Does Wave have time tracking? Your options in 2026

What Wave records, and what it doesn’t

Wave is three products that touch time in different ways. Knowing which is which saves a lot of searching through settings for a feature that isn’t there.

Wave Accounting and invoicing. Invoices are built from products and services, each with a price, and a quantity on each line. There is no timer, no timesheet and no record of hours worked per customer. To bill hourly work you create a service with your hourly rate as its price and enter the hours as the quantity. Wave’s own hourly invoice guidance suggests keeping a timesheet and attaching it to the invoice.

Wave Payroll timesheets. In the US and Canada, employers enter each hourly employee’s standard hours, overtime, vacation and sick time for a pay period, and Wave uses them to calculate pay. Employees can’t fill in their own timesheets, and the hours aren’t tied to customers, so they can’t become invoice lines.

Wave’s time clock calculator. A free web tool that adds up start and end times. It’s useful for totalling a week, but it doesn’t store anything in your Wave account.

So the question is not whether to use a separate time tracker, but how hours get from that tracker onto a Wave invoice.

Four ways to get billable time into Wave

Option	How hours reach the invoice	Setup	Monthly effort	Typical cost	Best for
Wave-connected tracker	The tracker creates the Wave invoice from selected entries	Connect Wave once, import customers	Review and send	Subscription, plus Wave Pro	Firms invoicing several clients every month
General tracker + Zapier or Make	An automation creates customers, products or invoices from tracker events	Build and maintain the workflow	Check the automation’s output	Tracker plus automation plan	Teams already committed to a tracker
Tracker report + manual entry	You copy totals from a report into invoice lines	None	Retype every line	Tracker only (many are free)	A few clients, simple rates
Spreadsheet timesheet	You total the sheet and enter lines, attaching the sheet	A template	Track, total and retype	Free	Solo work with one or two clients

1. A time tracker that creates Wave invoices directly

Tools in this group connect to your Wave business, import your customers and create invoices from the time you select. Swell and MinuteDock both work this way.

• Swell is built only for Wave. You review each outgoing line with the hours, rate and notes behind it, then Swell creates a draft invoice in Wave for you to approve and send. Entries included on an invoice are locked, so they can’t be edited or billed again. Plans start at $15 a month.
• MinuteDock creates Wave invoices with lines grouped by date, project or task, and also connects to Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB and FreshBooks. It has native mobile apps. Plans start at $19 a month. See how Swell compares with MinuteDock.

The tradeoff is a second subscription and, for Swell, a Wave Pro plan. In return the month-end invoice takes minutes instead of an evening, and the invoice always matches the tracked time.

2. A general time tracker connected through Zapier or Make

Harvest, Toggl Track, Clockify and Jibble don’t create Wave invoices themselves. Wave’s Zapier app can create customers, products and services, and invoices, and record sales, so an automation can push data from a tracker into Wave. Jibble’s Wave page describes exactly this kind of Zapier connection. Clockify’s Wave page focuses on exporting reports for Wave Payroll.

This works best when your team already uses one of these trackers for other reasons. Expect to design the workflow yourself: deciding when an invoice is created, how hours become line items and what happens when an entry changes after it was sent. Automations also need monitoring, because a failed step can quietly leave an invoice incomplete.

3. Export a report and enter invoice lines by hand

Any tracker can produce a report of hours by client and project. At the end of the period you filter by client, total the hours per rate, and enter them in Wave as quantities of your hourly service.

It costs nothing extra and needs no setup, which makes it a reasonable starting point. The cost is the retyping. Each client invoice means another round of copying, rounding and checking, and nothing stops the same hours from being invoiced twice if a report is run again with an overlapping date range.

4. A spreadsheet timesheet attached to the invoice

The simplest option: log start and end times in a spreadsheet, total each client’s hours, add the lines to a Wave invoice and attach the sheet so the client can see the detail. Wave supports attachments on invoices and estimates.

For one or two clients this is often enough. It breaks down when several people log time, when rates differ by project or person, or when you need to answer “what did this invoice cover?” months later.

How to choose

• Count your invoices. Under five hourly invoices a month, manual entry or a spreadsheet is usually fine. Beyond that, the retyping becomes the bottleneck.
• Count your rates. One rate for everything is easy to apply by hand. Different rates per project or per person are where manual totals go wrong.
• Decide where the truth lives. If an invoice is disputed, can you see exactly which entries it covered? Direct integrations link entries to the invoice; manual methods rely on your own records.
• Check your Wave plan. If you’re on Wave’s free Starter plan and don’t want to upgrade, the integration options narrow, and manual entry or a spreadsheet may be the practical choice.
• Think about the next year, not the next invoice. If you expect to switch accounting software, a tracker that supports several systems avoids a second migration.

Setting up hourly billing in Wave (manual method)

If you start with manual entry, a little setup in Wave makes it faster:

1. In Wave, create a product or service for each rate you charge, such as “Consulting, hourly” with your hourly rate as the price.
2. Make sure it’s marked as something you sell, so it’s available on invoices.
3. At the end of the billing period, total each client’s hours from your tracker or spreadsheet.
4. Create the invoice, add the hourly service and enter the hours as the quantity. Add one line per rate or per project if your client wants the breakdown.
5. Attach the timesheet or report if your client expects to see individual entries, then send the invoice.

When that process starts taking more than an hour a month, it’s worth moving to one of the connected options above.