When you’re running a small business, you jump at any opportunity to cut costs and reduce busywork. So if your business doesn’t need enterprise-level accounting features, Wave—a free accounting tool with no usage limits—might be the perfect fit for you.
Wave lets you send unlimited professional, branded invoices to unlimited clients, completely free. You can also process payments, run payroll, and generate custom reports to manage your brand’s finances easily. And when you pair Wave with automation, you’ll save both time and money.
Zapier’s automated workflows (called Zaps) let you connect Wave to your most-used apps. Do things like consolidate sales records, add customers to your email list, and create backups automatically. Here’s how.
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To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Record sales in Wave
If you sell a variety of products and services, it can be hard to maintain accurate business records in one place. Maybe you invoice clients for services using Wave, while also selling products online through eBay or an eCommerce tool. How do you consolidate all of your sales records to keep an accurate accounting of your income?
While you could manually export CSV files from your eCommerce platform to Wave, this risks unintended double-entry or missing records. Instead, use one of these automated workflows to keep your bookkeeping up to date. Whenever a sale is made in eBay, Stripe, or Square, a new customer or sale will be recorded in Wave. That way, your sales records will stay accurate and organized—no manual data entry required.
Subscribe new customers to your newsletter
Your customer journey doesn’t end with the first sale. It’s important to add new customers to your email list so you can continue nurturing your relationship. Having a complete list of previous buyers gives you an organized contact list for future campaigns, from feedback surveys to new product announcements.
But when you have too many other tasks on your plate, it’s easy to fall behind on sending customer contact information from one app to another. These workflows take care of that chore for you by automatically creating new subscribers in Mailchimp, Flodesk, or ActiveCampaign whenever a new customer is detected in Wave.
Log new invoices in a spreadsheet
Wave makes it easy to generate custom financial reports, from a profit and loss statement to a general ledger. But it’s always a good idea to keep backups of your business’s financial records.
Not everyone in your business can (or should) access your accounting software—but others on your team might need access to up-to-date sales information. A spreadsheet or Airtable database can be a great reference point for other teams who might need a big-picture idea of your invoice totals. And even if you’re just using it for yourself, a spreadsheet gives you more flexibility and control over your data.
But it may not be realistic to export a CSV from Wave more than once a month. If you’re using a spreadsheet as a reference point for your current sales totals, you’ll need to keep it more up-to-date than that. You can automate that process by using one of these Zaps to send new invoice information directly to new rows in Google Sheets or records in Airtable immediately after each sale.
Get notifications for new invoices and payments
You want to stay on top of your finances, but you don’t necessarily want to stay glued to your Wave dashboard all day. Whether it’s to update your accounting department of new payments or notify your team of new paid projects, there are plenty of reasons you might send a Slack notification for new activity in Wave.
These Zaps send a channel message in Slack or Microsoft Teams anytime a new invoice is created in Wave. That way, you’ll keep your team in the loop without adding unnecessary busywork to your plate.
Prompt communication is also key for lasting client relationships. Wave lets you send invoices by email to customers, but a Zap might fit the bill better in some scenarios. Maybe you like the personal touch of an email sent directly from your Gmail account, or maybe you want to schedule invoice emails for a future date (like the end of the month). Or maybe Wave sends invoices to your client’s accounting department, but you’d like to keep your contact person in the loop as well.
No matter the use case, this Zap creates and sends an email from a template whenever you create a new invoice in Wave.
Streamline your finances with automation
Automating Wave lets you cut down on unnecessary data entry, file exports, and busywork. When you connect Wave to the rest of your tech stack, every new customer is accounted for in your email list and new sales data immediately appears in your spreadsheets and team communications apps. You can also easily consolidate sales information across your eCommerce and accounting software, making it easier to track all of your income sources.
And that’s just the start of what you can do with Wave and Zapier. What will you automate first?