Wave vs. FreshBooks vs. Ordamo: Which One Actually Tracks Deposits on Custom Orders?

If you're just starting out and searching for free or cheap ways to track a customer deposit, Wave and FreshBooks are probably the first two names that come up — and for general invoicing, both are genuinely solid, widely used tools. The question worth asking before picking one is narrower: can either of them tell you, at a glance, what's been collected and what's still owed across every open custom order you have right now — without a manual workaround?

What Wave actually does with deposits

Wave's Starter plan is genuinely $0, and widely used for general small-business bookkeeping — invoicing, expense tracking, and bank reconciliation all work without a subscription fee. The deposit feature is not on that free tier, though: requesting a deposit through an estimate sits on the Pro plan at $19/month. On Pro you can request a deposit as a flat amount or a percentage when sending an estimate, and the customer can pay it directly.

Where it holds up: the deposit gets recorded and shows on a customer statement, and Wave explicitly built this to replace older workarounds like creating a smaller “deposit invoice” manually.

Where it stops: Wave has no native inventory or production-cost tracking at all — it wasn't built for businesses that manufacture or assemble products, only for straightforward invoicing and bookkeeping. Wave's own community discussions confirm that tracking a retainer or held deposit across multiple invoices still requires manually creating a liability account and moving funds between it and your bank account by hand. There's no live, automatic view of “what's owed across all my open orders” — that view has to be built and maintained manually, order by order.

What FreshBooks actually does with deposits

FreshBooks supports deposit requests directly on invoices — a percentage or fixed amount collected upfront through FreshBooks Payments, Stripe, or PayPal — plus payment schedules, which let a customer pay an invoice across multiple partial installments on dates you set. Deposits are available from the entry-level Lite plan at $23/month, though Lite caps you at 5 billable clients; Plus is $43/month for 50 clients, and Premium is $70/month for unlimited. For service businesses charging a recurring flat fee, FreshBooks also offers retainers — first available on Plus — though these are built around tracking billable hours against a pre-paid balance, which fits a consultant far better than a maker building a physical, one-off piece.

Where it holds up: deposits and payment schedules genuinely simplify collecting partial payment compared to sending separate manual invoices.

Where it stops: FreshBooks has no inventory, materials, or production-cost tracking, and its retainer feature is explicitly built for time-tracked service work, not product orders. Widely shared workarounds among FreshBooks users describe manually adding a negative “deposit” line item to a later invoice to zero out what's already been collected — a manual step that has to be repeated correctly for every order, with no automatic running balance across multiple concurrent custom orders.

What it costs to actually collect the deposit

The subscription is the smaller number. The one that scales with your revenue is the card processing fee, and it applies to the deposit and the balance separately, since they're two transactions rather than one.

Wave charges 2.9% plus $0.60 per credit card transaction, with Pro subscribers getting the $0.60 waived on the first ten transactions in a monthly billing period. On a made-to-order business splitting every order into a deposit and a balance, those 10 free transactions cover only a handful of orders, because each order spends two of them — after which the fixed fee applies again. FreshBooks collects through FreshBooks Payments, Stripe, or PayPal, so the processing rate depends on which processor you route through rather than on the FreshBooks plan itself.

This isn't an argument against either tool — every payment method costs something. It's an argument for knowing the number before you price your deposit, because a two-transaction structure pays the fixed portion of that fee twice on every single order.

The pattern: deposits bolted on, not built in

Both Wave and FreshBooks added deposit-handling features because enough customers asked for them — and both did a reasonable job within the constraints of what the rest of their platform is built for. Neither platform's underlying data model was designed around a business that sells before it builds. That shows up in the same places in both tools:

• No link between a deposit and a specific production batch or cost. A deposit is a payment against an invoice; it has no relationship to what materials or labor that specific order will actually cost.
• No live, automatic view across multiple open orders. Seeing “what's owed across everything in progress” requires manually checking each invoice or estimate individually, or building your own tracking sheet alongside the software.
• No inventory or materials tracking. Neither platform was built for businesses that produce physical goods, custom or otherwise — they're accounting and invoicing tools first.

This isn't a criticism specific to either product — it's what happens when a deposit feature gets added to a general invoicing tool rather than being the reason the tool exists in the first place.

Side-by-side comparison

What the manual workaround actually looks like

It's worth being specific about what “manual tracking” means in practice, because it's easy to underestimate until you're doing it for the fifth order that month.

In Wave, tracking a held deposit properly means creating a separate liability account in the Chart of Accounts, recording the deposit as money moved into that account rather than straight income, and then manually transferring it back out and applying it to the invoice once the order is actually billed. Wave's own community support confirms this is a multi-step manual process, not something the platform automates — it works, but it has to be repeated correctly, by hand, for every single order.

In FreshBooks, one widely used workaround for tracking deposits collected on hand is creating a line item literally called “Deposit” on the first invoice, then adding that same line item as a negative amount on the final invoice to zero it out. It works, but it depends on remembering to do it consistently, and by the tool's own documented limitation, the deposit-on-hand report can overstate what's actually collected if any invoice in the sequence hasn't been fully processed yet.

Neither of these is a criticism of the platforms — they're honest, functional workarounds for a job the software wasn't originally built to do. But “functional workaround, repeated by hand for every order” is exactly the kind of task that becomes the actual time cost once you're running more than a couple of custom orders at once.

A concrete example

Say you're running six open custom orders at once, each with a different deposit percentage and a different balance due date. In Wave or FreshBooks, answering “how much is currently owed to me across all six” means opening each invoice or estimate individually and adding it up yourself — the platforms will confirm each individual deposit was received, but neither will hand you the combined answer. The moment your business has more than a couple of orders open at the same time, that manual addition becomes the actual bottleneck, not the deposit collection itself.

Wave and FreshBooks both do a competent job of collecting a deposit. Neither one was built to answer the question a made-to-order seller actually asks every day: across everything I have in progress right now, how much is still owed to me?

When Wave or FreshBooks is genuinely the right choice

This isn't an argument that either tool is bad — for a business that needs clean, simple invoicing and doesn't yet have more than a couple of orders open at once, Wave's free tier or FreshBooks' low-cost plans are a perfectly reasonable starting point, and switching tools before you actually need to just adds unnecessary migration effort. The honest line is about volume and complexity: once you're juggling enough concurrent custom orders that manually tallying balances becomes a weekly chore, or once you need to see real margin per order rather than just “was the invoice paid,” that's the point where a general invoicing tool's limits start to cost real time.

Where this sits next to your other options

Wave and FreshBooks are two points on a wider map. If you're still deciding in general terms rather than between these two specifically, the fuller comparison — spreadsheets, accounting software, maker inventory tools and purpose-built order tracking — is in how to track deposits on custom orders. If you're already committed to full double-entry accounting and wondering why deposits still feel awkward there, that's covered separately in why Xero and QuickBooks fall short for made-to-order sellers.

The bottom line

Wave and FreshBooks both added deposit features because their customers asked for them, and both do the job they were designed to do — collect a partial payment and record it against an invoice. Neither was rebuilt around the actual shape of a made-to-order business: a deposit now, a balance later, a production cost that isn't known until the piece is built, and a need to see all of that across many open orders at once, not one invoice at a time.

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