Bench accounting services shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Bench accounting services shutting down

bench.co

297 pointsknuckleheads304 comments

The company is over a decade old and was not cheap to use, I don't think they could have suddenly run out of money as customers typically pay upfront and are in long term contracts. Could it be staffing issues? Corporate misbehavior? Data loss? Ransomware? Has a member of their team gone rogue? Misappropriation of funds?

We were bench customers until a few months ago, paying thousands of dollars per year for what could only be described as hundreds of dollars worth of service. The service was not very good so moving away was an easy choice but on a per-customer basis they must be making money hand over fist.

I expect we'll find out more eventually, hopefully employees will leak some insight. For now, this is inexplicable.

I'd guess staffing issues, since my bookkeeper would change every month. I'm still not sure how they couldn't afford to hire better staff, though. You're right that it could be something nefarious.

Where did you move to?

> I'm still not sure how they couldn't afford to hire better staff,

Because they never figured out how to automate enough of the process to scale revenue up without scaling expenses.

All the investments in these VC funded companies is a bet that the companies will develop automation that will allow them to not hire staff, period (relative to the growth in customers).

Which companies have actually succeeded at becoming a profitable and break-even human-less $ESTABLISHED_INDUSTRY?

Ah sorry to hear you were caught up in this.

Cronitor uses pilot. It was a little crazy at first but the last year+ feels like they have stabilized operations.

Im betting secured debt was called. Given the "instant" nature, it likely means a debt covenant was broken, that is one of the few things that can shut a company down in 24 hours.

Doubley so if the business isnt really profitable.

Sorry but is there some source about this for a lame person?

I’m a CFO and was a layperson on this until I started having to deal with it. I don’t have any resources other than my work experience with a few companies that have debt covenants. First, they can be rather arbitrary as they’re literally made up for each deal and meant to align somewhat to the growth story that’s being “sold” to the lender during the debt issuance; they’re negotiated between lender/borrower so take a lot of different shapes. The ones I’ve seen are usually 1) a reporting requirement 2) monthly/quarterly/annually frequency is negotiable 3) usually have some financial metric or growth metric that the company should be hitting by a certain time. So, I’ve seen EBITDA margin, gross margin, cash flow, and revenue growth stats as these metrics. But again, it could be anything.

As GP said, usually if the covenant isn’t being met but the company is profitable or has a good excuse the lender will not call the debt. They’ll work with you. I’ve seen tons of flexibility here from lenders. Usually the lender will start having more questions about the strategy and current forecasts if the metrics are underperforming and you’ll (CEO/CFO) will have to start being a bit more transparent than required or maybe just more frequent check in meetings to discuss status. In most cases, if you actually have a good story and have a healthy partnership the lender doesn’t want to call the loan and wants to see how they can help (within tolerance) get you back on track.

The moment the lender calls the loan typically, in startup land, there’s no cash reserves to pay off the debt and so the company is instantly insolvent and operations cease. This is why the lender is flexible, calling is typically a nuke for the business. But also, it can be a bit of a stop/loss. Meaning the cash in the bank can at least be recouped.

"I'm betting"

Why do you think it wasn't possible for them to run out of money? It's not like a 10 year old business is immune to failure.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Anything is possible and running out of money is the most probable explanation but it seems so hard for this type of business to get itself into this type of situation. Customers pay thousands of dollars per year, usually upfront. That’s the type of revenue predictability that most of us would love for our businesses because it makes forecasting so much easier. They must have known months ago that they were running out of money. Failing to become sustainable and going through layoffs is one thing, shutting down overnight with zero warning is another. But yes, you’re probably right, it’s just hard to imagine how they could have imploded like this.

And yet, it's as simple as money ran out. They never turned a profit, investors ran out, the last round of funding was a loan with strings attached that led to a bunch of cost cutting and other poor decisions that explain the poor service quality.

A few staff guessed it might close 3 weeks ago at best though everything was very uncertain, but most of the accountants probably didn't see this coming either.

source: I know a few former employees.

Running out of money right at year end, just when accounting revenue is likely to pick up is a bit sus.

what service did you move to?

Founder/Former CEO Ian Crosby's post about the Bench closure:

https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790

Is there a version readable for people without twitter accounts?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html

https://unlace.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fianwcrosby%2Fs...

https://xcancel.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790

Swap the domain of the URL with nitter.poast.org

https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/18727242319993817...

More about nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Nitter's been dead for about a year at this point. I'm pretty sure any Nitter instance still running is using some abstract method and not the actual Nitter system.

I used to use a site called Nitter for the same reason, but it stopped working. I think X/Twitter changed something.

With all due respect to the founder, it's impossible to know, even in hindsight, whether things in a startup would have been similar, better, or worse. This is not an endorsement to firing the CEO or saying that the board was capable in any way. This founder or CEO trap is more common that we think about. It is not only a Steve Jobs story. Founders know that giving equity and power to others include risks.

I advise caution in believing his statements to be true, particularly about Bench’s board and investors. The truth will live in their financial statements, which no doubt will be revealed in bankruptcy proceedings in the coming months.

Ian Crosby here. If you don't believe me, believe the CEO of Shopify who was an investor and partner: https://x.com/tobi/status/1872753436116332994

Ian, I emailed you a couple years ago when I felt Bench had become worse and worse for customers. I was sad to discover that you’d left and I felt the difference was definitely attributable to your departure. I switched providers shortly thereafter.

So, speaking as a former customer, the tragedy and timeline you mention pass the sniff test for me. So glad your next venture has been going well for you!

I’d like to clarify - and ought to have done above - that I’m not saying you’re lying in your Tweets. Just that the story of any business failure is often more nuanced than “investors are bad”. And that story may be revealed in court filings as I’m sure creditors will be going to court to get their money back in the coming months.

Hi Ian. Sorry to see this happen to the company you founded. Can you say what the board's strategy was that conflicted with your vision?

I agree that the financial statements will be a key artifact of truth + I cannot speak to the validity of the statements made by Ian as I have no context or knowledge of Bench outside of my experience of being a long time customer.

However I can, albeit anecdotally from my perspective, say that I felt there was a marked difference in Bench's quality/service/responsiveness/performance/etc about 3yrs ago. This aligns with the timeline given by the former CEO in his post for his departure.

I can’t imagine the frustration you’re going through if you’re a Bench user.

Paying for a service and not getting what you expect, especially when it comes to your taxes is no joke.

Instead of having to start from scratch, our team at Kick is moved quickly to build these resources to help prior Bench customers:

1. Free Bench migration

2. Free 2024 Bookkeeping review calls

3. Free Daily Live Q&As (coming soon)

We’re moving fast and sharing additional resources and updates in real time here:

- https://kick.co/bench

- https://x.com/kickfinance

Other resources on the way include a Tax Extension Guide and Accountant Directory to make sure folks get a soft landing is this difficult time.

If you're running into issues, my email me at conrad@kick.co and I’ll do the best I can to route you to the right place.

Is Kick owned by, affiliated with, or invested in by Bench in any way?

Also are any of the C-Level execs from Bench involved in Kick in any way?

Kick is not affiliated with Bench in any way. We've onboarded a significant number of customers from Bench onto Kick before this happened, so this may have been why were were mentioned.

We're working fast right now to try to provide resources and help Bench users migrate and will be sharing updates here: https://x.co/kickfinance

Thanks Conrad however in the interest of clarity + transparency can you add some insight/details into how/why this statement came about in both the shut down email customers got today + what is currently posted on the Bench.co page?

"For continued support with your bookkeeping, we recommend exploring Kick, a modern accounting software, which has created an exclusive offer to handle your ongoing needs: kick.co/bench."

Having an "exclusive offer" listed in the initial closure communication/announcement + you having a landing page ready to go sounds like there was more to Bench just happening to mention Kick because your company has "onboarded a significant number of customers from Bench onto Kick before this happened"...

This would be a great question to answer and would provide a lot of peace of mind.

So you're planning on offering tax filings, or just recommendations? tbh this should have been included in the notice because I wrote y'all off immediately because taxes was the main pain point Bench solved for me (electing to file as an S-Corp).

A friend of mine mentioned Taxfyle as an alternative to Bench. They offer free bookkeeping migration, a free Xero subscription, dedicated bookkeeper to do your books and professional tax support where they handle your taxes too. They seem like a good fit for you! Check them out here: https://www.taxfyle.com/

I used Bench in the past and they partnered with Taxfyle up until ~November 2023 (date of the email I received stating the partnership was ending).

The service was fine, interesting that their relationship ended just over a year ago.

I signed up to the paid account ($125 per month), added credit card details. Your system has me on free trial until early January.

I've followed all the steps required to unlock the "sorry to hear about the Bench situation" onboarding.

Now after jumping through all the hoops, I'm told that the "free onboarding" and call only happens after the payment is processed later in January.

Why wait?

It's difficult to vet your service without this assistance. Money aside, time is of the essence here.

Really hoping to be proven wrong here, but this feels like an opportunistic sales initiative that claims to be more, but is really just a "20% off for your first year" coupon code.

I tried to sign up for Kick and received an email that you don’t support my industry. Were an artist studio that makes and retails physical goods. Do you expect to support more industries soon?

I am with an accounting firm and if u need any help will be happy to provide that.

While you have documentation about migrating to your platform, you don't seem to have any documented promises around export and leaving your service.

Also, it seems a bit odd to me that the "balance sheet" ability is two non-free pricing levels deep into your service. Isn't that a baseline expectation?

Strange that kick seems to know and had time to build all this but customers didn't get any heads up?!

> had time to build all this

They didn't need a heads up to build this. It takes between half an hour and half a day.

Does Kick integrate with my existing quickbooks?

> We know this news is abrupt and may cause disruption, so we’re committed to helping Bench customers navigate through the transition.

No, you're not. The minimum for commitment is a longer notice.

This must terrible for small businesses. Not sure how they can even help 10k customers with transition if they have shutdown and staff are laid off.

Not to mention all the money businesses paid in advance for services they’ll likely never get back. It’s a terrible situation—small businesses really RELY on these services, and now they’re left stranded with no clear resolution. Truly, reckless and insane.

I havent been at Bench for over 6 years but it’s always been a business on the verge of failure. The main issue was just the schizophrenic strategy that was being employed. On one hand you have a software company with useful tools and services to automate bookeeping. On the other you had a division of bookeepers that would do a lot of the manual / refinement work. These tasks are at odds with one another. If you automate things you remove power from the teams who are incentivized to scale their org charts. With LLMs, Bench should have been positioned to own this space entirely, and offer a superior or equivalent product with much better margins. Bur they decided to become a services company and not a technology company.

All I can take away from it is a few lessons, because this is a pretty awful outcome for almost every party.

Q - is it that the strategy was at odds? Or was it that the software wasn’t good enough yet, so expensive bookkeepers were required to supplement?

This is accurate (from a former employee). They were not at odds, the platform was simply never sufficient on its own to do the books. Bookkeepers were required to fill the massive gaps.

Tracks with what I've seen from other companies that tout their accounting AI/automation. Never measures up .I was never a customer - did Bench overpromise to their customers directly? They always struck me as the most human from the outside.

Bench just forced me to switch to an annual contract a few days ago too. What a bunch of crooks.

Wait a minute, they pushed you into an annual contract? And now that they aren't going to perform their end of the contract?

This is fascinating. That smells like actual fraud on their part.

I’m sure all of this will be played out in spectacular fashion in the courts of British Columbia in the coming months. Directors in BC are liable for unpaid wages to employees. No doubt they pulled the rug just in time to ensure people got their statutory severance. But beyond that, anyone hoping for more will have to get in a long line behind secured creditors. Man this sucks.

In a situation like this, someone with a contract not receiving consideration mere days after signing can probably just not pay. It would be very difficult for a company in the midst of shutting down to fight anyway.

I'd be shocked if you didn't get reimbursed. But if you don't, let me know and Afino might be able to mitigate a portion of your losses with a friendly discount. That just ain't right.

When a company goes bankrupt, there’s a specific order that everyone who’s owed money gets paid out in. I wouldn’t be surprised if “operational costs” like refunds are low on the list.

If you paid with a credit card, consider filing a chargeback.

Me too, and signed with Capchase. What are you looking to do? I'm trying to find someone at capchase, but not finding anyone...

I would LinkedIn DM Capchase folks with support or customer service titles.

I signed up with Capchase on a 12-month contract, too. Does this mean my contract is with Capchase and I’ll have to pay for the next 12 months even if I don’t get the service? Feels like a great scam. Sign a whole bunch of new customers in 12-month contracts and get paid upfront from Capchase in full and leave us paying off our debt to Capchase. I’m so frustrated.

They also hired at least 20 people in the last 30 days according to LinkedIn

Bench was a terrible service in my experience. I used it for one of my startups a few years ago. I personally invested a lot into said start-up. I checked my books and everything seemed ok. Eventually I found that they had hidden my Gusto payroll line items from view and they were no longer taken into consideration in my books. This led to a $300k shortfall from where I thought I was vs reality. Their team just shrugged when I brought the issue to their attention. The impact was immediate layoffs affecting real people who depended on me.

Sure ultimately everything falls upon me the founder. But something so common as GUSTO payroll should never be miscategorized and hidden from view.

How could this kind of ‘hiding’ comply with GAAP standards in any scenario?

What sort of accounting books were being prepared where such a function is even needed?

When I was using Bench, they were only doing cash accounting (not GAAP). We had to switch to a different service when we switched over to accrual accounting.

Quick note that cash vs accrual basis accounting is orthogonal to whether the balances are correct or not. IANAA but afaik GAAP does not preclude cash basis accounting, provided the conditions where cash accounting is permitted pertain.

Current (I guess now former) bench customer here. Concerned about this comment in their FAQ:

> On this website, by December 30th, you’ll be able to enter your Bench login credentials to download your current and prior year-end financials, as well as any documents you’ve uploaded such as receipts and bank statements.

This makes it sound like they are only making the year-end financials available - not the individual transactions/ledger entries. I’m concerned about this - aren’t the individual transactions required if one were to be audited? Would this create a lot of liability for their former customers?

Shocking, but not terribly surprising from a business perspective... From everyone I know who's worked there, the operation was just a thinly veiled wrapper around human accountants. The plan for profitability was that they'd eventually automate the human part away, but eventually never came.

My condolences to the employees who now have a stressful new year.

> The plan for profitability was that they'd eventually automate the human part away, but eventually never came.

Every. Damn. Time. I've fought and lost this battle at so many companies with directors and executives who were genuinely completely delusional about how much of a human process could be automated.

It's always the tasks that are easy and don't take up much time. If you end up solving one of the genuinely hard problems then you should just pivot to packaging and selling that as your business.

It's how virtually all automation works. You figure out how to make a computer do 80% of the problem domain and give humans tools to intervene effectively when you're outside that subset.

Many of the most reliable systems you can think of work this way, from the mail, to taxes, to factories, to autopilot systems. The key to building them is to be intentional about what you're doing and especially avoid blaming the humans for the system's failures.

Accounting startups that rely on automation are doomed to fail. Customers demand perfect accounting at automation-reflective prices. It’s just not possible.

Check out story of scalefactor.

Well yeah, if you're saying you can automate something, something as tractable as bookkeeping, then why would customers expect less quality? It should be perfect, and instant— that's the entire sales pitch of having a machine do it in the first place.

It might not be optimal, a human tax professional might be more creative and save you money, but it should always produce correct forms.

I don't know much about accounting, but isn't shutting down an accounting service three days before the end of the year a huge slap in the face if the clients of the service, maybe even fraudulent?

And if it is, is it really normal in this sector and "part of the deal" of working with startups?

Running discount promotions on annual plan up until recently is also rather sus.

Pages which are now mysteriously offline but still visible on way back machine

Does shutting down mean bankruptcy? My businesses will have real damages from this - both the money that has been paid to bench all year for now no output of annual books/a financial summary as well as the cost of now having to pay to redo my 2024 books.

on social media some employees are saying it's insolvent

Seems like my experience may not have been typical. I used Bench from 19-23 for a startup and always felt like I was getting great service. I agree that they were a bit expensive, but the financials passed external reviews and always made my investors happy.

It is a shame to see them closing down this way, awful timing and awful treatment of their customers. As a founder, you need to fully understand your financials, but you should have a pro managing the day-to-day and even month-to-month.

I used them from around '18-'22. There were a couple of minor glitches sometimes, but it was generally fine and they were always quick to respond to questions. My accountant liked working with them.

The fact that they are recommending Kick makes me view that company with suspicion. This whole thing is really leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

We've onboarded a significant number of folks from Bench onto Kick before this happened, so this may have been why were were mentioned.

Working fast right now to try to provide resources and help Bench users migrate and will be sharing updates here: https://x.co/kickfinance

Gotcha, thanks for that. I'm sure you're a solid company with happy users.

BTW, that link to your X profile returns a 404. It should be https://x.com/kickfinance .

Totally agree. There is no contact page or reviews online for kick. I can’t afford to get into this mess again.

exactly.

I lol'ed.

Wow, what a shock. I cancelled my account just days before the annual renewal earlier this month. I feel for all of the small businesses this is going to hurt. The service had been getting worse for an while and the last straw was when they sent an email saying the year-end financial report would be ready by April 10th, 5 days before the tax deadline.

I’m gonna have a go with plain text accounting for the bookkeeping for a bit. Looking at what Bench was doing, and my books in general not being too complicated I think it’ll be fine, maybe better actually because I’ll have a closer eye on things. Still using a CPA to file taxes though.

I was just sold bench.co for my three businesses and the sales person Luc Lewarne made me sign a payment agreement with Capchase. The agreement states that I still owe Capchase the full amount for a year, even if Bench.co shuts down...

Does anyone have any contacts or experience with Capchase? I never even started my service, which was supposed to begin January 1st, 2025 and now I will have to pay out 12 months to Capchase?!?!

Solidgiant, this is Luc Lewarne. I assure you that I am just as shocked as you are. I woke up today, along with my colleagues, to an email telling us that Bench was insolvent, and that all operations and employment would cease effective immediately. I know what it is like to be mislead in a buying process - it feels terrible. I want to let you know, person to person, that I had no bad intentions or knowledge of Bench’s future when I sold you our services. As for Capchase, I’m pretty sure they haven’t processed a payment from you yet, which means they haven’t sent us any funds. If you contact them, you should be able to get out of it.

Thanks Luc for the response, I have emailed Capchase support and they asked me to talk to bench.co I wasn't trying to publicly name you to shame you, but was looking for help in case someone knew where to point me. Hindsight I can see, should have probably left that out. The public page on Bench.co didn't have any contact or way to talk to anyone so I used the only contact I had. I do wish you the best in your next endeavors.

I imagine it wasn't very fun to wake up to the news that you lost your job, and then to have your name personally called out :( I don't doubt you were just as mislead as your customers were. I hope you are able to take a few days to process the situation and decompress, and then you rebound quickly into your next position! I don't think anyone will hold it against you personally :)

Well in hindsight, that was a silly thing to do...

First step- make sure you have read and understand your contract. Is there a cancellation period? What state laws may apply (Some states a allow a cooling off period, but often this applies only to consumer contracts, not B2B).

Second, contact Capchase via email and see if they will will allow you out of the contract "peacefully". If they are smart, they will so "sure, no problem, of course" and cancel the contract. If not, name and shame them everywhere you have an audience.

Third, if that doesn't work, you can either proactively sue them to cancel the contract, or just don't pay them and let them decide whether or not to sue you. Doing the latter may result in a negative report on your business credit.

And fourth maybe don't name and shame the poor salesperson.

> I was just sold bench.co [...] made me sign a payment agreement with Capchase. The agreement states that I still owe Capchase the full amount for a year, even if Bench.co shuts down...

I might ask a lawyer if that looks like fraud. (And then wouldn't be surprised if the lawyer can quickly make it like the sale never happened, other than your time wasted, and the lawyer fees.)

Or maybe ask your state AG's office if that looks like fraud.

(Edit: I mean the appearance that Bench.co was entering contracts to provide service for a period, knowing that they probably wouldn't provide that service, and, further, attempting to obligate you to pay for service for the entire period anyway. Or something like that. I'm not a lawyer, so I'd ask one.)

Do account execs get a heads up about a shutdown? If not, maybe there wasn't a good reason to mention the account exec by name here.

Agreed. Also, even if they did get a heads up, hn is not the place to resolve this kind of dispute. Emailing them, or a lawyer sounds more productive.

Shaming companies publicly is fine; shaming individual workers and posting personal data is bad taste to say the least.

Which is part of why I didn't put the name in. The essence was that the company might have signed contracts that they knew they wouldn't fulfill.

Of course, salespeople should have professional reputations (e.g., for honesty, or for dishonesty). But don't let them be a scapegoat for the more likely real culprit or bigger fish.

I don't know the dollar figure here and I would hope Capchase is a company that will value their reputation over screwing you on that dollar figure, but I would definitely question why you signed an agreement to pay for a product even if that product is not deliverable. One of the primary value adds to the middleman in a transaction is generally that they take on some of the risk.

Please do not name individual workers, they were likely unaware and no longer work there.

Shaming companies is fine, shaming individual workers is not; usually they are powerless, likely here too.

> I was just sold bench.co for my three businesses and the sales person Luc Lewarne made me sign a payment agreement with Capchase.

I'm sorry for the troubles you had, but is it really fair to say the salesman made you sign an agreement?

Wouldn't "you have to pay even if we don't deliver the product you're buying" be considered unconscionable?

I’m guessing Capchase is a financier of sorts. Capchase pays Bench for the full term up front, then the customer pays Capchase in monthly increments.

So Capchase is delivering their product, the financing. Which is why there would be a clause that the customer still owes Capchase even if Bench closes; Capchase has already paid Bench and wants to be made whole.

This is how I read it as well. I hope OP got a significant discount on Bench service in exchange for this kind of agreement.

Yea. That doesn't sound right. I'd say Op should talk to a lawyer ASAP.

I mean, bad to agree to in the first place, but it doesn't seem like a contract where the other party is non-performant, should be enforceable.

It seems to me that this is the key takeaway for founders:

Your accounting stack is

  1. accounting software
  2. bookkeeping  (ie operating the accounting software)
  3. cpa / cfo    (ie for tax and financial planning)

The benefit and problem with "nextgen" solutions like bench, kick, etc is that they provide a proprietary solution for the entire stack. This could be better/faster/cheaper but also comes with risk, as we are seeing in real time.

In contrast, the minimal risk approach is to source your accounting stack from different vendors:

  1. accounting software (eg quickbooks, xero, wave)
  2. bookkeeping   (hire a person or use a service)
  3. cpa / cfo     (hire a person or use a service)

If you use "standard" accounting software, you can change the other layers of your accounting stack at will. The total cost of layers 1 and 2 might be $6k-$8k per year for a company with revenue, which looks more expensive than the nextgen solutions. But the reduced risk and increased flexibility may be worth it.

Look into Paro.ai. They are a marketplace with good and reliable bookkeeper, accountants, CFOs. My AI startup got a CFO from them 3 years ago and the relationship is still going strong. They haven't hiked up my rates over 3 years. CPA firms increase rates every year, or dump you if you don't make enough money for them

Agreed, but how do you protect yourself against quickbooks/xero/wave going under? Especially with Wave being mostly(?) free

Good question. Quickbooks, Xero, and Wave are all owned by publicly traded companies.

(H&R Block owns Wave.)

Im based here in the US, and unfortunately i signed up yesterday after learning about the bookkeeping special...for a small business $1005 is alot...Square (my bank) basically said they cant do anything about it since i autho the payment...Any suggestions?

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be filing a fraud complaint. They had to have known this yesterday but still sold you a service. At least, that's the argument I'd be making, and I doubt the Bench team will have the bandwidth to dispute complaints right now.

Ask them for prorated refund. You paid for a service and didn't receive it.

I signed up two weeks ago and they made me sign an ACH agreement with Capchase. Did you sign with capchase?

If they won't help you navigate such an obvious fraud, report Square to the CFPB (while it still exists).

And keep situations like this in mind every time you hear some libertarian idiot railing against regulations.

Hey, Arjun here, CEO of doola (Business-in-a-Box for LLCs) (YC S20)

If you are a solopreneur or run an Ecom business and are looking for support with dedicated bookkeeping (including a human bookkeeper), check out https://www.doola.com/bookkeeping/

Happy to support anyone looking for help with bookkeeping + business tax filings for their business going into the new year (we support Non-US tax filings as well if you are a Non-US founder)

I’m interested in migrating over. We have one account in GBP currency, can you handle this too? It’s with wise.com. Do you over 2024 catch up too?

Hey we don't have multi-currency support (yet) but it's on the roadmap

And we can help with 2024 catchup

You can book a free demo here, excited to help if we can: https://www.doola.com/bookkeeping/book-a-demo/

Hey, if you're interested, happy to introduce you to my accountant. He handles our books that includes multiple currencies including GBP on wise.com.

I've heard they claimed to have SOC 2 security compliance, but refused to prove it (show the SOC2 report to customers) -- that's really fishy.

They had that cert for the last ~3 years and were audited yearly and had a standard package to share with clients so doubt there's much to this rumor

Nope, just confirmed, they refused to share SOC2 Report with their paying customers.

Can someone explain why potential customers would put up with this?

I'd think that the last thing a company wants to do is hire an bookkeeping company that seems shady.

$60m Series C 3.5 years ago. My hypothesis is they shut it down when they were unable to turn it into a rocketship.

Perhaps I'm old school, but how hard is it to hire a bookkeeper part time, a CPA a few times a year, and use Quickbooks? Was there some special value that Bench provided?

Been there done that several times over. One PT bookkeeper would only do books if they also got paid to process payroll which like the books was always behind. They did a good job on the books but I have small brick and mortar biz's. While I can wait a bit for books I can't to get my employees paid correctly, once someone's payroll isn't right/paychecks take longer/etc it gets heated.

Another would produce books that required a lot of work from my CPA which made the CPA a lot more expensive.

I've had it pretty easy - friends of mine have had PT/local bookkeepers do every form of damage you can think of - it's a messy world for SMB books. And those are nothing compared to the carnage I've observed small biz's with an employee PT or FT in house doing the books.

You’re not old school.

This is just how the tech industry works.

I ofc know nothing about Bench, but am aware of tech companies that try to disrupt established businesses with the aid of free* unlimited* money.

You’re probably so small that you don’t need to worry about keeping good books. If you have a decent number of customers and employees and worry about payroll then you need proper accounting software.

I use GnuCash for my personal accounting, and have a flow down to import my monthly cashflow and categorize everything into my ledger. What does such accounting software provide on top of that?

You guys are lucky. I didn't even get an e-mail. I just found out I couldn't login and happened across the website. So what are the chances of getting any kind of refund for the services I paid for and will not receive?

I'm wondering the same thing. I paid for Bench through Freshbooks, who said they'll be offering refunds for services not rendered. If they didn't get back to me with this, I was going to dispute the charge with my credit card company. If you paid by CC, you could try that.

This thread is full of accounting service founders promoting their product, often with a discount for Bench refugees. Why are there so many of those accounting startups and how do they manage to survive in such a crowded market? Or are they also going to do a last-minute shutdown when the VC money runs out?

The reason there are so many is that every company needs an accounting service. You don't need to dominate the market to have a profitable service.

Then how did Bench collapse? How many of those startups have enough customers to be profitable? How could I, as a business owner, decide based solely on their HN advertisements?

> Then how did Bench collapse?

We don't know. There have been many companies that collapsed while competitors grew and new competitors started out. Companies collapse for various reasons. One good explanation is that secure debt got called in and that was the end of them.

> How many of those startups have enough customers to be profitable?

Who knows. How many of the VC ran startups are running at a loss to grow but if they just cut back would be profitable?

> How could I, as a business owner, decide based solely on their HN advertisements?

Who knows. Sounds like a foolish thing to do.

The reason is that there is tons of money still flowing, because accounting is an industry that is easy to pitch to an investor in 2024.

1. It touches everyone 2. Everyone finds it annoying 3. Everyone thinks they pay too much 4. AI (still sexy) can fix the above

Unfortuntely, we're still decades from strong products.

I wouldn't touch any of these companies with a ten foot pole if I was a consumer or investor.

Because literally no one knows how to keep books and manage a double entry system. We had a family business for 40+ years and most of the revenue was from fixing bookkeeping and accounting mistakes made by untrained individuals trying to use software (QuickBooks). "If the software lets me do it then it must be correct."

This is really frustrating. I'll admit their services have been going downhill dramatically (all my books Jan-Nov were still open as of last week and usually they would close subsequent month), but I still think shutting down right before the tax year ends is downright scummy.

What are the alternatives that handle bookkeeping and tax filing? Maybe I should just get a local CPA...

Local CPA isn't a bad option though it could be pricey. (CPAs don't want to do book keeping either). I think one of the things that makes the bench.co shutdown challenging is that they used "proprietary" software so now you're going to have to migrate soon. Switching to accounting software that CPAs are more likely to be familiar with would be a step in the right direction and working with someone to aid that and help do catch up would be a good idea. I can help with both so that this isn't the catastrophe that it's shaping up to be

You can hire a bookkeeper to work with the CPA. I had a freelance freelancer who would keep books up to date, and then turn over the books to the CPA for tax prep and analysis. I estimate the cost was about half as much as if the CPA firm did everything, and everyone was doing what they wanted to do.

Definitely a local CPA. Building that relationship will pay off, even if it's just peace of mind.

My local CPA had previously guided me to using Bench. "Accountant" and "bookkeeper" are separate disciplines. My accountant manages my tax filings and other complicated transactions. The bookkeeper makes sure all our ledgers balance out.

“shutting down right before the tax year ends is downright scummy”

as if a dying business can magically decide to stay open longer and shut down at a more convenient time

They can though. Dying businesses take time to die. Even if nothing else, they could have decided to shut down _earlier_ so that customers would have more time to deal with the fallout. Or they could have decided to shut down _at the same time_ but just messaged about it earlier.

Just like the strategic announcement of bad news....on a Friday.

It seems unlikely they didn't know they were going down until just a few days before having to shut down services.

And given that this happens during the holidays, ot wouldn't surprise me if some customers don't find out about this until after the window to extract your data has expired. Or people have to work on fixing this mess who were supposed to be on PTO.

I have a friend who works at Taxfyle and they are a great alternative. They do both taxes and bookkeeping and work with software like Quickbooks and Xero where the pro does everything for you. Definitely worth checking out if you want to check their website: https://www.taxfyle.com/bookkeeping

They charged us for our next month of service the day before they shut down. That’s fraud.

Think of it as two months of read access rather than one month of read/write access!

> You will have until Friday, March 7th at 5:00pm ET to download your Bench data from this website.

This is really sad to hear. We offer a related service in Canada, and therefore I am keenly interested in what didn’t work. If anyone from Bench is interested in chatting about what went wrong and what to avoid I would really appreciate your time / happy to grab a coffee if you are in Toronto.

For any Canadian corps caught up in the Bench shutdown. We bundle corporate governance, bookkeeping, tax and payroll for $250 CAD/month but only serve straight forward small Canadian corporations.

- Nick co-founder at Ribbon Business (https://getribbon.ai), nicholas.wesley-james@getribbon.ai

This is the problem with SaaS. If it shuts down you loose access to your data and app. This is why we should have local native apps!

Glad I dropped Bench a few months back for my own solution. They started out great, but over the past 18 months, I was always having to reconnect via Plaid and then be told way after the fact to manually upload bank statements because my data wasn't syncing. Even worse, I started having to manually categorize nearly all transactions despite there being existing identical transactions they could auto-categorize from. Finally just built an app that imports data from my bank and lets me bulk categorize/fuzzy search transactions.

If you have been affected by this, don't go from one tech bro service to another. Find a company ran by a tax professional. There is no viable automated solution for bookkeeping and tax now. These are customer intensive fields that require inquiries and clarification, things that AI isn't adept at. This is my field and while I do use software to automate some work, it still hallucinates and can transpose items or be unable to read data. I do suggest doing a tax extension right away and letting your employees know. Depending on the state of your books, you may need to hire spmeoen to review them and process any 1099s and W2s you need to get out.

always so annoying to find bookkeepers at a fair price.

In particular, charging on expenses or on transaction volume isn't aligned with value generated. Instead, bookkeepers should charge on "anomalous transactions identified and corrected"

https://www.ledgerup.ai/ (a YC co) has a bookkeeping agent integrated with quickbooks. I've migrated to them after trying Fondo (also a YC co) and a local SMB bookkeeper in the past.

There's so many YC backed bookkeepers - Pilot, Afternoon, Fondo, LedgerUp

If bookkeepers and able to collect an “unfair” price, then why are there no publicly listed bookkeeping businesses putting up large profit margins?

To everyone navigating this transition, we understand the challenges and want to help make this process smoother. At Docyt, we are offering 30 days free to businesses impacted by this change, and we won’t enforce annual contracts because we believe flexibility and support are critical.

Docyt has extensive experience with migrations and can: * Perform rapid migration of unlimited years of Bench data. * Deliver full accrual basis bookkeeping. * Support 20+ industry verticals and 30+ revenue systems. * Handle multi-entity and intercompany accounting. * Provide continuous reconciliation of key balance sheet accounts done daily. * Offer integrated bill pay, receipt management, and expense reporting software.

We know this transition may feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to face it alone. Docyt is here to help businesses keep their books accurate and operations seamless. Reach out to me via LinkedIn if this has affected you - we are here to help!

This is terrible. I paid them ~$4500 to do all my taxes and book keeping (just started my business this past June). What recourse do I have to get that money back?

Also allegedly they were supposed to file an S Corp election. I've emailed them, but have no idea if I'll find out if it was actually sent.

same here. and my spouse signed up for the year to get taxes done quickly because we had an issue with 2023 -- and he hated them. I have used them for years. now I'm just at a loss. I don't know how to get money back. I'm sick.

Not even a tiny bit surprised given their pricing [0]. The only thing you're getting with those rates are juniors with questionable training and worse supervision. Likely outsourced to a cheap country on top of it.

As a reference point their MONTHLY rate would get you 1-2 hours of senior associate time at a B4 provider.

It's the equivalent of hopping onto fiverr and hiring a coder after sorting by low price, and then being surprised when you receive LLM code that doesn't compile. It's entirely your own fault if you thought that would work...

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241223225539/https://www.bench....

Just got an email from them out of nowhere and they are closing down more or immediately. Very surprising.

With how much they were charging and how little service they were providing, I can't comprehend how they've never been able to figure out the business model.

The cloud is someone else's computer, including SaaS and when they suddenly go away.

If there's an opportunity to open-source this code so people who can't simply migrate to one option after considering many, self-hosting might be an option at least in the interim.

Their software is designed to enable hundreds of bookkeepers to do the accounting with some interesting automations, self hosting makes little sense. As an individual, if you want to do things yourself, you're better off using gnucash.

Plenty of accounting software that can do multi-tenancy and multi-entity exists that can be self-hosted.

Accounting software is not novel, multi-tenancy and multi-entity is not a novel feature.

There are plenty of accounting platforms that do a lot of this, if not most, and are self hosted or you can run in your own cloud.

Odoo is an easy one that comes to mind, plenty of others.

GNUCash isn't really a business accounting platform.

Looks like Bench is being acquired after all? Content of the linked page was updated thing morning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547803

also on tech crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after...

Wow. We need an alternative to Intuit.

I created a subreddit in case any current/former Bench users would like to continue talking to one another and compare notes: https://www.reddit.com/r/BenchUsers

Does anyone have experience with Kick.co? It seems more self-managed with AI. I don’t want to migrate to another company that’s just going to close again despite being well funded.

7 years with bench and just renewed the annual plan last month. Seems like it’s unlikely we’ll see any refund for the 11 months remaining. Very frustrating to have to mirage somewhere else and pay for 2024 catch up.

Tossing another hat in the game. https://treewalk.com/bench-accounting-conversion/

Accounting firm run by an entrepreneur that specializes in small to medium size businesses.

Offering free migration/onboarding for the first 100 clients who join them from Bench.

my wife's company was literally talking to bench support few days ago for her last year LLC & personal taxes that they have been delaying for months. this new is crazy.

Anyone looking help with only LLC & personal takes then just email me here and we'll help you out: vip@joinotto.com

So you run a bookkeeping company, yet your wife is using a competitor?

Hi, I am the founder of entity.inc and several accounting firms. We are offering free migration from bench, tax planning and compliance as well as legal services. If anyone has any issues or needs, whether you are based in the US or abroad, please reach out.

No mention of refunds for unused months

on social media employees are saying it's insolvent so no refunds :-(

link please

Edit, found it myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/1hnhoxq/comment...

What are the best alternatives?

https://github.com/denys-olleik/accounting

Doing my best wish someone would help.

Cool. Looking forward to going through it.

>Have CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis; installed.

Why is postgis a requirement for an accounting package?

For pure bookkeeping at a small scale, I really like plain text accounting with beancount and fava

Bookkeeping is easy but labor intensive. Dealing with US tax law... That's when you spend on a local CPA.

Interesting that they didn’t even consider doing an “AI pivot”

They had been slapping on a bunch of "AI" tools this year, all of which required me to manually converse with the AI to categorize transactions. I was wondering what I was even paying Bench for with how much manual work I had to do each month i.r.t. to my books.

Got the same email. Totally shocking.

hmmm another "unicorn" from vancouver that bites the dust, i remember one with an owl as mascot logo can't recall what they did or their names but many ppl from vancouver mentioned it while ago.

I wonder why that place can't compete with American cities, i think even Toronto /Montreal is more successful than Vancouver.

for one the low salary must be demoralizing on top of being one of the most expensive cities in the world.

have there been notable canadian startup unicorn that turned IPO or major acquisition (100x ROI and up?) other than Shopify?

seems like nobody can really compete with America when it comes to creating IPOs and billionaires.

US companies pay more and obviosuly it’s a bigger market. It means the pool of good engineers and leaders is constantly leaking across the border. I’ve made Vancouver work for me for 20 years but there are significant headwinds and for young people with no ties there is very little incentive to stay. There is a lot more happening on the East coast though.

> seems like nobody can really compete with America when it comes to creating IPOs and billionaires.

This is another way of saying American tech VCs throw a lot of money around, often into poor investments, in the hope of cornering the market on $nextBigThing. In a world where any Tom, Dick and Harry can run up massive losses and still IPO through an SPAC, how is that an indicator of anything good?

>In a world where any Tom, Dick and Harry can run up massive losses and still IPO through an SPAC, how is that an indicator of anything good?

Anyone can IPO, but few earn money doing it. In the last 10 years, how many owners made any significant money IPO-ing through an SPAC? The market has mostly rewarded good businesses with cash flow and profits and growth, and others have lagged behind a relatively risk-less SP500 investment.

This very thread is an example of yet another business shutting down because the business couldn’t achieve the desired profit margins. If the owners could have IPO’d and made money, they would have.

Does anyone know the reason?

This is so fucked up**. I have an annual account and they have not done my books since July and now this... An no refunds?!

Poor.

Is the list of the board members or VCs involved in this confidential?

I have been a Bench customer for eight years. I have simple books, and the service was perfect at the time. Over the last three years, the turnover was bananas - and for the last three years, the year-end financials kept taking longer and longer to complete. This year, it was to the point I was going to leave. They offered a discount and a chance to adjust. They did much better, until this month when the announcement came that you had to sign a year contract and choose within TWO WEEKS to avoid another price hike and FORCED year. That, or leave. I was shocked when I asked if I could at least have my year-end done, as this was happening right at the end of the year. Straight up, the answer was no. You have to have a subscription for the year to get that. I was going to stay the coming year solely because of the timing to move and set up elsewhere, but now, I see this was simply in the cards. They wanted to see if things could be salvaged by how many annuals they got - clearly, there weren't enough. What is MORE of a slap in the face is the AUDACITY to - IN YOUR TERMINATION EMAIL - HAVE AN AFFILIATE RECOMMENDATION TO ANOTHER SERVICE - ARE YOU INSANE???? Do they think we are COMPLETE MORONS??? I smell a lawsuit brewing, not from me but from larger companies. Some things are COMPLETELY rotten here.

Truly crazy news and timing for this to happen over the holidays.

I'm the founder/CEO of Digits - if you're a tech startup on Bench, we'd love to work together. Reach out to vip@digits.com and we'll extend our friends/family discount and make this as painless for you as possible.

Do you do personal tax returns in addition to business taxes as part of a package?

Are you a single member LLC? Digits is focused on C Corps right now and for C Corps we can offer personal tax returns. Fill out this form: https://tinyurl.com/digits-bench here. Our team is fully focused on helping Bench customers through the rest of the holidays!

Off topic, but what is going on with the comments in this discussion? Seems like a ton of new accounts, and strange behavior like commenting gibberish or exact same comment text within minutes of each other, for example:

    strattonoak 39 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

    The no access to data smells like a ransomware event. Why is data not available to export out and everything is taken down and not accessible? Seems like it's way more work to take down access that to leave it up?
        
    theoak 40 minutes ago | prev | next [–]

    The no access to data smells like a ransomware event. Why is data not available to export out and everything is taken down and not accessible? Seems like it's way more work to take down access that to leave it up?

My guess is that this page is ranking very high for the kind of search anyone would use for finding out more about the closure.

So disgruntled customers are finding the page and complain, competitors are finding the page to use for lead generation.

Yes, this seems to be what happened.

(But the specific accounts mentioned by the GP were a bit of a special case.)

So: that specific comment was posted three times, by accounts named strattonoakmont, strattonoak, and theoak. I googled the first and got this wikipedia page:

> Stratton Oakmont, Inc. was a Long Island, New York, over-the-counter brokerage house founded in 1989 by Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush. It defrauded many shareholders, leading to the arrest and incarceration of several executives and the closing of the firm in 1996.

It's the company from the Wolf of Wall street.

If you’re a tech startup and previously used Bench, I’d strongly encourage you to check out Pilot.com - we work with literally thousands of startups. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.)

Genuine question: why did you raise $100 million Series C for a bookkeeping company? I'm a Pilot customer, and my heart dropped when I saw your funding announcement on the homepage a while back.

It's a fairly capital-intensive business.

Here's my best articulation of specifically what makes it hard: https://waseem.substack.com/p/tech-enabled-services

The disconnect you have with me (your customer) is that I don’t want or need a “tech enabled service”.

I just want the service.

Sometimes being a Pilot customer feels like I’m being experimented on. Instead of humans reliably doing our books, now I need to hire a fractional CFO (which you conveniently also provide) to double check your work.

We find errors in our Pilot books at a staggering rate. Things that would never be missed if we just had a human bookkeeper.

The value prop for a “tech enabled service” from a customers perspective is non-existent. It’s not cheaper for the customer (I pay you over $25k/yr for doing very little), the quality isn’t any better, and as we see with Bench (who also raised $100 million) there’s incredible risk in relying on it as a business critical service.

Anyone reading this, just please go hire a human bookkeeper. Don’t believe the marketing spin pitched by these tech enabled services companies.

I’m interested in migrating over to Pilot. How is the migration process from bench? It seems we can do a data export in a few days. Can pilot do 2024 catch up?

We have a number of folks who have switched from Bench, and as you can imagine there's enough volume here that it's worth building some bespoke stuff for this.

And yes, we can do 2024 catch-up work.

(waseem@pilot.com if folks have any specific questions)

Happy pilot customer at both my startups (gyroscope & bit.io), and will be using them again for my third.

Do you service single member LLCs/S Corps?

We do, yes.

Pilot looks very expensive!

I guess we now know that the price of a bookkeeping and tax preparation service that won’t shut down without warning is the 2x pilot are charging of what bench were charging.

Your bookkeeping service shutting down with no notice over the holidays is not cheap either, my friend. Some things are worth paying for.

let’s hear your metrics on the issues of timeliness, accuracy, cost and bookkeeper churn that Bench faced?

Hey everybody -- I'm the founder and CEO of Afino. We offer all of the same services as Bench and ready to help any founder affected by this sudden shutdown.

Check out our services on our site (www.afino.ai) and book a priority meeting to talk to me and my team (https://app.reclaim.ai/m/afino/priority-intro)

Awesome. Since you're here, could you share pricing? I know it may vary, but since you are offering to bring on Bench customers perhaps you could share pricing for similar service as Bench's offerings?

You're right that it varies a lot but we're priced competitively with all of our peers. I haven't seen a quote that we can't beat. We're playing a long game here and aren't going to lose a good customer on price.

Bookkeeping starts at $500/mo, Fed + State Taxes at $2,400. We do a long list of FP&A and fractional CFO services as needed. We get our prospects a detailed quote from just a 30-min call.

We just moved to CleerTax. Not sure if they are good yet but pretty responsive.

CEO of Finaloop (real-time financial solution) just offered a migration package and 75% off.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7278469880629067776-...

If you're a ecommerce brand, we specialize in ecomm bookkeeping and can get you migrated and caught up for 2024 immediately.

DayZero - ondayzero.com - or send me an email michelle@ondayzero.com. Always happy to be a resource

FYI: "You will have until Friday, March 7th at 5:00pm ET to download your Bench data from this website."

Additionally, they took down all of their accounting articles without notice. They had valuable summaries on various tax topics. Thankfully, Wayback Machine has archives of my bookmarks.

All the more reason to self-host your own archived versions of bookmarks...

Not sure why flagged. Link rot is one of the scourges of the internet.

is there an easy solution for this? I recently found myself looking through old bookmarks from a long previous project and only about 1/3 worked and it made me sad.

does any one know who is in charge at Bench accounting? Does anyone know where the scum bag is. I want to find this ass hole. I want to swear criminal warrants for them. Anyone who has info on this situation please contact John adams 678-508-1590 or email john@thebrasslantern.com

Come to factsfinancegroup.com

Real people.

Won't bore you with technical talk, your books will simply be done. You will be tax ready and tax efficient.

Last, but not least, you will have everything you need to grow at your fingertips.

We simply want 100 clients.

We'll focus on 100 of you and continue to the moon together.

EVA Business Solutions can help any impacted Bench customers. Contact them at info@evabusiness-solutions.com or call 615-461-7157.

If you are an ecom brand or tech startup - I'm CEO of Afternoon.co (YC F25) providing same services as Bench including year end tax filing, ready to onboard you asap, just email me at roman@afternoon.co

I'm sorry for all those affected by the Bench Accounting shutdown. If any of you are solopreneurs, feel free to reach out to my friend Nate at Cookie Finance. They are a highly trusted accounting platform (US based) that provides full-service accounting/tax. Nate also shared with me that they’ve already worked with a lot of former Bench clients.

His contact info is below.

Nate Coughran info@cookiefinance.co

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