Once your information is entered into the system, it's important to be able to get it out again in a useful way. For example, if you owned a bakery, you'd want to know how much you were making from selling peanut butter cookies, and how much you're spending on ingredients. You'd probably also want to know how much money you owe to suppliers and how much cash you have in the bank. These are fairly simple requests from your data, both Wave and QuickBooks handles them very well.

If you need something more complicated, like maybe you need to track inventory, or you'd like to see how much cash you're spending versus how much you're bringing in, then you'll need a more robust system like QuickBooks.