Wave is accounting software, but Wave Advisors is a human service layered on top of it.
Wave currently provides in-house professionals who can either perform recurring bookkeeping for a customer or coach that customer on how to manage accounting in Wave independently. Payroll coaching is also available for businesses that need help setting up Wave Payroll.
The difference between those services is more important than the name “Advisor” suggests.
One model outsources the bookkeeping work.
The other teaches the business owner to do the work.
Recurring Bookkeeping: Wave Does More of the Work
Wave’s recurring bookkeeping service assigns the business an in-house bookkeeper.
Current service descriptions include transaction categorization, account reconciliation, collaboration with the assigned bookkeeper and monthly review calls. The bookkeeping package also includes a Wave Pro subscription, although Wave notes that its Receipts feature is not included in the bookkeeping package.
This is a fundamentally different product from subscribing to Pro alone.
Pro gives the user software automation.
Wave Advisors adds a person responsible for helping maintain the books.
Accounting Coaching: The Owner Still Does the Bookkeeping
Accounting coaching takes the opposite approach.
Instead of outsourcing the monthly work, the business receives one-on-one instruction designed to help set up Wave correctly and understand how to maintain its own accounting.
Wave currently lists accounting coaching starting at $229 USD as a one-time service, with additional packages available. The offering includes a live one-to-one coaching component and 30 days of email access to the coach.
This makes coaching potentially more relevant for a freelancer or owner who wants independence rather than an ongoing bookkeeping relationship.
A single setup mistake can affect months of later accounting. Learning the chart of accounts, transaction categorization, reconciliation and reporting workflow correctly at the beginning may therefore be more valuable than repeatedly fixing errors later.
Payroll Coaching Is Its Own Service
Wave Advisors also provides payroll coaching.
According to Wave’s current support documentation, the payroll coach can assist with setting up the payroll account, explaining payroll-tax functionality and guiding the customer through its first payroll.
This should not be confused with Wave Payroll itself.
Wave Payroll is the software and tax-processing service.
Payroll coaching is human assistance with understanding and configuring that service.
How Much Does Wave Advisors Bookkeeping Cost?
Wave’s current US marketing page lists recurring bookkeeping starting at $149 per month when billed annually.
It also states that pricing depends on transaction volume and that monthly plans are available.
This means the advertised starting price should not be treated as a universal flat monthly rate.
A business processing a small number of monthly transactions and a company producing several hundred transactions create different workloads for a bookkeeper.
Wave therefore prices the service according to the scope of the books rather than pretending every small business requires the same amount of work.
Bookkeeping Service Includes Pro—But Not Receipts
There is an interesting packaging detail.
Wave says recurring bookkeeping customers receive a Pro subscription as part of the service, but the Receipts scanning feature is not included in that bookkeeping package.
That matters for pricing comparisons.
A business considering Advisors should not automatically add the full standalone cost of Pro on top of the bookkeeping quote.
At the same time, a business that relies heavily on automated receipt capture may still need to account for that feature separately.
Advisors Can Enter the Business Without Your Password
A legitimate Wave Advisor does not need the owner’s password.
Wave’s Help Center explains that an advisor may add themselves remotely as an admin collaborator to provide the service and explicitly states that a Wave Advisor will never ask for the customer’s Wave password.
This is an important security boundary.
If someone claims to be a Wave bookkeeper and asks a customer to send their account password, that does not match Wave’s documented Advisors workflow.
Credentials and MFA codes should never be shared with an outside publication either.
What the Bookkeeper Actually Works On
The core recurring workflow revolves around transaction quality.
Wave’s Advisors documentation identifies categorization and reconciliation as central activities.
Those are precisely the points where automated software still benefits from human judgment.
A bank feed can show that $1,500 left the account.
A human may still need to determine whether that transaction represents equipment, a contractor, rent, an owner’s withdrawal, debt repayment or another accounting category.
Likewise, reconciliation requires investigating why Wave’s balance does or does not agree with the bank statement.
What Wave Advisors Is Not
Recurring bookkeeping should not be assumed to mean an audit.
Wave’s terms describe the bookkeeping service as unaudited and set out its scope around recording, organizing and categorizing transactions and reconciling bank and card accounts.
That distinction matters whenever a business needs assurance work, a formal financial-statement audit, specialized tax representation or another regulated professional service outside ordinary Wave bookkeeping.
The word “advisor” is broad.
The actual scope of the purchased service is what controls.
Who Should Consider Recurring Bookkeeping?
The recurring service makes the most sense when bookkeeping is becoming an ongoing operational burden.
That could happen because:
transaction volume has grown, accounts are regularly falling behind, reconciliations are being skipped, year-end cleanup is becoming expensive, or the owner simply does not want bookkeeping to remain part of their job.
The value proposition is time and consistency.
Who Should Consider Coaching Instead?
Coaching is better aligned with a different type of customer.
A new freelancer may be comfortable managing 30 transactions each month but uncertain whether the accounting setup is correct.
Another business owner may be moving from spreadsheets or another accounting platform and need help establishing the right Wave workflow.
In those cases, permanently outsourcing a modest workload may be unnecessary.
Learning how the system works can solve the underlying problem.
The Real Decision: Software, Teaching or Outsourcing?
Wave now offers three increasingly hands-on levels of bookkeeping support.
Starter or Pro: the business runs the books.
Accounting coaching: the business runs the books with professional instruction.
Recurring bookkeeping: an assigned bookkeeper takes responsibility for much of the recurring work.
That is a much more useful framework than asking whether Wave “comes with an accountant.”
It does not automatically come with one.
But a business that wants human help can buy a service designed around the same accounting system it already uses.