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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 o
by 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 agoThanks! 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 agoYes! "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 agoThese might be helpful: https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/ https://bench.co/syllabus/guides/