Free books are still generic books.
Wave gives small service businesses free accounting and invoicing, and it's genuinely good at that. It just wasn't built for platform payouts, brand deals, gifted product — or the quarterly tax math that comes with them.
What “built for creators” actually means.
The tax engine is the point
General-purpose accounting stops at the books: the categorizing gets done, and the scary math — federal, self-employment, state, four deadlines a year — is still yours to do somewhere else. Post runs it continuously and tells you what to set aside this month, reviewed by a team of accountants.
Creator income, modeled natively
Platform connections stitch what you earned to what landed. Brand deals run draft → signed → delivered → invoiced → paid, with a flag when the wire comes in short. PR logs at fair market value from a photo. A generic ledger sees all of that as "deposit."
Configured for you, in your language
Free tools hand you a blank chart of accounts and the job of setting it up. Post ships opinionated: "brand deal," "gifted stuff," "what's mine to keep" — with real books (P&L, balance sheet, general ledger) generated underneath for your CPA.
Invoicing that knows what a deliverable is
Post's invoices live inside the deal pipeline — tied to the contract, chased automatically when the brand is slow, matched when the money lands. Invoicing isn't a separate feature; it's a stage of the deal.
- Genuinely free accounting and invoicing — the price is unbeatable
- Polished invoicing for client-service businesses
- Real double-entry accounting underneath, not a toy
- A solid choice for a simple service business that needs books and invoices
If your business is invoices out and payments in, free is hard to argue against — genuinely. If your income is platforms, brand deals, and PR, keep reading.
What should you be setting aside right now?
If books and invoices are all you need, Wave's price is honestly unbeatable — we won't pretend otherwise. Post's $24–49 buys the part free tools don't do: a real federal + self-employment + state tax engine running year-round, plus a creator-native income model — platform sync, brand-deal pipeline, gifted product at FMV. If April scares you more than bookkeeping does, that's the trade.
Yes — inside the brand-deal pipeline. Invoices are tied to the deal and the contract, chased automatically, and matched to the bank deposit when it lands, including a flag when the amount is short. For classic hourly client invoicing at volume, Wave's dedicated invoicing is a strength.
That's the traditional route — P&L to Schedule C, once a year. It works, but it answers the question in April. Post keeps the answer current all year and computes it from books that already include creator-specific income like gifted product at fair market value.
Connect your bank and platforms and Post rebuilds the current year from source data; historical bank statements import by CSV so prior months land in the same books.