cut down on completion time.

“We automate as much as possible so that it’s just ready to use,” Axler said.

Wave puts customer commitment first in all areas of product development. For example, the platform even gives users the option to accept check payments at a time when most prefer to accept and receive payments via credit card or ACH. In addition to speed, electronic payments provide risk and compliance assurance to protect customers when malfeasance occurs.

As an arm of H&R Block, Wave deploys a customer success team to produce educational content and resources to give users the info they need to execute a successful tax season. One-on-one assistance and support from Wave are available through Wave Advisors.

One of many action items on the horizon for Wave is to increase automation by leveraging AI capabilities.

To that end, Axler said, Wave is investing significantly in automating repeated tasks and organizing large amounts of data in structures appropriate to the content and business category.

Meanwhile, Wave’s partnership with payroll infrastructure company Check, for example, will soon enable it to offer full tax coverage in all 50 states. It’s the kind of attention to detail that keeps customers coming back in a dynamic space with many competitors.

It matters. Axler said sole proprietors often tell the Wave team that seeing the platform’s professional invoice designs gives them more confidence to meet tough challenges. They report that, before adopting Wave, not having the polished options it provides may have held them back.

“The same way we want our technology to look and feel beautiful, we want to extend that benefit to our customers,” Axler said. “You’re going to be more successful when you feel good about what you’re putting out into the world.”