How to invoice tracked hours in Wave

Before you start: check compatibility

Four things need to be true before Swell can create invoices in Wave:

• Your Wave plan. Swell requires an active Wave Pro plan or Wave Advisors to connect. Wave’s pricing page includes setting up third-party integrations in its plan comparison, so confirm the current table before you subscribe.
• Your business currency. Swell creates invoices in US dollars. If Wave reports a business currency other than USD, Swell blocks invoice creation until that is resolved. If the currency is unknown, invoicing isn’t blocked.
• Your accounting system. Wave is the only accounting destination Swell supports today. There is no QuickBooks or Xero integration.
• The kind of time. Swell is for time you bill to clients. Wave Payroll timesheets record employee hours for pay, and they can’t be used to create customer invoices.

Connect Wave and map your clients

An owner or admin connects your Wave business during setup, then reviews three things:

1. Customer mappings. Each Swell client is linked to a Wave customer. If a mapping is inactive, Swell blocks invoicing for that client until you fix it.
2. Service mappings. Each project is linked to the Wave product or service you bill it under. Products Swell creates in Wave are renamed when you rename the project. Products you already had in Wave keep their own name, price and income account.
3. Defaults. Choose whether invoices use grouped or detailed lines by default, and confirm your rates.

If you later switch the connected Wave business, Swell marks the old business’s customer and product mappings as stale.

Set your rates

Rates can apply per project, per team member, or both. When more than one rate could apply, the most specific one wins.

When you save a rate, Swell recalculates uninvoiced time at that rate by default. Time that’s already on an invoice keeps the amount it was invoiced at.

Your account also has a rounding setting: off, nearest or up, in steps of 6, 15 or 30 minutes. Invoice lines use the rounded hours.

Track billable time

Start a timer or enter the time manually, by start and end time or by duration. Attach each entry to a client, a project and, if you use them, a task.

Only stopped entries can be invoiced. A running timer is left out of invoice selection until you stop it.

Review the lines before you create the draft

Open the invoice review for a client. Swell shows the lines it will send to Wave, built from the uninvoiced billable entries you select.

• Grouped mode creates one line per project and rate. The notes behind each line appear in the evidence panel beside it, so you can check them without changing the invoice.
• Detailed mode creates one line per entry, and an entry’s notes can become that line’s description.

You can edit a line description for this draft. The edit applies only to the Wave draft you’re creating. Your time entry notes don’t change.

Create the draft

When you confirm the review, Swell:

1. Reserves the selected entries, so nothing else can include them in an invoice at the same time.
2. Sends one create request to Wave. Swell doesn’t retry an invoice creation request, so a single request can’t produce two invoices.
3. Records the Wave invoice on each entry and locks those entries.

The invoice is created with Wave’s draft status. If Wave’s total differs from the total you reviewed, Swell flags the difference as a warning.

Finish the invoice in Wave

Open the draft in Wave, check it, then approve and send it.

Wave stays the source of truth for invoicing and payment. Swell doesn’t send invoices or collect payments, and it doesn’t edit invoices after they’re created in Wave. It updates its own records as Wave reports changes.

If Wave’s response is unclear

Sometimes Wave’s response to a create request is unreadable, or an error comes back after the request was sent. Swell doesn’t resend it. Instead it searches Wave for an invoice matching the customer, invoice date and total.

• If exactly one invoice matches, Swell links it to the entries.
• If none or several match, Swell pauses new drafts for that client and marks the attempt for review. An admin can either link the entries to the invoice they confirm in Wave, or release the entries so they can be invoiced again.

What Swell doesn’t do yet

• Timesheet submission or approval.
• A user-facing billing-period lock.
• A calendar view, offline tracking, or a public API or webhooks.
• Native mobile or desktop apps. Swell is a responsive web app.
• QuickBooks or Xero integrations.

If you need one of these, check the current feature list before you start a trial.