Take a $4,950 job. Run the whole thing through a credit card at a typical 2.9% + $0.30 processing rate and you hand over about $144. Do forty jobs that size in a year and card fees cost you roughly $5,800 â more than most contractors spend on their entire software stack, insurance renewal, and phone plan combined.
Push those same payments to ACH at 1% capped at $10, and the same forty jobs cost you $800.
Thatâs the real difference between invoicing apps. Not the logo on the PDF. So I took one invoice â the same job, the same numbers, the same deposit structure â and built it three times: Joist, Wave, and QuickBooks Online. Hereâs what each one does with it, what it costs you to get paid, and who should use which.
The test invoice
A composite deck repair and rail replacement:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Labor, 40 hrs | $2,600 |
| Materials (lumber, hardware, stain) | $1,850 |
| Dump fee + permit | $200 |
| Subtotal | $4,650 |
| Sales tax on materials (varies by state) | $300 |
| Total | $4,950 |
Terms: 40% deposit ($1,980) before material pickup, balance ($2,970) due on completion, net 7.
That deposit structure is where most invoicing tools quietly fall apart, so itâs the most important part of the test.
What each tool actually is
These three are not competitors in the way a comparison post implies. Theyâre three different categories of thing that happen to print invoices.
- Joist is a contractor-specific estimate-and-invoice app. Mobile first. Built by people who understand that you write the estimate standing in someoneâs backyard. It is not accounting software.
- Wave is small-business accounting software with free invoicing attached. Real double-entry books. Nothing in it knows what a change order is.
- QuickBooks Online is the accounting platform your bookkeeper and CPA already use. Heaviest, most expensive, most capable, and the only one where âprogress invoicingâ is a named feature instead of a workaround.
Pricing and feature tiers for all three move around, and Joist in particular has changed hands and restructured its plans. Check current pricing pages before you commit â treat every dollar figure here as the shape of the thing, not a quote.
Building the invoice: what happened
Joist
Fastest path from âjob doneâ to âinvoice sent.â You write the estimate on your phone, the customer approves it, and the estimate converts to an invoice without you retyping a single line. The 40% deposit is a first-class concept â you set a deposit amount or percentage on the document and the app tracks the balance.
Where it bites: your books live somewhere else. At tax time youâre exporting or hand-entering into accounting software, and the deposit â which is a liability, not revenue, until youâve done the work â doesnât land in a liability account on its own.
Wave
The invoice itself looks professional and took about eight minutes to build from scratch. The problem is the deposit. Waveâs invoicing is built around one invoice, one total, with partial payments applied against it. To bill a 40% deposit properly you end up either:
- Creating a $1,980 deposit invoice, then a second invoice for $4,950 with a âLess deposit receivedâ line of -$1,980, or
- Sending the full $4,950 and asking the customer to pay part of it, which means the thing sitting in their inbox says $4,950 and no due date they believe.
Option 1 works and is what most Wave users do. Itâs two documents instead of one, and your accounting needs a manual journal entry to keep the deposit out of revenue until you earn it.
QuickBooks Online
The only one where the estimate-to-progress-invoice flow is native: build the $4,950 estimate, invoice 40% of it, then invoice the remaining 60% later, with both invoices linked back to the original estimate. QuickBooks shows you whatâs been billed against the estimate and whatâs left.
The catch has historically been that progress invoicing lives on the mid-tier plan, not the entry-level one. Confirm which tier you need before you subscribe, because the gap between tiers is real money every month.
The comparison that matters
| Joist | Wave | QuickBooks Online | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Estimate â invoice in one tap | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Native deposit / progress billing | Yes | Workaround | Yes (higher tier) |
| Real double-entry books | No | Yes | Yes |
| Job costing | Limited | No | Higher tiers |
| Mobile usability in a truck | Best | OK | OK |
| Automatic payment reminders | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Your CPA already knows it | No | Sometimes | Almost always |
| Monthly cost | Free tier + paid plans | Free core, paid add-ons | Highest |
The fee math, run on the same $4,950
Processing rates change and vary by plan, so run these as structure, not as a quote. Typical published card-present and card-not-present rates for small-business platforms cluster around 2.9% + $0.30 for online card payments, with ACH either around 1% capped at a low dollar amount or, on some plans, free.
Splitting the job into a deposit and a balance means two transactions, so you pay the fixed per-transaction fee twice:
| Payment method | Deposit $1,980 | Balance $2,970 | Total fees | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card, 2.9% + $0.30 | $57.72 | $86.43 | $144.15 | $4,805.85 |
| ACH, 1% capped $10 | $10.00 | $10.00 | $20.00 | $4,930.00 |
| Check | $0 | $0 | $0 | $4,950.00 |
On a job this size, steering the customer to ACH instead of card is worth about $124 â more than two billable hours.
Scale it. Forty jobs a year at this size:
| Method | Annual fees |
|---|---|
| All card | ~$5,766 |
| All ACH | ~$800 |
| Mix: deposit by card, balance by ACH | ~$2,710 |
That last row is the realistic one. Homeowners will card the deposit because itâs the moment theyâre committing and the card is already out. The balance is the one worth steering.
Two honest caveats. First, surcharging the customer for card fees is regulated by state law and by card network rules, and some states restrict it outright. Look up your own state before you add a 3% line to an invoice. Offering a discount for check or ACH is generally treated differently from adding a surcharge â but confirm that locally too. Second, checks cost zero in fees and plenty in float: a check that arrives in eleven days cost you eleven days of cash.
Time to paid: the app is not the lever
None of these three will materially change how fast you get paid by itself. What changes it is the behavior the app makes easy:
- Invoicing the same day you finish. An invoice that sits in your truck for nine days cannot be paid in nine days. Joist wins here purely because itâs the one youâll actually open on site.
- A pay button in the email. Removing the âwhereâs my checkbookâ step is the single biggest accelerator. All three do this.
- A deposit. Taking 40% up front means the worst case on a job is that youâre owed 60%, not 100%. This is cash flow, not collections.
- Automatic reminders at day 3, day 7, day 14. Set them once. Stop being the guy who texts âhey, just checking in.â All three support this; turn it on, because none of them do it by default.
More on the collections side of this in invoicing and getting paid, and on the front end of the process in how to write estimates that win jobs.
Who should use which
Use Joist if youâre solo or two guys, you write estimates on your phone, and your bookkeeping is a shoebox plus an accountant in March. The speed from driveway to sent invoice is worth real money, and the deposit handling is clean out of the box. Accept that youâll need something else â or someone else â doing the books.
Use Wave if you want free, youâre billing fewer than roughly 10â15 invoices a month, and youâre willing to do the two-document deposit dance. Itâs the best free option, and it gives you actual books instead of a pile of PDFs. Itâs a reasonable anchor for the approach in running a contracting business on $0 of software.
Use QuickBooks Online if you have employees or subs, youâre filing 1099s, you want job costing, or your CPA has already told you to. The progress invoicing is the real version of what the other two approximate. Itâs also the one youâll grow into rather than out of.
Use two if youâre in between: Joist (or similar) for estimates and field invoicing, QuickBooks or Wave for the books. Plenty of shops run this way. It costs you a monthly fee and a reconciliation habit, and it beats forcing one tool to do a job it wasnât built for. If you want the wider field, the full software comparison covers the other contenders.
One accounting point nobody tells you
A deposit is not income until youâve earned it. Itâs customer money youâre holding. If you take $1,980 in March and donât start the job until May, that $1,980 belongs in a liability account â customer deposits â not in March revenue. Wave and QuickBooks can both handle this correctly; a standalone invoicing app canât, because it isnât doing your books.
The practical risk isnât the IRS. Itâs you, looking at a bank balance fat with other peopleâs deposits, and concluding you had a good month.
Your next move
Pick your three largest invoices from the last six months. Add up what you actually paid in processing fees on each one, and note how many days passed between job completion and money in the bank.
If the fees are over 2% of revenue, your fix is payment method, not software. If the gap between finishing and invoicing is more than two days, your fix is a mobile-first app youâll actually open on the job site. Solve the bigger of the two first.