Wave Bookkeeping Rollout: Business Setup, Transaction Review, and Close Control

• Confirm Wave availability, business ownership, country, currency, fiscal year, plan, and profile boundaries before importing any live accounting data.
• Treat the chart of accounts and starting balances as migration decisions with source evidence, not as convenient fields to complete during bank connection setup.
• Separate transaction intake, transaction review, reconciliation, and report acceptance because Wave gives each activity a different purpose and state.
• Pilot one invoice, one expense, one transfer, one imported bank item, and one statement period before expanding the implementation.
• Keep exports, report PDFs, source statements, exception notes, and ownership records as continuity evidence while recognizing that a Wave export is not a one-click restore image.

Review Wave's generated chart before adding accounts. Current help guidance says custom tabs, account types, and subaccounts cannot be added, so do not design a hierarchy that the product cannot represent. Keep an approved crosswalk from the prior ledger to the selected Wave account types, and explain any consolidation in the workpapers. Add only accounts with a defined reporting purpose and naming convention. Archive or correct test accounts before the pilot so staff do not code transactions to near-duplicates that differ only by punctuation or abbreviation.

Treat starting balances as dated accounting entries. For a new bank, card, or loan, preserve the statement or trial-balance evidence, entry date, selected equity account, amount, preparer, and approver. Wave's current documentation says a connected bank or card creates a starting-balance transaction and that earlier fiscal-year activity can require its date and amount to be adjusted so it remains the first transaction for the account. Inspect that generated entry before loading history; otherwise an overlap between the connection, manual balance, and uploaded transactions can make the ledger look complete while overstating cash.

Design invoice governance around Wave's draft boundary. Creating and saving an invoice leaves it as a draft and does not change accounting or reports; approving it allows sending or payment recording and places it in accrual-basis reports, after which it cannot return to draft. Define who may create customers and items, who checks income accounts and taxes, who approves the draft, and how invoice-number exceptions are documented. Because changes to business or customer profile details can affect other invoices, include address, terms, tax, currency, and item-account mapping in the pilot review.

• Approve a prior-ledger-to-Wave chart crosswalk and reject unsupported hierarchy assumptions before data entry.
• Tie every starting balance to dated source evidence and inspect any entry Wave creates during bank connection.
• Choose one controlled transaction intake path per account during cutover to prevent overlapping imports and uploads.
• Require draft-invoice review of customer, item, income account, tax, dates, currency, numbering, and approval state.

Select a pilot that exercises the accounting boundaries rather than only the easiest transaction. Include an approved customer invoice, its payment or open receivable state, a vendor expense, a bank or card import, a transfer between payment accounts, and a period-end statement. If checks are common, add a money-in-transit case. Preserve the original documents and expected posting before entry, then trace dates, amounts, accounts, tax, customer or vendor, review state, and report effect. The goal is to prove how Wave handles the organization's real work, including one exception.

Use Wave's transaction review control for completeness of coding, not as a close certificate. Current guidance says Category and Account details must be complete before a transaction can be marked reviewed, but an unreviewed transaction still affects reports and does not block reconciliation. Assign a reviewer who compares the Wave item with source evidence and investigates auto-categorized or auto-merged activity. Track unreviewed items as an operational queue with an age, owner, reason, and due date so report users know whether a current result includes work that has not yet received detailed review.

Reconcile from the bank statement, not from the Wave balance widget. On the web version, open the account period using the statement end date and closing balance, match the statement activity, investigate the difference, and end the period only at an explained zero. Wave will not let a new period be created while an existing period is unreconciled, which makes a disciplined first period especially important. Have a second person inspect the closing balance, unmatched items, starting balance, funds in transit, and any manual additions before accepting the reconciliation.

• Trace at least one invoice, expense, import, transfer, and statement period from source through the correct Wave report.
• Keep transaction-review ownership separate from the person who prepared or imported the activity when staffing permits.
• Reconcile with a complete bank statement and independently verify the date, closing balance, unmatched items, and difference.
• Record every exception with its cause, affected account and period, corrective action, reviewer, and retained evidence.

Start with the business boundary and evidence plan. Confirm the owner, profile, country, currency, fiscal year, accounting basis, plan, cutoff date, historical source, chart crosswalk, opening-balance support, and close approver before entering live data. Wave configuration should implement those decisions rather than become the place where staff improvise them.

Wave's current help guidance says business profiles are available for businesses in Canada and the United States, excluding United States territories, and one Wave account can maintain up to fifteen profiles. Validate availability and profile design before migration because collaborators, exports, banking activity, invoices, and reports operate within the selected business profile.

Not every bookkeeping workflow requires Pro, but automatic bank transaction imports and several collaborator roles are plan-dependent. Record whether the business will use Starter, Pro, payroll, receipts, online payments, or other services, then test the exact subscribed configuration. Do not design a control around a feature that the chosen plan or region does not provide.

No. Review confirms that transaction details and coding have been checked, while reconciliation matches Wave activity to a bank statement for a defined period. Wave says an unreviewed transaction can still affect reports and can still be reconciled. Maintain separate review and reconciliation queues, owners, evidence, and acceptance criteria.

Saving an invoice leaves it in draft and does not change accounting or reports. After approval, the invoice can be sent or paid and appears in accrual-basis reporting; it cannot be returned to draft. Test customer, item, income account, tax, currency, numbering, approval, and payment behavior before making invoice entry a production workflow.

At minimum, compare the trial balance and account transactions report with the migration source, validate the balance sheet and profit and loss statement on the intended basis, inspect receivables and payables when used, and reconcile bank and card statements. Add cash flow and operational invoice reports when they support the organization's close decisions.

Treat it as continuity and audit evidence, not as a one-click system image. The export contains defined files for the active business profile, and separate reports or invoice PDFs may also be needed. Document how data would be reconstructed, which settings and relationships require manual work, who can perform recovery, and how totals would be validated.