By transaction I mean any time money goes in to or comes out of your bank account or credit card. Both Wave and QuickBooks allow you to connect your bank and credit card account to their apps (they call it a "bank feed"). Doing this will automatically pull your transactions into the system. The interface looks like a big list. Now you become like an octopus in a mailroom - a sorting machine putting everything in the right boxes. In other words, telling the app why you spent or received the money in the list.

QuickBooks will recognize transactions that happen often and suggest the account you normally use. It also allows you to setup an "auto-add" function. So, for example, if you have a telephone bill that you pay to the same company every month. You can setup a rule to "auto-add" that transaction to the Telephone Expenses account whenever it's paid - eliminating the need for you to sort it every month.

Wave doesn't have this functionality. You'll have to sort each transaction manually. If you have less than 25 transactions per month, and between one and three accounts (credit cards count as accounts), doing this sorting manually might be ok. If you have more transactions and/or more bank and credit card accounts, it'll become tedious and time consuming to have to manually go through each one.