Bench Reviews

Pros people are nice and friendly and they generally care Software integrations reduce the likelihood of human error Cons 1 Any time there is an expense that isn t auto categorized they leave it as needs categorization from me If they read the description they could easily guess the majority of the categories 2 Always needs my review The books don t tie with Stripe and our bank accountant They made mistakes when they added their Stripe integration to modify historical years which broke current years and they don t check these things them selves The only way to check and catch these are do to it yourself which is disappointing 3 They are slow to do the books Each month there is a big delay even though our books are very simple one revenue source limited expenses 4 For the few times we ve urgently needed our books to be completed they were unable to move fast and accommodate 5 They do a poor job of dealing with refunds Constantly categorizing them as revenue instead of finding the matching transaction

It does not appear that my books are being maintained I was told when I signed up that our books would be updated 10 days into the following month My books are currently 6 months behind I have requested help with this a few times so that I could meet with my accountant and they are still not up to date

The service and tax service are not worth one tenth of what they charge Their services that are supposed to auto-connect to your credit card and bank accounts almost never work They don t process your business expenses correctly and their taxfyle service offers no help with managing deductions let alone finding deductions They want you to search for and upload everything and do the work for them Their website is awful and it is nearly impossible to get what you need out of it Example Do you want the data that you ve uploaded to send to someone else to to the work correctly Good luck For 4000 a year it s a rip off

I am giving them two stars in my initial review but it is borderline and on the precipice of dropping to one Just like many of the other negative reviews I also paid for Bench to finish my historical books 2021 in my case I am nearly three months in and there s no sign of those ever getting completed I ask for updates weekly and they either ask for an additional document that is not relevant to the time period or ask for something I ve sent in multiple times before or tell me they are working on it still In addition they have not done the books for the past two months April and May Am I supposed to tell them to do their job repeatedly to get something done I simply don t understand why they have so many good reviews based on my experiences so far

I was initially happy with my service then I realized I was having to categorize the same expenses for them over an over again It was difficult to get in communication with the team due to my schedule When customer support tried to reach out I wasn t able to schedule a time since only a few were available I ended up spending almost as much time as I was previously Just not worth the cost In the end my books I paid for were still not complete I have the same missing categorization files even for months I paid for

The bench team has only one way of communicating and that is electronically and I feel for the money paid it is very restrictive and slow I have never had one discussion with the person handling my accounting or my account and so my actual numbers and information seems flawed so it is frustrating

Loved Bench until there was an exorbitant increase in fees which now precludes many solopreneurs from using the service Not a way to treat long time customers Also the canned response they give after every bad review is worthless They ll reach out to you and then send an email full of excuses

I started with Bench a few months ago and am less than impressed My point of contact is very brief doesn t seem interested in my business and has not finished my books from two months ago I find myself hesitant to approach her since her responses sound like she s annoyed to hear from me

The first year I used Bench I was very happy and had no doubt s I would use them again However this year I have been so stressed and frustrated There has been a lack of communication my first agent left at the beginning of tax season incorrect information including my address on my tax return lost paperwork I had to download documents multiple times promises made and then not followed through with I spoke with an about canceling and I am going to broach that subject again I have no faith anymore and plan to use a program on my own

Pretty terrible experience so far It s March of 2024 and they are still not finished with my income statement for January of 2023 When I contacted the bookkeeper about this he blows me off and says he s too busy to squeeze in a meeting They just keep asking for more and more documentation they don t categorize repeated transactions correctly and turnover is obviously a huge problem as I ve been passed around to several bookkeepers account managers