Bench Reviews

Easy to use website Pretty straight forward and it makes finances look easy I had good experience with some of the people who work there The amount of work my simple company asked for was not the according to the full price I should be billed with Will go another direction

So far working with Bench has been straightforward I was previously utilizing QuickBooks services to run my business Unfortunately that had to come to an end due to poor customer service and many mistakes on their end along with a host of other issues Bench is way over-priced for a small business so keep that in mind The minimum I believe is around 500 a month They definitely do not do 500 worth of work for me per month due to my business size I keep paying because they are easy to work with no local bookkeeper will give me the time of day etc I would definitely recommend working with Bench simply due to the ease of use which when running a business is key WIth Bench running in the background I can focus on things that matter to make more money and grow the business Bench deserves 5 stars so don t let my 3 star review fool you I just have to keep it real and to get 5 star they would need to cut their monthly fee in half

It s taken months to get my books updated I ve uploaded everything and they ve told me that there is nothing else to do on my end but I still have more than 3 months of bookkeeping that isn t updated

I do love the service that Bench provides It s a nice hands-off approach to having the bookkeeping managed on a regular basis The only thing I didn t like was the hard sales tactic by the sales staff Because I signed up for the Bench trial after the start of my fiscal year I would have been forced to pay full monthly price to import past transactions from the previous months Because we re a startup we didn t have a lot of past transactions It was only 78 lines of transactions for a seven month period I was asked to pay 400 month to catch up the transactions and have it all reconciled for the prior year and for two months of this year I didn t like that lack of flexibility especially for a very small startup like we are I am six months into using Bench and I still have this bitter taste in my mouth from the sales and onboarding experience

PROS- Books are done without me having to figure everything out It s mostly automated although there is some manual involvement Charts are useful but would like them to be more robust Year end financial package is great and very helpful CONS- Takes a really long time to get your completed month s books It s usually two months after the month has ended and has even been as long as three months So you don t get May s results until mid-July Website and app are still very buggy and not as full featured as they could be Would like ability to chart data in a way that s more useful

- would be nice to also have accounting for personal expenses that are often intermingled with small businesses sole proprietor as mine is at this point Your team is helpful but turnover is high and consistency suffers I have a lot of accounts and need help to access them- your onboarding managers are excellent

The service has always been good But the fact that they have a proprietary back-end makes it a little tough to switch in the future Also the pricing is great for larger businesses or those with high expenses but seems to price out smaller businesses

The Bench team is simply stretched too thin I have been a Bench customer for several years This is the most delayed they have been to closing the books So much requires additional correction and categorization on our part Their team is pleasant and honest about this being an issue but it is a real issue especially if you need to rely on these books

Bench has solid software and I like how they make financial reporting easy and streamlined However they are slow to finalize your books and the level of reliability in meeting deadlines leaves something to be desired

I ve been working with Bench for over a year and have not yet gotten fully comfortable with the services I ve had consistent turnover in my bookkeepers and was just notified that my annual tax filings would not be filed in time and an extension is necessary This even though the bookkeepers have confirmed they have had everything they ve needed for my last fiscal year for over a month and a half Disappointing That said the books are largely accurate and haven t needed excessive correction on a monthly basis