Wave Payroll is a paid add-on to Wave's free accounting core: it calculates pay, runs direct deposits, and in a limited set of states handles tax payments and filings automatically. In states outside that list, Wave Payroll still calculates everything correctly, but you're responsible for actually submitting the tax payments and filings yourself. We build the piece most small businesses miss: making sure payroll data actually lines up with project costs and job tracking Wave itself has no visibility into.
The biggest gap we see isn't the tax-filing split, most businesses figure that out quickly from Wave's own setup flow. It's job and project costing. Wave Payroll calculates wages correctly but has no concept of which client or project an hourly employee's time should cost against, which matters a lot for a small contracting or service business that bills by project.
The second common pattern: a business running Wave Payroll alongside a separate time-tracking tool because Wave's own time tracking is basic. Getting hours from that tool into payroll without re-typing them is exactly the kind of small, repetitive sync we build.
For businesses in a self-service tax state, we've also built reminders and data exports that make the manual filing step less error-prone, pulling the exact numbers a business needs to file instead of someone re-deriving them from a payroll report by hand.
An hourly employee's wages get allocated across the projects or clients they actually worked on, based on time entries from wherever your team tracks hours, instead of a flat monthly payroll number with no project detail behind it.
Time logged in a dedicated time-tracking app flows into Wave Payroll automatically each pay period, so nobody's retyping hours Wave's own tracker never saw.
For states where Wave doesn't file automatically, we build the export that pulls the exact numbers needed for the filing, reducing the chance of a manual transcription error at the worst possible time.
Wave Payroll gets the paycheck right. Whether that cost lands against the correct project, and whether a self-service state's filing actually goes in on time, usually still depends on someone remembering. Tell us which part you're handling manually and we'll look at closing it, without replacing Wave. And if payroll isn't where your real friction is, that's fine too, n-frames automates whatever's manual in a small business, Wave or otherwise.
Let's talk →Only in a limited set of states where Wave offers full-service tax payments and filings. In other states, Wave Payroll still calculates taxes correctly, but you're responsible for submitting the payments and filings yourself.
Wave Payroll is a paid add-on separate from Wave's free accounting core, priced with a base monthly fee plus a per-employee charge. The price generally differs between full-service tax states and self-service states.
Wave has basic time tracking built in, but it's not built for detailed project-level cost allocation. Businesses that need payroll cost split by client or project usually need that mapped separately.
Not natively in most cases. Getting hours from a dedicated time-tracking tool into Wave Payroll without manual re-entry typically needs a custom sync built between the two.