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As someone who's currently looking at Bench and Pilot, it seems that Bench is a similar product, albeit much cheaper once one's revenues start to grow. How does

As someone who's currently looking at Bench and Pilot, it seems that Bench is a similar product, albeit much cheaper once one's revenues start to grow. How does Pilot compare to Bench?

wdaher 9y ago
Three key differences: * Our books are stored in QuickBooks Online, and you have access, so you're never locked in. If you need to work with another provider or just don't like us anymore, you can hand your data to any bookkeeper in the world, because it's just QuickBooks (vs. being handed an Excel export from a custom accounting system) * All we do is startup company bookkeeping, so we've developed super-deep expertise in it (vs. aiming to solve it for, e.g. the bakery or yoga studio) * We do accrual-basis bookkeeping (vs. only supporting cash-based bookkeeping)—this is a pretty inside-baseball thing, but it matters as the startup gets larger I don't know how much automation Bench has already built, or if it's all just humans under the hood, but one structural advantage of #1 for us is that it means our engineers can spend all their time focusing on automating error-prone work (rather than needing to build out a QuickBooks clone).
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  Thanks! This...makes a lot of sense. Since you're focused exclusively on startups, is there any chance y'all can write up a "tools" guide for people just starting out, not just for bookkeeping? i.e. "Here's stack that new companies have a lot of luck with, that minimizes headaches and saves time: Pilot, Expensify, Gusto, Stripe etc." Speaking of which, any recommendations for things I can do now that will save me headaches down the road?
  - wdaher 9y ago
    Yes! "Pilot recommended financial stack" is definitely at the top of the list of blog posts we want to write because it's just super-nice to get set up on the right stack from day one, rather than having to worry about it when things are more complicated. The short, spoiler version for now is: Gusto, Chase corp card, Stripe, Expensify, bill.com if you do a lot of invoicing. (And then the more 101 stuff, like, "Please don't mix business and personal expenses")
  - ian_crosby 9y ago
    These might be helpful: https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/ https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/
ian_crosby 9y ago
Ian Crosby from Bench, here are a few things I think differentiate us: * Bench launched five years ago and we’ve scaled to be the largest bookkeeping service in America, with hundreds of employees and thousands of customers. We’re not a brand new startup and you can trust that we’re not going anywhere! * We have lots of happy customers that can back us up that we’re really, really good at bookkeeping. Tweets by patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/958956425631301632 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/958956425631301632 Facebook reviews: https://www.facebook.com/pg/BenchAccounting/reviews/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/BenchAccounting/reviews/ Trustpilot reviews: https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/bench.co https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/bench.co * We built our own software because Quickbooks breaks when serving clients at scale. Serving bookkeeping to 100 clients is just a very different game from serving bookkeeping to 10,000 clients, and you need very different systems to make sure everything runs smoothly. Far from locking you in, if you ever want to leave Bench, we’ll work with your new bookkeeper to get onboarded to any system of your choice, at no charge. * We’ve spent years perfecting our hiring and training programs, and building an incredible culture of client service. If you’re hiring a service, the people that you’re dealing with on the other end really, really matter. We do this part right. * At the end of the day, it’s now the industry standard for any bookkeeping service to do a free month of bookkeeping for you, so you can evaluate whether you like them or not. If you’re debating between two services, I highly recommend that you just try both! If you give Bench a whirl, we’ll turn around a monthly P&L for you in 24 hours that you can use to evaluate whether we’re the best choice for you. * Pro tip: Sign up through one of our partners (like Stripe) and you'll get 20% off for your first 6 months with Bench: https://stripe.com/works-with/bench https://stripe.com/works-with/bench Best of luck, I hope you find something that works really smoothly for you! @Pilot: welcome to the market and congratulations on your funding round! Love to see people trying to make life better for startups. I look forward to hearing about your lessons along the way!
- wdaher 9y ago
  Hi Ian! Congrats to you folks on the recent funding round as well.

As someone who's currently looking at Bench and Pilot, it seems that Bench is a similar product, albeit much cheaper once one's revenues start to grow. How does Pilot compare to Bench?

wdaher 9y ago

Three key differences: * Our books are stored in QuickBooks Online, and you have access, so you're never locked in. If you need to work with another provider or just don't like us anymore, you can hand your data to any bookkeeper in the world, because it's just QuickBooks (vs. being handed an Excel export from a custom accounting system) * All we do is startup company bookkeeping, so we've developed super-deep expertise in it (vs. aiming to solve it for, e.g. the bakery or yoga studio) * We do accrual-basis bookkeeping (vs. only supporting cash-based bookkeeping)—this is a pretty inside-baseball thing, but it matters as the startup gets larger I don't know how much automation Bench has already built, or if it's all just humans under the hood, but one structural advantage of #1 for us is that it means our engineers can spend all their time focusing on automating error-prone work (rather than needing to build out a QuickBooks clone).

whitepoplar 9y ago
Thanks! This...makes a lot of sense. Since you're focused exclusively on startups, is there any chance y'all can write up a "tools" guide for people just starting out, not just for bookkeeping? i.e. "Here's stack that new companies have a lot of luck with, that minimizes headaches and saves time: Pilot, Expensify, Gusto, Stripe etc." Speaking of which, any recommendations for things I can do now that will save me headaches down the road?
- wdaher 9y ago
  Yes! "Pilot recommended financial stack" is definitely at the top of the list of blog posts we want to write because it's just super-nice to get set up on the right stack from day one, rather than having to worry about it when things are more complicated. The short, spoiler version for now is: Gusto, Chase corp card, Stripe, Expensify, bill.com if you do a lot of invoicing. (And then the more 101 stuff, like, "Please don't mix business and personal expenses")
- ian_crosby 9y ago
  These might be helpful: https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/ https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/

ian_crosby 9y ago

Ian Crosby from Bench, here are a few things I think differentiate us: * Bench launched five years ago and we’ve scaled to be the largest bookkeeping service in America, with hundreds of employees and thousands of customers. We’re not a brand new startup and you can trust that we’re not going anywhere! * We have lots of happy customers that can back us up that we’re really, really good at bookkeeping. Tweets by patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/958956425631301632 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/958956425631301632 Facebook reviews: https://www.facebook.com/pg/BenchAccounting/reviews/ https://www.facebook.com/pg/BenchAccounting/reviews/ Trustpilot reviews: https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/bench.co https://ca.trustpilot.com/review/bench.co * We built our own software because Quickbooks breaks when serving clients at scale. Serving bookkeeping to 100 clients is just a very different game from serving bookkeeping to 10,000 clients, and you need very different systems to make sure everything runs smoothly. Far from locking you in, if you ever want to leave Bench, we’ll work with your new bookkeeper to get onboarded to any system of your choice, at no charge. * We’ve spent years perfecting our hiring and training programs, and building an incredible culture of client service. If you’re hiring a service, the people that you’re dealing with on the other end really, really matter. We do this part right. * At the end of the day, it’s now the industry standard for any bookkeeping service to do a free month of bookkeeping for you, so you can evaluate whether you like them or not. If you’re debating between two services, I highly recommend that you just try both! If you give Bench a whirl, we’ll turn around a monthly P&L for you in 24 hours that you can use to evaluate whether we’re the best choice for you. * Pro tip: Sign up through one of our partners (like Stripe) and you'll get 20% off for your first 6 months with Bench: https://stripe.com/works-with/bench https://stripe.com/works-with/bench Best of luck, I hope you find something that works really smoothly for you! @Pilot: welcome to the market and congratulations on your funding round! Love to see people trying to make life better for startups. I look forward to hearing about your lessons along the way!

wdaher 9y ago
Hi Ian! Congrats to you folks on the recent funding round as well.