Wave Reviews 203

⚠ WARNING TO EVERYONE – STAY AWAY FROM THIS COMPANY

I am writing this review to warn people about a very serious and disturbing experience with Wave. Despite the fact that I closed my account, disconnected my bank, cancelled all pre-authorized debits, and even entered an intentionally incorrect account number so they would have no access to my real business account, Wave still managed to withdraw a large amount of money from my business account without authorization.

Before closing my account, I read many Google reviews from other customers who reported similar suspicious withdrawals and unethical behavior. As soon as I felt something was off, I closed everything immediately. But exactly what other reviewers warned about has now happened to me as well.

This situation is extremely concerning:
• My account was fully closed
• My bank access was removed
• No payroll was processed
• No active subscription
• Pre-authorized debit was cancelled

Yet Wave still accessed my real business account and took money without permission. This is unacceptable and raises serious concerns about security, ethics, and compliance.

I even visited the company’s “office” in person. It was completely empty—no staff, no reception, nobody working there. Just a sign on the wall. This only makes the whole situation even more suspicious.

Wave stores extremely sensitive customer information—banking details, employee data, SIN numbers—yet acts with zero transparency and no accountability.

I strongly advise anyone using this company or considering it to be extremely cautious. If anything similar has happened to you, come forward and report it to the appropriate authorities or law enforcement. These issues need to be investigated properly.
This has been one of the most concerning experiences I have ever had with a financial/payroll service. For the safety of your business and your employees: stay away from this company.

Extremely disappointed and strongly warning every business owner. Wave Financial (waveapps.com) has completely failed us. For the last two payrolls, they withdrew the funds from our business account but never paid our employees. This is a serious breach of trust and financial responsibility. For weeks, we emailed, escalated tickets, used their chat system—not a single real response. No phone number, no customer service, no accountability. Today we visited their office in person and found no staff, empty space, and security confirming that multiple businesses have shown up with the same complaints. This raises major red flags.

At this point, we’re filing a police report and preparing legal action, because my company had to pay payroll a second time out of pocket due to their failure. Wave used to be a reputable system, but something is clearly wrong now. No phone. No office presence. No response. In my opinion, the situation looks fraudulent. Business owners—be extremely careful. If you’ve experienced anything similar, please share your story so others can be warned.

Wave decided not to do business with me anymore after however many months because I have bad credit score! How inconvenient! I didn't even know they check our credit.

Everything was going great with Wave. Then a change to a new payroll service provider. The transition was not customer friendly, but got through it. This week, I received a notice from CA Employment Development that Q2 F25 payment was short paid. I had a 50% penalty on the amount that wasn't paid. I contacted the chat room for wave but after a week it wasn't resolved. I tried again today and waited for over an hour and wasn't able to speak to anyone. Long story short - I paid the amount due to state and the penalties. I don't know if this next quarter will be paid correctly. Definitely checking on the due date.

I received a Phish statement for a transaction I didn't make. It was over $500.00. Links if I want to challenge it will not be used. I doubt it shows up on my monthly statement.

I requested help from Wave via email about changing an employer number, and they finally responded 2 months later. FYI, I had already deleted my account after no response within a few days and moved on to another accounting package.

I've been using Wave my small business accounting and payroll for years. I've rolled with transaction categorizing mistakes, confusing UX changes, and Plaid integration because at least the payroll deposits and taxes were paid on time. Well not anymore. The recent Check integration has broken my payroll to where I have not been able pay anyone for over two months. I have several open tickets that have not been responded to for weeks. Their chatbot happily can't help with anything, and just makes new tickets. The CTO send an apology email saying everything would be fixed in July, it has not. I should have been suspicious when the email included a whole section on cancelling my account vs committing to resolving all issues. I have no insight into how the Check integration was decided, but after being in tech for 25 years, it reeks of executives ignoring staff recommendations and forcing through a technology change. What a bummer.

I am having the same issues as everyone. Ever since they went to an AI system and wanted to handle payroll plus taxes it has been a nightmare. They withdrew the full amount to cover the payroll and federal taxes but never paid the taxes. They even took an addition amount of money and labeled it as 'underfunded tax'. They are now not responding to emails, and it is impossible to get someone on the phone. I am scrambling to get the overdue payroll taxes paid.

I would give 0 stars if able. Do not trust those people! In late June they made upgrades to their payroll system and it has not fully loaded so we could use their system for 3 payroll periods. They shutdown the customer service line due to the volume of complaints and all our emails have gone unanswered. Moving to ADP ASAP. Have done manual payroll calculations for 6 weeks.

I have the same issue as everyone else. Since they switched to checks for their payroll i can no longer run my payroll. I have submitteed many tickets through their chatbot. I get an email with a ticket number, and thats the end of the support. When i put the ticket number in their chatbot, they say the issue has been resolved. However nothing has happened. Ive used wave for years but i am now looking to switch to something more reliable, or at least something that actually has customer support.

The company switched payroll processing partners with no notice to customers. We didn't know until we began to have serious problems running payroll, all of our payroll setup was missing, authorization forms nullified, historical data is missing. On top of that, they attempted to take an additional $650 withdrawal for a vague 'underfunded payroll tax' charge, which is not possible since they pull payroll taxes with every payroll that we run. Turns out, they were debiting the quarterly amount due for the new system, and planning on refunding the money they have already collected more than a month later. No communication about this, just double dipping into our accounts with no explanation. Their chat is down, they don't respond to emails - it's been weeks since I sent the first inquiry. Additionally, they sent me a notice that they have put my payroll account on hold because they haven't been able to charge my account for 3 months, yet I have been charged their fee as recently as a week ago, and successfully ran payroll 2 weeks ago. This is madness. And you can't get hold of anyone.

Went to run payroll this morning and it was completely broken. Couldn't enter hours or pay my employees. Customer service is a useless chat bot. There is no way to get to a person. No phone number or even an email address. I had to sign up for another payroll service to get my people paid and couldn't even generate a report to enter YTD information to the new service. This is not the kind of customer service you should expect when paying for a payroll service.

They've gone up in price several times over the past few years without providing anything more of value. This latest "upgrade" is a complete clusterf***.

Looking forward to being able to download my YTD records so I can cancel this garbage money seive and move on.

Run as far away from this company as you can get unless you're happy with using chat bots or digging through help pages when you need to get payroll done.

What started out as a promising service quickly turned into a nightmare that I’ll be cleaning up for at least two more months.

Wave messed up my June 1–15 payroll, failing to issue direct deposits to my employees — but they did pull the taxes. I had no idea what happened for over a week. My support tickets were canceled without explanation, and no one responded. When I tried to stick with them just long enough to close out Q2 correctly, I couldn’t even select the correct payroll dates for nearly a week. By the time the system finally worked again, they charged me for July — and said I couldn’t cancel because the charge had already gone through, even though support had been nonexistent the entire week before.

I was then told that if I wanted my tax reports filed, I had no choice but to keep paying through July. They even warned that if any taxes were collected that weren’t due until after July 31, I’d have to continue into another month to avoid being left with partial filings and no remittance.

To make matters worse, you cannot start a new payroll service until they release your business from their system — effectively locking you in. And don’t expect clean exports when you leave: the reports they generate are borderline useless and don’t export in a format that any normal payroll provider can easily work with.

Wave Payroll was a complete disaster. Avoid it at all costs.

After using Wave for over 5 years in our small business, they have some of the worst customer service in the tech sector we have ever encountered. I would give them 0 stars if possible. They have made major changes with zero communication and today....all of our uploaded employee records and files are gone. This includes salaries, bank records and all supporting docs. As a small business, we rely on the tools we pay for to work. Wave has failed us numerous times over the last 18 months but this is the most egregious. We can not recommend using wave in any.

We took over a business in 2020, not the easiest time to do so, but downtime allowed me lots of research for accounting software. I passed up QB because WAVE did the basics that I needed; was inexpensive and had a decent payroll package. The first sign of trouble was about a year ago when they paid one of my IRS tax payments late through the payroll system. No resolution came through and I was charged a $900 fine. Wave had nothing to help me with it. I recently got another letter saying that last quarter tax payments of December '24 were also late, but this time the IRS had pity on me and they didn't charge me the fine just sent a warning. I shared that with wave and they had no reply. Recently they did an upgrade that sent the payroll module absolutely bonkers. Total crash and when I reached out for help, I got a couple emails back, but no resolution and no follow up. I sent multiple messages, chats, emails - one with HELP at 72 point font! ...and no one replied. I even upgraded to "pro" to see if that will clear up the disaster of calamities. It lost all my employees history, would not allow me to process payroll, and some info came back but it was all jumbled and too late. It still doesn't work so I had to emergency switch to QB. Patched together a manual payroll week for my staff, and QB was great to transition to. Five years of decent use, all dashed away and not one apology or reply from all of my outreaches. Don't bother, it'll be a disaster for you too!

I used to use Wave for simple invoicing and it always worked well. In the past when I had ACH payments, two days, tops. This last week, stuck in the Bermuda Triangle. Support can't help, they keep saying 2-7 days. They mention that Memorial Day set it back but man, two days in January for an ACH payment. No ACH payment takes more than 3 days!

Then, they closed a ticket I opened without any resolution. Just closed it while I slept.

Hate to say it but I think H&R Block acquiring Wave made it worse. They probably only want customers on their paid plans.

I am through with Wave apps after 15 years. Done. They won't care.

Ive literally dealt with account being locked and stopped over aned over and over and over and over and i've only had them for 3 weeks. These guys reversed a payment our client made to us, we didn't find out about it for several days, and only found out when it was debited from our account, since we didn't know about the refund that they processed on there own and we only use that account for inbound payments, it bounced, and because it bounced they locked our account (understandable I guess, but maybe you should tell your clients this is even happening) then after having already required hours and hours of documentattion over and over they lock our account again and require exhaustive documentation for a refund they processed on their own and said nothing to us about. Now we're expected to deal with another ridiculously redundant requirment to keep our account open, forward all the documentation we already have forwarded twice before. SAVE YOURSELF THE TIME. Anywhere else is better.

TERRIBLE!!! I have been writing to them for months trying to get answers to MY account issues but they keep me going in circles with the chat bot giving me answers to how to manage other peoples' accounts! NO WAY TO CONTACT AN ACTUAL PERSON. Incredibly frustrating. I want to cancel my account but I can't log in and when I request a password change I get nothing so I am unable to log in, unable to contact anyone and yet they keep charging me. I've opened up a dispute with my bank and I've got to cancel my credit card associate with this account to make the charges stop. BEYOND TERRIBLE!!!! STAY FAR AWAY.

A one-star review is too generous. If I could, I'd rate this company a NEGATIVE 5 stars. I have been with Wave for a good 5 years now. Used to swear by them and told all my fellow small business owners to join them. Today, I wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy. Their customer service is non-existant. Horrible horrible horrible!. You can't EVER get an answer from them. They paused my invoicing, asked me to reach out to them so they could explain why and when I did, they never replied. That' was 2 months ago. I have repeatedly emailed and messaged on social media, and nothing! Then I decided to upgrade to their premier plan in hopes that that might get me a response. 3 weeks after I did, they finally sent me a nonsensical reply and when I asked for clarification, they have yet to respond. That was 2 months ago. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE!

I’ve been using Wave Accounting for my business for about 10 years. I use them for payroll services. The customer service used to be decent until H&R Block purchased them in 2019. Customer service is now virtually nonexistent.
I filed a request to fix an incorrect quarterly wage report- it’s been 6 weeks and I still haven’t received a response.
I sent a separate general email to get them to respond to the initial ticket request- they responded in 4 days to let me know they are backed up. I wrote back demanding a refund for inadequate service, at which point they ghosted me.
I filed a consumer complaint with the NY State Attorney General.
The behavior of customer service in the past decade, but all companies, is criminal.
I filed my request 3 weeks before business taxes were due. Because of no response from Wave- I’ve had to cancel my accountant appointment (incurring a fee) and had to file a tax extension, which will cost me hundreds of dollars in tax penalties.