Wave alternative in Canada: what to look for when free invoicing is no longer enough

This page is for a Canadian sole trader or small business that started on a free invoicing tool and has reached the point where sending invoices is no longer the whole job. Sales taxes now have to be right on the document, supplier bills have to be kept with the file that arrived, the numbering has to hold up if anyone asks, and an accountant wants to get in and see the year. The page makes no claims about any other product — not what it has, not what it dropped, not what it costs. Those things change; check the tool you are on, on its own site, on the day you decide. What follows is a checklist of what a business outgrowing a free tool should look for, the Canadian rules that drive most of the list, and KRONENWERK's own answers, including the ones that may send you elsewhere.

A free tool is often the right tool, until it is not

Nothing on this page argues that free invoicing is a mistake. For a business with a handful of customers, no sales tax registration and a shoebox of expenses, a free tool is frequently the cheapest correct answer, and paying for bookkeeping software before you need it is just a subscription. The line is not a feature anyone is missing. It is a change in what the business owes, and three things tend to cross it within the same year.

First, you register for the GST/HST — and, in Québec, the QST — so every document you issue carries tax lines and registration numbers that a customer's bookkeeper will check before paying. Second, the cost side starts to matter: supplier bills carry tax you can recover, and the recovery depends on holding a document with the prescribed information on it. Third, somebody outside the business asks for the year — an accountant, a lender, a buyer, or the Canada Revenue Agency — and a folder of PDFs on a laptop is not an answer. Before those three, staying free is sensible. After them, the cost of staying is measured in the hours somebody spends rebuilding twelve months in a spreadsheet.

The checklist: ten things to look for

Take this list to whatever you are considering, including KRONENWERK. The useful question is never "is it on the roadmap" but "show me the document it produces for this case".

The Canadian rules behind half the list

The federal rate is 5 % GST. In Québec the QST is 9.975 %, applied to the same pre-tax amount, which is why the two are shown separately rather than added together. The harmonized provinces replace both with a single HST line: 13 % in Ontario, 14 % in Nova Scotia since 1 April 2025, and 15 % in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island. British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan charge GST plus their own provincial sales tax, and Alberta and the three territories charge GST alone. None of that is decided by software; it follows from what you sell, to whom and where.

Registration is driven by the small-supplier threshold: a business must register once its worldwide taxable sales exceed $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters. Below that you are a small supplier and may not charge the tax unless you register voluntarily. The day you register is the day the numbers have to appear on the documents, and it is usually the day the free tool stops being adequate.

The documentation tiers matter because they are written from the buyer's side. Under $100 a document needs the supplier's name, the date and the total. From $100 it also needs the supplier's registration number and the tax amounts or a tax-inclusive statement with the rates. From $500 it needs the customer's name, the terms of payment and a description of each supply. Revenu Québec applies the same information requirements to the QST, so one well-built document serves both authorities. The detail is set out on what a Québec invoice must show; for sales across the border, see invoicing a US customer from Canada.

Finally, retention: six years from the end of the last tax year the records relate to. That applies to the invoices you issued, the bills you received and the books resting on them, and it is a real argument against keeping the only copy inside a tool you might stop using.

The cost side is where free tools usually stop

Sales invoicing is the easy half. The half that decides whether your books are usable is the one nobody advertises: supplier bills and receipts, each with the file that arrived attached, each attached to something. A supplier bill that exists only as a figure in a list is worth very little when the credit is questioned; the same bill with its PDF, its filename and the date it was entered is evidence. If you run work in jobs — a quote, an order, three supplier bills, photos, an invoice and a payment that all belong together — the place to keep them is inside the accounting rather than in a drive folder. KRONENWERK calls that a transaction, and it carries no amount of its own; it just holds everything that belongs to one job under one number.

What moving actually involves

Export customers, suppliers, open invoices, open bills and a trial balance as of a date from whatever you use now. Upload them, map the columns once, compare the totals against the export you started from, and approve. Old invoice numbers are kept exactly as they were issued, and new ones continue your sequence, so the six-year record stays whole across the move. There is no dedicated adapter for any particular product, so the exports go through the generic CSV and XLSX mapping. The switching guide sets out the steps, the approval gate and the reversal rule if a figure does not match. Most businesses pick the first day of a quarter, so the sales tax period starts clean, and issue their first invoice from the new system the same afternoon.

The honest counterpoint: this one is not free

If you are leaving a free tool, the fair thing to say first is what it will cost. KRONENWERK has four plans from 29 € a month, listed in full on the pricing page. There is no free plan and no trial. That is a deliberate choice and it is stated on every page rather than discovered at the end of a signup. It is also the honest counterpoint to everything above: if the business genuinely does not yet have sales taxes to account for, supplier bills to keep or an accountant asking for records, the checklist is not urgent and the money is better left in the business. Come back when the first of those three arrives. If you are weighing the paid options against each other rather than against free, the Canadian comparison page covers that ground, and the Montréal page states the same limits for a Québec business.

How KRONENWERK handles this

SUPPORTED WITH LIMITATIONS Multi-tax lines computed on the net and printed separately with the registration numbers on the document; a refusal when QST is charged without a QST registration; province-aware warnings on the invoice structure; invoices in USD with books in CAD; frozen issued documents, credit notes and gap-free numbering; receipts and supplier bills with the original file attached; transactions as job folders; accountant access with their own rights; CSV and XLSX migration with an approval step and a reversal rule. Not done: no GST/HST or QST filing, no rate determination, no payroll, no tax advice — the figures per rate are in the reports and the filing is on the CRA's and Revenu Québec's portals. Four plans from 29 € a month; no free plan and no trial. See invoices.