36 ms·

Bench accounting services shutting down

297 points by knuckleheads 2y ago

ayesha314 2y ago
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ayesha314 2y ago
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Baglanal 2y ago
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!
BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
Looks like Bench is being acquired after all? Content of the linked page was updated thing morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547803 also on tech crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after-abruptly-shutting-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after...
jbeard4 2y ago
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 https://www.reddit.com/r/BenchUsers
fractionalboy 2y ago
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benchscrewedus 2y ago
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nuesko 2y ago
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- ezekg 2y ago
  They don't do taxes so not appealing to me. That was the main pain point Bench solved for me.
knuckleheads 2y ago
Just got an email from them out of nowhere and they are closing down more or immediately. Very surprising.
- gkedzierski 2y ago
  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.
- sahil__ 2y ago
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marcobambini 2y ago
Does anyone know the reason?
porter 2y ago
What are the best alternatives?
- journal 2y ago
  https://github.com/denys-olleik/accounting https://github.com/denys-olleik/accounting Doing my best wish someone would help.
  - ibejoeb 2y ago
    Cool. Looking forward to going through it. >Have CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis; installed. Why is postgis a requirement for an accounting package?
    - numbsafari 2y ago
      Sales tax calculations maybe?
    - journal 2y ago
      I wanted some features for shipping and receiving and ability to find closest assets. I'll be importing zip codes which have lat lng needs to be stored and queryable.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- aphilbert 2y ago
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- laleck 2y ago
  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.
- nickcknight 2y ago
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mgkimsal 2y ago
FYI: "You will have until Friday, March 7th at 5:00pm ET to download your Bench data from this website."
- deleted 2y ago
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- laleck 2y ago
  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...
  - aftbit 2y ago
    Not sure why flagged. Link rot is one of the scourges of the internet.
  - avs733 2y ago
    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.
    - laleck 2y ago
      This open-source bookmark manager, hoarder, was posted recently and offers local archiving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746 Recently, I've started messing around with vimwiki and saving pages as PDF or as safari web archive.
ezekg 2y ago
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...
- ibejoeb 2y ago
  Definitely a local CPA. Building that relationship will pay off, even if it's just peace of mind.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    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.
    - ibejoeb 2y ago
      That's a fair assessment. I'd advise hiring a part-time bookkeeper if the transactions are sufficiently numerous or complicated to warrant it. The cpa can handle period closing concerns, trial balances, all that stuff. Many family-sized firms offer this as included, so there might not be much of a difference.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        For others reading along, one huge difference is that bookkeeping tends to be vastly cheaper per hour. It would get very expensive to pay a CPA to transcribe your credit card statement into Quickbooks (or previously Bench, or whatever else you're using for your ledgers). Bookkeeping is sufficiently complex that I'd personally rather pay someone to do a good job of than muddle through on my own, but it's not rocket science. Perhaps most importantly, they understand accounting jargon. When my CPA asks me to send over the Fnord-Smootson report, and that's not the exact name of a report in my bookkeeping software, I have no freaking idea how to get that to him. A competent bookkeeper asks whether he needs that report frobnicated by date or by time-value and they work out the details. A good CPA makes rocket science look easy. You typically pay them crazy amounts per hour, but for only a few hours a year. They take those bookkeeping journals and explain your situation to the IRS in a way favorable to your interests. You want a good bookkeeper and you want a good CPA. If you can get both of those under the same roof, freaking awesome! Your life just got easier and more profitable.
aimazon 2y ago
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.
- porter 2y ago
  what service did you move to?
- ezekg 2y ago
  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?
  - encoderer 2y ago
    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.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > 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).
    - aitchnyu 2y ago
runako 2y ago
$60m Series C 3.5 years ago. My hypothesis is they shut it down when they were unable to turn it into a rocketship.
euph0ria 2y ago
We just moved to CleerTax. Not sure if they are good yet but pretty responsive.
yolo2122 2y ago
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.
- ABS 2y ago
  on social media some employees are saying it's insolvent
mdlm 2y ago
Got the same email. Totally shocking.
digitcatphd 2y ago
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- ezekg 2y ago
  How can Claude file your taxes for you? And without hallucinations? Seems dangerous tbh
  - digitcatphd 2y ago
    Not for filing. The hard part is understanding how to find exemptions, deductions, ect. It has already outperformed both my CPA and tax attorney and at this point I am using it to correct them before taking their advice.
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benchdude444 2y ago
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.
- jegolden1 2y ago
  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?
  - tonkatsu2222 2y ago
    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.
    - jegolden1 2y ago
      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.
carloshdx 2y ago
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?
- deepsun 2y ago
  Ask them for prorated refund. You paid for a service and didn't receive it.
- solidgiant 2y ago
  I signed up two weeks ago and they made me sign an ACH agreement with Capchase. Did you sign with capchase?
- kstrauser 2y ago
  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.
- bayarearefugee 2y ago
  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.
nervous_jessica 2y ago
No mention of refunds for unused months
- ABS 2y ago
  on social media employees are saying it's insolvent so no refunds :-(
  - Amfy 2y ago
    link please Edit, found it myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/1hnhoxq/comment/m41x5lr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/1hnhoxq/comment...
wdaher 2y ago
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.)
- porter 2y ago
  Pilot looks very expensive!
  - aimazon 2y ago
    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.
    - porter 2y ago
      You don't know they won't shut down. And how does this compare to a local accounting firm?
      - wdaher 2y ago
        Price should be comparable to a high-quality local provider, but if that's not what you're seeing, I'd love to know that.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        And how does this compare to a local accounting firm? Hint: ask the salesman what happens in the event of an IRS audit. A good local CPA will go to the wall for you. Will the service you're considering do the same?
  - santoshalper 2y ago
    Your bookkeeping service shutting down with no notice over the holidays is not cheap either, my friend. Some things are worth paying for.
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deepsun 2y ago
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.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  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
  - deepsun 2y ago
    Nope, just confirmed, they refused to share SOC2 Report with their paying customers.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      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.
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appconsulting 2y ago
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pplante 2y ago
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.
- willcipriano 2y ago
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  - pplante 2y ago
    What gave you that impression? I always consulted my financials when making decisions. Unfortunately the books were wrong and I made incorrect choices from that bad data.
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      When I go over my household budget I'd notice if I wasn't paying my mortgage even if someone deleted it from my spreadsheet. It's important enough to me that it's front of mind when I'm thinking about money. I expect to see it on the list. I'd look for it if it wasn't there. Salaries are apparently not that big of a deal in the same way so asking for a higher one seems like a good idea.
      - rudolf1995 2y ago
        Seems like a pretty sweeping generalization to take from a single anecdote about how one person was confused by a bad UI.
    - deleted 2y ago
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porter 2y ago
Bench just forced me to switch to an annual contract a few days ago too. What a bunch of crooks.
- solidgiant 2y ago
  Me too, and signed with Capchase. What are you looking to do? I'm trying to find someone at capchase, but not finding anyone...
  - beibeiq 2y ago
    I would LinkedIn DM Capchase folks with support or customer service titles.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - galenking 2y ago
    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.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  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.
  - ttul 2y ago
    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.
Joup 2y ago
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lgreer 2y ago
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.
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lindsi 2y ago
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?!
ahadalicpa 2y ago
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Nelkins 2y ago
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?
- Nelkins 2y ago
  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.
- mt1973 2y ago
  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.
bagelss 2y ago
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.
- aimeess24 2y ago
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    - bagelss 2y ago
      I agree, not a great first impression. I have several questions before we jump to another provider especially an untested one.
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fractionalboy 2y ago
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jseibert 2y ago
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.
- Nelkins 2y ago
  Do you do personal tax returns in addition to business taxes as part of a package?
  - beibeiq 2y ago
    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 https://tinyurl.com/digits-bench here. Our team is fully focused on helping Bench customers through the rest of the holidays!
    - Nelkins 2y ago
      Single member LLC, so I don't think Digits is the right fit for me at the moment. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
      - claudiogodoyb 2y ago
        I have a friend who works at Taxfyle and they cater to single-member LLCs and newly formed businesses. They seem like a great fit for you if you need taxes and bookkeeping done. Check out their website: https://www.taxfyle.com/bookkeeping https://www.taxfyle.com/bookkeeping
theoak 2y ago
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- pdoconnell 2y ago
  If they're insolvent, depending on who they're using for their infrastructure their systems and services may have literally been turned off on them.
strattonoakmont 2y ago
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arjawn 2y ago
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/ 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)
- bagelss 2y ago
  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?
  - ensemblehq 2y ago
    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.
  - arjawn 2y ago
    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/ https://www.doola.com/bookkeeping/book-a-demo/
strattonoak 2y ago
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fractionalboy 2y ago
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dceddia 2y ago
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.
ColdSpringBiz 2y ago
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ihaveanaupair 2y ago
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Nelkins 2y ago
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.
- jsnyoung 2y ago
  exactly.
- bagelss 2y ago
  Totally agree. There is no contact page or reviews online for kick. I can’t afford to get into this mess again.
- conradwa 2y ago
  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 https://x.co/kickfinance
  - Nelkins 2y ago
    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 https://x.com/kickfinance .
- ergocoder 2y ago
  I lol'ed.
jsnyoung 2y ago
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?
- Networkplumber 2y ago
  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.
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mjr00 2y ago
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.
- Spivak 2y ago
  > 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.
  - jegolden1 2y ago
    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.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      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.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    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.
BenCPA 2y ago
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MubarakShahCPA 2y ago
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- ezekg 2y ago
  Your website doesn't mention tax filing. Is this a new offering or am I missing it somewhere?
Heckyeah123 2y ago
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daft_pink 2y ago
Wow. We need an alternative to Intuit.
wilkystyle 2y ago
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?
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  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.
- jsnell 2y ago
  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.
  - dang 2y ago
    Yes, this seems to be what happened. (But the specific accounts mentioned by the GP were a bit of a special case.)
hadil001 2y ago
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conradwa 2y ago
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://kick.co/bench - https://x.com/kickfinance 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.
- illmasterj 2y 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.
- brianbreslin 2y ago
  Does Kick integrate with my existing quickbooks?
- ezekg 2y ago
  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).
  - claudiogodoyb 2y ago
solidgiant 2y ago
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?!?!
- ocdtrekkie 2y ago
  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.
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  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.
  - jegolden1 2y ago
    And fourth maybe don't name and shame the poor salesperson.
- neilv 2y ago
  > 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.)
acaloiar 2y ago
> 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.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  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.
  - genman1 2y ago
    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.
ssousa666 2y ago
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ottoaj 2y ago
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
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  So you run a bookkeeping company, yet your wife is using a competitor?
yolo2122 2y ago
Founder/Former CEO Ian Crosby's post about the Bench closure: https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790 https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790
- wslh 2y ago
  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.
- sumeno 2y ago
  Is there a version readable for people without twitter accounts?
  - vednig 2y ago
    https://unlace.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fianwcrosby%2Fstatus%2F1872724231999381790 https://unlace.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fianwcrosby%2Fs...
  - tarr11 2y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html
  - ckrailo 2y ago
    Swap the domain of the URL with nitter.poast.org https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790 https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/18727242319993817... More about nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
    - Tanoc 2y ago
      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.
blakebilliet 2y ago
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 https://app.reclaim.ai/m/afino/priority-intro)
- runako 2y ago
  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?
  - blakebilliet 2y ago
    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.
paragkochar 2y ago
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paragkochar 2y ago
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bolshchikov 2y ago
CEO of Finaloop (real-time financial solution) just offered a migration package and 75% off. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7278469880629067776-iQyF?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7278469880629067776-...
michliao 2y ago
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
jakecarpenter 2y ago
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.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  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.
MayowaO 2y ago
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.
akyang 2y ago
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pkkkzip 2y ago
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.
- justinhj 2y ago
  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.
- rchaud 2y ago
  > 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?
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >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.
davidkopf 2y ago
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
sirjaz 2y ago
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!
cmosser 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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evabiz7 2y ago
EVA Business Solutions can help any impacted Bench customers. Contact them at info@evabusiness-solutions.com or call 615-461-7157.
jnwatson 2y ago
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?
- balls187 2y ago
  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.
- yolo2122 2y ago
  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.
- blindriver 2y ago
  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.
- arjvik 2y ago
  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?
j45 2y ago
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.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  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.
  - j45 2y ago
    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.
ahstilde 2y ago
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/ 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
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  If bookkeepers and able to collect an “unfair” price, then why are there no publicly listed bookkeeping businesses putting up large profit margins?
romanzubenko 2y ago
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
genman1 2y ago
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Havoc 2y ago
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.co/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20241223225539/https://www.bench....
taxbirdie 2y ago
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.
johnkadams 2y ago
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
johnkadams 2y ago
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- avs733 2y ago
  while I can imagine the frustration, I'm not sure this is a post you want attached to your name if you have to get into a legal battle with them.
johnkadams 2y ago
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jaccounting 2y ago
Tossing another hat in the game. https://treewalk.com/bench-accounting-conversion/ 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.
EybQrT3c 2y ago
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jbeard4 2y ago
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?
entityinc 2y ago
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.
WesJam 2y ago
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 https://getribbon.ai), nicholas.wesley-james@getribbon.ai
burlesona 2y ago
They charged us for our next month of service the day before they shut down. That’s fraud.
- taspeotis 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
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rglover 2y ago
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.
nextworddev 2y ago
Interesting that they didn’t even consider doing an “AI pivot”
- ezekg 2y ago
  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.
Kwpolska 2y ago
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?
- deleted 2y ago
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- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  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.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    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?
    - that_guy_iain 2y ago
      > 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.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  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."
theanonymousone 2y ago
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?
- Havoc 2y ago
  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
theanonymousone 2y ago
Is the list of the board members or VCs involved in this confidential?
wanderingchilly 2y ago
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amac 2y ago
Poor.
chrismaeda 2y ago
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.
- Amfy 2y ago
  Agreed, but how do you protect yourself against quickbooks/xero/wave going under? Especially with Wave being mostly(?) free
  - chrismaeda 2y ago
    Good question. Quickbooks, Xero, and Wave are all owned by publicly traded companies. (H&R Block owns Wave.)
- smathur3312 2y ago
  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
fincent 2y ago
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297 points by knuckleheads 2y ago

ayesha314 2y ago

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ayesha314 2y ago

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Baglanal 2y ago

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!

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago

Looks like Bench is being acquired after all? Content of the linked page was updated thing morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42547803 also on tech crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after-abruptly-shutting-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/30/bench-to-be-acquired-after...

jbeard4 2y ago

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 https://www.reddit.com/r/BenchUsers

fractionalboy 2y ago

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benchscrewedus 2y ago

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801accounting 2y ago
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- benchscrewedus 2y ago
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danweinhardt 2y ago
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nuesko 2y ago

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jbench1234 2y ago
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jmarc1986 2y ago
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ezekg 2y ago
They don't do taxes so not appealing to me. That was the main pain point Bench solved for me.

knuckleheads 2y ago

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

gkedzierski 2y ago
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.
sahil__ 2y ago
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marcobambini 2y ago

Does anyone know the reason?

porter 2y ago

What are the best alternatives?

journal 2y ago
https://github.com/denys-olleik/accounting https://github.com/denys-olleik/accounting Doing my best wish someone would help.
- ibejoeb 2y ago
  Cool. Looking forward to going through it. >Have CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis; installed. Why is postgis a requirement for an accounting package?
  - numbsafari 2y ago
    Sales tax calculations maybe?
  - journal 2y ago
    I wanted some features for shipping and receiving and ability to find closest assets. I'll be importing zip codes which have lat lng needs to be stored and queryable.
- deleted 2y ago
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aphilbert 2y ago
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laleck 2y ago
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.
nickcknight 2y ago
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mgkimsal 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
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laleck 2y ago
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...
- aftbit 2y ago
  Not sure why flagged. Link rot is one of the scourges of the internet.
- avs733 2y ago
  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.
  - laleck 2y ago
    This open-source bookmark manager, hoarder, was posted recently and offers local archiving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746 Recently, I've started messing around with vimwiki and saving pages as PDF or as safari web archive.

ezekg 2y ago

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...

ibejoeb 2y ago
Definitely a local CPA. Building that relationship will pay off, even if it's just peace of mind.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  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.
  - ibejoeb 2y ago
    That's a fair assessment. I'd advise hiring a part-time bookkeeper if the transactions are sufficiently numerous or complicated to warrant it. The cpa can handle period closing concerns, trial balances, all that stuff. Many family-sized firms offer this as included, so there might not be much of a difference.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      For others reading along, one huge difference is that bookkeeping tends to be vastly cheaper per hour. It would get very expensive to pay a CPA to transcribe your credit card statement into Quickbooks (or previously Bench, or whatever else you're using for your ledgers). Bookkeeping is sufficiently complex that I'd personally rather pay someone to do a good job of than muddle through on my own, but it's not rocket science. Perhaps most importantly, they understand accounting jargon. When my CPA asks me to send over the Fnord-Smootson report, and that's not the exact name of a report in my bookkeeping software, I have no freaking idea how to get that to him. A competent bookkeeper asks whether he needs that report frobnicated by date or by time-value and they work out the details. A good CPA makes rocket science look easy. You typically pay them crazy amounts per hour, but for only a few hours a year. They take those bookkeeping journals and explain your situation to the IRS in a way favorable to your interests. You want a good bookkeeper and you want a good CPA. If you can get both of those under the same roof, freaking awesome! Your life just got easier and more profitable.

aimazon 2y ago

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.

porter 2y ago
what service did you move to?
ezekg 2y ago
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?
- encoderer 2y ago
  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.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > 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).
  - aitchnyu 2y ago

runako 2y ago

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

euph0ria 2y ago

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

yolo2122 2y ago

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.

ABS 2y ago
on social media some employees are saying it's insolvent

mdlm 2y ago

Got the same email. Totally shocking.

digitcatphd 2y ago

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ezekg 2y ago
How can Claude file your taxes for you? And without hallucinations? Seems dangerous tbh
- digitcatphd 2y ago
  Not for filing. The hard part is understanding how to find exemptions, deductions, ect. It has already outperformed both my CPA and tax attorney and at this point I am using it to correct them before taking their advice.

deleted 2y ago

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benchdude444 2y ago

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.

jegolden1 2y ago
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?
- tonkatsu2222 2y ago
  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.
  - jegolden1 2y ago
    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.

carloshdx 2y ago

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?

deepsun 2y ago
Ask them for prorated refund. You paid for a service and didn't receive it.
solidgiant 2y ago
I signed up two weeks ago and they made me sign an ACH agreement with Capchase. Did you sign with capchase?
kstrauser 2y ago
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.
bayarearefugee 2y ago
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.

nervous_jessica 2y ago

No mention of refunds for unused months

ABS 2y ago
on social media employees are saying it's insolvent so no refunds :-(
- Amfy 2y ago
  link please Edit, found it myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/1hnhoxq/comment/m41x5lr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/Accounting/comments/1hnhoxq/comment...

wdaher 2y ago

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.)

porter 2y ago
Pilot looks very expensive!
- aimazon 2y ago
  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.
  - porter 2y ago
    You don't know they won't shut down. And how does this compare to a local accounting firm?
    - wdaher 2y ago
      Price should be comparable to a high-quality local provider, but if that's not what you're seeing, I'd love to know that.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      And how does this compare to a local accounting firm? Hint: ask the salesman what happens in the event of an IRS audit. A good local CPA will go to the wall for you. Will the service you're considering do the same?
- santoshalper 2y ago
  Your bookkeeping service shutting down with no notice over the holidays is not cheap either, my friend. Some things are worth paying for.
2y ago

deepsun 2y ago

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.

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
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
- deepsun 2y ago
  Nope, just confirmed, they refused to share SOC2 Report with their paying customers.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    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.

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appconsulting 2y ago

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pplante 2y ago

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.

willcipriano 2y ago
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- pplante 2y ago
  What gave you that impression? I always consulted my financials when making decisions. Unfortunately the books were wrong and I made incorrect choices from that bad data.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    When I go over my household budget I'd notice if I wasn't paying my mortgage even if someone deleted it from my spreadsheet. It's important enough to me that it's front of mind when I'm thinking about money. I expect to see it on the list. I'd look for it if it wasn't there. Salaries are apparently not that big of a deal in the same way so asking for a higher one seems like a good idea.
    - rudolf1995 2y ago
      Seems like a pretty sweeping generalization to take from a single anecdote about how one person was confused by a bad UI.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

porter 2y ago

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

solidgiant 2y ago
Me too, and signed with Capchase. What are you looking to do? I'm trying to find someone at capchase, but not finding anyone...
- beibeiq 2y ago
  I would LinkedIn DM Capchase folks with support or customer service titles.
- deleted 2y ago
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- galenking 2y ago
  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.
Schiendelman 2y ago
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.
- ttul 2y ago
  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.

Joup 2y ago

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lgreer 2y ago

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.

801accounting 2y ago
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lindsi 2y ago

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?!

ahadalicpa 2y ago

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Nelkins 2y ago

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?

Nelkins 2y ago
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.
mt1973 2y ago
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.

bagelss 2y ago

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.

aimeess24 2y ago
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- toddwx 2y ago
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  - bagelss 2y ago
    I agree, not a great first impression. I have several questions before we jump to another provider especially an untested one.
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jseibert 2y ago

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.

Nelkins 2y ago
Do you do personal tax returns in addition to business taxes as part of a package?
- beibeiq 2y ago
  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 https://tinyurl.com/digits-bench here. Our team is fully focused on helping Bench customers through the rest of the holidays!
  - Nelkins 2y ago
    Single member LLC, so I don't think Digits is the right fit for me at the moment. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
    - claudiogodoyb 2y ago
      I have a friend who works at Taxfyle and they cater to single-member LLCs and newly formed businesses. They seem like a great fit for you if you need taxes and bookkeeping done. Check out their website: https://www.taxfyle.com/bookkeeping https://www.taxfyle.com/bookkeeping

theoak 2y ago

[flagged]

pdoconnell 2y ago
If they're insolvent, depending on who they're using for their infrastructure their systems and services may have literally been turned off on them.

strattonoakmont 2y ago

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arjawn 2y ago

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/ 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)

bagelss 2y ago
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?
- ensemblehq 2y ago
  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.
- arjawn 2y ago
  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/ https://www.doola.com/bookkeeping/book-a-demo/

strattonoak 2y ago

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fractionalboy 2y ago

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dceddia 2y ago

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.

ColdSpringBiz 2y ago

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ihaveanaupair 2y ago

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Nelkins 2y ago

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.

jsnyoung 2y ago
exactly.
bagelss 2y ago
Totally agree. There is no contact page or reviews online for kick. I can’t afford to get into this mess again.
conradwa 2y ago
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 https://x.co/kickfinance
- Nelkins 2y ago
  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 https://x.com/kickfinance .
ergocoder 2y ago
I lol'ed.

jsnyoung 2y ago

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?

Networkplumber 2y ago
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.

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mjr00 2y ago

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.

Spivak 2y ago
> 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.
- jegolden1 2y ago
  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.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    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.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  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.

BenCPA 2y ago

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MubarakShahCPA 2y ago

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ezekg 2y ago
Your website doesn't mention tax filing. Is this a new offering or am I missing it somewhere?

Heckyeah123 2y ago

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daft_pink 2y ago

Wow. We need an alternative to Intuit.

wilkystyle 2y ago

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?

LordDragonfang 2y ago
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.
jsnell 2y ago
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.
- dang 2y ago
  Yes, this seems to be what happened. (But the specific accounts mentioned by the GP were a bit of a special case.)

hadil001 2y ago

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conradwa 2y ago

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://kick.co/bench - https://x.com/kickfinance 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.

illmasterj 2y 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.
brianbreslin 2y ago
Does Kick integrate with my existing quickbooks?
ezekg 2y ago
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).
- claudiogodoyb 2y ago

solidgiant 2y ago

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?!?!

ocdtrekkie 2y ago
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.
ensignavenger 2y ago
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.
- jegolden1 2y ago
  And fourth maybe don't name and shame the poor salesperson.
neilv 2y ago
> 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.)

acaloiar 2y ago

> 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.

teruakohatu 2y ago
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.
- genman1 2y ago
  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.

ssousa666 2y ago

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ottoaj 2y ago

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

Kwpolska 2y ago
So you run a bookkeeping company, yet your wife is using a competitor?

yolo2122 2y ago

Founder/Former CEO Ian Crosby's post about the Bench closure: https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790 https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790

wslh 2y ago
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.
sumeno 2y ago
Is there a version readable for people without twitter accounts?
- vednig 2y ago
  https://unlace.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fianwcrosby%2Fstatus%2F1872724231999381790 https://unlace.app/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fianwcrosby%2Fs...
- tarr11 2y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html
- ckrailo 2y ago
  Swap the domain of the URL with nitter.poast.org https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790 https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/18727242319993817... More about nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
  - Tanoc 2y ago
    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.

blakebilliet 2y ago

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 https://app.reclaim.ai/m/afino/priority-intro)

runako 2y ago
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?
- blakebilliet 2y ago
  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.

paragkochar 2y ago

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paragkochar 2y ago

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bolshchikov 2y ago

CEO of Finaloop (real-time financial solution) just offered a migration package and 75% off. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7278469880629067776-iQyF?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7278469880629067776-...

michliao 2y ago

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

jakecarpenter 2y ago

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.

kstrauser 2y ago
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.

MayowaO 2y ago

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.

akyang 2y ago

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pkkkzip 2y ago

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.

justinhj 2y ago
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.
rchaud 2y ago
> 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?
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  >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.

davidkopf 2y ago

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

sirjaz 2y ago

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!

cmosser 2y ago

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evabiz7 2y ago

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

jnwatson 2y ago

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?

balls187 2y ago
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.
yolo2122 2y ago
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.
blindriver 2y ago
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.
arjvik 2y ago
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?

j45 2y ago

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.

BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
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.
- j45 2y ago
  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.

ahstilde 2y ago

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/ 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

lotsofpulp 2y ago
If bookkeepers and able to collect an “unfair” price, then why are there no publicly listed bookkeeping businesses putting up large profit margins?

romanzubenko 2y ago

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

genman1 2y ago

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Havoc 2y ago

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.co/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20241223225539/https://www.bench....

taxbirdie 2y ago

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.

johnkadams 2y ago

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

johnkadams 2y ago

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avs733 2y ago
while I can imagine the frustration, I'm not sure this is a post you want attached to your name if you have to get into a legal battle with them.

johnkadams 2y ago

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jaccounting 2y ago

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

EybQrT3c 2y ago

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jbeard4 2y ago

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?

entityinc 2y ago

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.

WesJam 2y ago

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 https://getribbon.ai), nicholas.wesley-james@getribbon.ai

burlesona 2y ago

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

taspeotis 2y ago
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.

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rglover 2y ago

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.

nextworddev 2y ago

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

ezekg 2y ago
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.

Kwpolska 2y ago

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?

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that_guy_iain 2y ago
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.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  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?
  - that_guy_iain 2y ago
    > 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.
datavirtue 2y ago
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."

theanonymousone 2y ago

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?

Havoc 2y ago
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

theanonymousone 2y ago

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

wanderingchilly 2y ago

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amac 2y ago

Poor.

chrismaeda 2y ago

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.

Amfy 2y ago
Agreed, but how do you protect yourself against quickbooks/xero/wave going under? Especially with Wave being mostly(?) free
- chrismaeda 2y ago
  Good question. Quickbooks, Xero, and Wave are all owned by publicly traded companies. (H&R Block owns Wave.)
smathur3312 2y ago
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

fincent 2y ago

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