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.
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 (joshua@bench.co), 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.
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.
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!
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
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.