Wave Moved Legacy Users to Starter: What Stopped Working
Invoicing survives. Bank feeds and your bookkeeper do not. If somebody else has been logging into your Wave account, that access ends.
On this page
Wave built its reputation on being genuinely free accounting software for small businesses, and a great many freelancers chose it for exactly that reason. The terms have changed for long-standing users, with a named date attached.
The honest summary: most of what you use still works, and two specific things stop.
Who this applies to
Wave defines a "legacy business" as one created before 29 January 2024 in Canada or 5 February 2024 in the US.
From 1 June 2026, legacy businesses that are not using a payments feature, an active payroll subscription or another paid Wave service are migrated to Wave's Starter plan. Businesses that are using those paid services keep their current experience.
So the people affected are, broadly, those who used Wave as free accounting software and never paid Wave for anything — which is most of the people who recommended it to you.
What Starter keeps
More than the framing of a "downgrade" suggests:
- Invoicing and estimates.
- Bill entry.
- Optional online payments.
- Manual bank statement uploads.
- Transaction categorisation, bank reconciliation and accounting reports.
- The Wave mobile app.
For a solo freelancer invoicing a handful of clients and keeping books for their own purposes, that is a working product. You can still bill, still get paid, still reconcile, still produce reports.
The two things that stop
Bank connections for transaction imports. Transactions no longer flow in automatically. Wave's wording is that continuing to use them requires upgrading to Pro.
This is an inconvenience rather than a capability loss, and the distinction matters. Manual statement uploads remain available, so the reconciliation workflow still exists — it just starts with you downloading a CSV from your bank each month instead of it arriving on its own.
Expect to spend twenty minutes a month you were not spending before. Expect also that some months you will forget, and the backlog is less pleasant than the routine.
Worth noting: bank connections on a Personal profile are not affected. Wave says "you will continue to have access to this feature" there.
Collaborator access. This is the bigger one, and the wording is unambiguous:
"As of June 1, 2026, your collaborators will not be able to access your account."
Why the collaborator change matters most
A bank feed is your own workflow. A collaborator is somebody else's.
If you share your Wave business with an accountant, a bookkeeper, a virtual assistant or a business partner, their login stops working. They will discover this when they try to do the work you are paying them for, probably at the least convenient moment in the month.
Tell them before they find out. And decide between the two real options: upgrade to Pro, which preserves collaborator access, or change how you work with them — exporting reports and sending files rather than giving them a seat.
Wave notes Pro has no free trial, is pay-as-you-go and can be cancelled at any time, with access continuing through the paid period before the business returns to Starter. That makes a short Pro period a reasonable way to buy time while you reorganise, rather than a commitment.
What the page does not address
The FAQ describes which features Starter includes and excludes. It does not say what happens to historical invoices, bills or accounting records.
We are not going to infer an answer. For accounting data specifically, the right response to an unanswered question is not to assume the comfortable interpretation — it is to hold your own copy.
Export your invoices, your transactions and your reports, keep them somewhere that is not Wave, and the question stops mattering.
One timing caveat
Wave's own page carries a last-modified date of 15 October 2026 while still describing the 1 June 2026 migration in future tense. That mismatch means the current state of your particular business is worth confirming in-product rather than inferring from the help centre.
Check what plan your business is actually on, and whether your collaborators still have access, rather than reading a date and assuming.
Is Starter enough?
For a solo freelancer with a modest client list and no bookkeeper: yes, comfortably. The loss of automatic bank feeds is real and manageable.
For anyone working with an accountant inside the system, or reconciling high transaction volumes where manual uploads become a genuine monthly burden: the arithmetic is different, and it is a real comparison between Pro's cost and the time you are about to spend.
Either way, this is a good moment to make sure your records exist outside whichever tool you land on — which is the subject of the records to secure before you switch.
Questions people ask
Is Wave still free?
The Starter plan is, and it keeps the core of what most freelancers use Wave for: invoicing, estimates, bill entry, transaction categorisation, bank reconciliation, accounting reports and the mobile app. What it does not include is automatic bank connections and the ability to share the business with other users.
What is a Wave legacy business?
One created before 29 January 2024 in Canada or 5 February 2024 in the US. Those businesses kept their existing experience until the migration. Businesses using a payments feature, an active payroll subscription or another paid Wave service keep their current experience rather than moving to Starter.
Will I lose my invoices and accounting history?
The page we checked describes which features Starter includes and excludes, and does not say that historical invoices, bills or accounting records are removed or restricted. Since it does not address that directly, export your records rather than assuming - that is the right posture for accounting data regardless of the vendor.
What happens to my bookkeeper's access to Wave?
It ends. Wave states "As of June 1, 2026, your collaborators will not be able to access your account" for migrated businesses. Upgrading to Pro before that date keeps collaborators. If an accountant or assistant logs into your Wave, this is the change that affects you most.
How do I import transactions without a bank connection?
Starter includes manual bank statement uploads, so the workflow becomes downloading a statement from your bank and uploading it rather than transactions arriving automatically. It is more work each month and it is not a loss of capability - the categorisation and reconciliation tools still function on uploaded data.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Spotted something out of date or incorrect? Tell us and we will fix it.