[Meekro]

I love it when I don't have to think about things, and Gusto combined with Stripe (Atlas and card processing) have made it possible for me to not ever think about a whole lot of things.

Now if only there was a company as good as Stripe/Gusto that did accounting+taxes, I'd really be set! I mean, "I give you access to my accounts, (almost) never think about you, and I have a proper set of books and my taxes are fully done every year."

[jbarnold]

Pilot.com founder here. This is exactly the startup that we're working on! We have 500+ customers including 100+ YC companies and fully take care of bookkeeping + taxes. Feel free to drop me a note at [e-mail] if I can help.

[x2f10]

Fascinating. However, being an accountant, I have to wonder how it's possible to scale. With (accrual) accounting being so dependent on management's estimates, how does it work? Do you offer audit protection? Do you work with ext. auditors? Do you provide GAAP / tax guidance?

[jbarnold]

Startups and other SMBs have been using third party bookkeeping providers long before Pilot.com. We provide essentially the same interface/service as those companies, but we are leveraging technology to a much greater degree, which we think allows us to provide higher quality books and better service (ask our customers for their verdict there). We can connect companies with ways of meeting their audit and GAAP/tax guidance needs (providers who we work with regularly).

[ankrgyl]

Pilot is amazing! They have delivered on exactly your quote for us, except that I do often think about how helpful they are :-).

[freedomben]

Do you have a cheaper tier for people that are sole-proprietors or have only a handful of transactions a month?

[jbarnold]

Today our lowest cost tier is $195/mo. Hopefully in the future we will have an even lower cost option.

[anurag]

Extremely happy Pilot customer for render.com. Can't go wrong with them.

[yurylifshits]

We have a great experience with Pilot (YC W18 company)

[sergiotapia]

Do you offer that for freelancers?

[harry2quinn]

Take a look at Keeper Tax - not quite the same but I think might address what you're looking for (https://www.keepertax.com/).

[lukevdp]

In Australia, Xero is very good at the last part. I know Xero has a US presence as well that is integrated with Gusto and Stripe, have you seen that?

[ryguytilidie]

I have an accountant and theyre tech savvy and thats pretty much how it all works.

[Yabood]

I heard many good things about bench.co.

[Meekro]

I'm actually a customer of Bench.co, but I've been somewhat frustrated and thinking about leaving. First, they are very slow-- the books for a given month are usually finalized at least a month later (so your May books won't be fully ready until July, sometimes even later). By the time they are ready, the information is "old news" and not useful for decision making. I end up running queries against my Stripe data to get more up-to-date financial info.

Also, they keep asking me to manually classify the same transactions every month, things that have always shown up in my books every month. I would think they would have learned by now, and that they haven't is a red flag that makes me wonder what else is broken.

Finally, they don't actually do taxes. My ideal bookkeeping system would automatically handle that so I don't have to think about it, in the same way that my Gusto payroll runs automatically without me having to even remember that it's happening.

[joshuaberkowitz]

Joshua from the Product team at Bench here.

Sorry to hear about your experience with us, Meekro. We try to provide as hands-free an experience as possible, but know we have work to do.

We're sometimes stuck relying on bank statements due to the poor quality of data coming from bank feeds. This means we need to wait until month end to finalize books (and sometimes later if a credit card statement has a late statement date), leading to the timing challenge you described. We do this to ensure your books are completely accurate and ready for tax-time, with no fixes needed.

To address the above problem, we recently launched a new feature we're calling Pulse, to help manage day-to-day cash flow and spending. We're releasing improvements to it every week. https://bench.co/blog/operations/cash-flow-pulse/

The manual classification issue sounds like a failure on our part. We should not be repeatedly requesting input on the same transactions. If you shoot me an email ([e-mail]), I'd be happy to help. From the Product side, we're experimenting with using clustering models to better tackle the problem and remove some burden from our bookkeepers.

Lastly, on the tax front, we've got you covered! Our ambition is to do exactly what you're looking for - handle bookkeeping and taxes together on the back end, so you don't have to think about it. We'll have a formal announcement coming very soon. Please reach out to your bookkeeper if interested.

[scrollaway]

I echo most of your frustrations with Bench. I've had more luck with Wave and their tooling is more interesting IMO. But their non-bookkeeping offer is piss poor.

[whitepoplar]

Maybe check out pilot.com? (Disclaimer: haven't used them, but have heard good things.)

[Nimitz14]

With 600k in revenue why don't you just get a real accountant firm to take care of that for you?

[Meekro]

My first attempt to find one blew up in my face. =(

I lived in LA at the time, so I looked for highly-rated local accountants on Yelp. The search led me to this one[1], who proceeded to make a series of nasty mistakes that led to a taxation authority seizing money from my bank account (among other problems). The whole mess took months of time and many thousands of dollars to clean up.

Later on, I settled on bench.co doing the bookkeeping, and found a CPA firm to prepare the taxes every year. It basically works, but it still feels archaic and clunky. Several people here suggested pilot, so I might look at that next.

If you have an accountant you'd like to recommend, I'd definitely be grateful!

[1] https://www.yelp.com/biz/james-m-cha-cpa-los-angeles

[bigchewy]

The stories I've heard from CPAs and other friends is that it it's amazing for small companies < ~$300K annual revenue and then falls apart pretty quickly once you need to do something other than just basic reconciliation and pay taxes

[dahfizz]

Have you thought about... hiring an accountant?

[wmeredith]

Can you expand on your setup?

[Meekro]

I run a game server hosting business that does ~$600k in ARR, and I love focusing on the software side of it. I have a simple payroll with 2 recipients, and I love how Gusto is something I never have to think about. I enabled automatic payroll and muted their automatic emails, so the whole thing just runs every 2 weeks without me having to remember that it's happening.

I wish someone would do my regular tax filings in the same way that Gusto does the payroll tax filings: quietly and correctly, without making a huge show of it. Bench.co falls far short of that, for reasons I explained in an adjacent post here. They still make me go and manually classify the same transactions every month for some weird reason, and I have to double-check everything since I've seen them make plenty of simple mistakes. And they don't handle the tax filings themselves, either, which means more brain cycles on my part.