Wave Payroll API
No direct Wave Payroll API: payroll endpoints are absent from Wave's public GraphQL schema. Third parties reach payroll data through Finch's unified API (Organization, Payroll, and Deductions with roughly 24-hour freshness), while Wave's own GraphQL API covers only the accounting side.
Frequently asked questions
Wave Payroll scores A on the API Report Card. No direct Wave Payroll API: payroll endpoints are absent from Wave's public GraphQL schema. Third parties reach payroll data through Finch's unified API (Organization, Payroll, and Deductions with roughly 24-hour freshness), while Wave's own GraphQL API covers only the accounting side.
Wave Payroll has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Wave Payroll is the payroll product inside Wave (waveapps.com), a Toronto-founded small-business financial platform that also offers free accounting, invoicing, payments, and bookkeeping services.
Vertical: Financial Services (SMB Payroll / Accounting). Sub-vertical: SMB payroll bolted onto a free-accounting platform. Running scheduled biweekly/semimonthly/monthly payroll for a handful of W-2 employees. Paying 1099 contractors and generating year-end 1099-NEC / T4A forms.
Moderate.
Employee PII (name, address, SSN/SIN, DOB). Bank account and routing numbers for direct deposit. Wages, salaries, hourly rates, bonuses, commissions. Federal, state, provincial, and local tax withholdings and filings (941, 940, W-2, T4, T4A, 1099-NEC, state UI).
Wave the company was founded in 2010; Wave Payroll's lineage dates to the 2011 Small Payroll acquisition (~15 years old).
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.