Americas largest professional bookkeeping service for small businesses Bench Accounting

That package has everything your accountant needs to file your taxes. When they’re just starting out, a lot of small business owners use spreadsheets or accounting software to manage their books. However, they were unhappy with the level of financial statements customization and categorization provided by Bench within these reports. Bench.co’s web-based app provides financial reporting functionality.

• It’s one of the many features offered by Bench.co to help with channeling transactions and formulating decisions whether to invest in a sector or cut your losses.
• Shortly after you sign up, we’ll give you a call to learn more about your business and bookkeeping needs.
• In the event that you make a cash transaction, you can take a photo of the receipt with your phone and send it to your bookkeepers.
• However, they were unhappy with the level of financial statements customization and categorization provided by Bench within these reports.
• I really love Bench because they do all the work that I hate.

Your bookkeeper will interact with you on a one-to-one basis. They’ll keep you updated with how your accounts are looking and they’ll be available to contact you if you’ve got any issues. Bench.co will set up a specialist bookkeeping team for you priced at $83 per month.

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Shortly after you sign up, we’ll give you a call to learn more about your business and bookkeeping needs. On this call, we’ll connect your accounts to Bench, and gather any extra documentation we need to complete your books. We sync seamlessly with your financial accounts and tools to keep your books up-to-date and save you the time and effort of manually uploading documents.

• Check out our growing YouTube channel where we go deeper into the digital tools and share more of our personal experiences growing our businesses.
• Anyway, the major advantage of uploading all this financial data to an online platform is how easily you can access monthly reports, financials and review items.
• Our licensed tax professionals are on hand for all your tax planning needs.
• You can avail of specialized bookkeeping with all plans as an add-on.

Unfortunately, Bench seems to have lost its soul in a quest to scale. I’m really disappointed to see a company I once loved lose what made it great. If you’re several years behind on your bookkeeping and taxes, you can get caught up and filed with Bench Retro. QuickBooks, Xero and other do-it-yourself bookkeeping software give you a tool to do your own bookkeeping and taxes. Transitioning to an S-Corporation involves various costs, including the initial filing fee for the IRS S corp election (Form 2553), which varies by state. Additionally, legal fees for drafting the necessary corporate documents can add up.

How Much Does Bench Accounting Cost?

Ideally, those conversations are happening throughout the year. Depending on the firm, a CPA may offer bookkeeping services where they do the bookkeeping themselves, have in-house bookkeepers, or outsource the bookkeeping to a third party. See what running a business is like with Bench on your side. Try us for free—we’ll do one prior month of your bookkeeping and prepare a set of financial statements for you to keep.

Bench is a bookkeeping and accounting service that connects small business owners with financial experts. You’ll connect your bank accounts to your Bench bookkeeping account and your dedicated bookkeepers will receive a read-only version of the information. The in-house Bench team then categorizes your transactions and gives you financial statements every month. Once we have everything set up, we’ll complete a month of your bookkeeping in 1-2 days. Our bookkeepers reconcile your accounts, categorize your transactions, and make necessary adjustments to your books.

A stress-free tax season

As previously mentioned, you can schedule a call via Bench’s app. These calls are centered around reviews, obviously, hence you’ll be connected with your bookkeeper and discuss how things are progressing. From what I gather, there’s no specification as to why you should call.

Trusted by more than 10,000 American small business owners

The Bench bookkeeper will ask you questions about your business. If you feel like they haven’t asked you something important, be sure to bring it up yourself. Also, this individual should also provide you with a quick tour of Bench and its accounting software. For someone like me, an artist with a right sided brain, your service is perfect.

I finally I was done with this feeling, and I needed a better organization plan for my books. Your Bench team does all the categorizing for you, and sets up your ledger too. The DIY route also makes sense if you have some background in business bookkeeping, and there’s space in your schedule to make bookkeeping a regular task. Also, the amount of tweaking you may need to do—and the number of hours your CPA will clock—depends upon how complex your business is. Get a snapshot view of all your money-in and money-out, whenever you need it, even before your books are closed. We’re here to help entrepreneurs understand what they want to do and where they want to go.

Bench.co’s Financial Reporting

As corporations grow they will likely adopt different accounting approaches. They may operate under accrual (GAAP) practices, which most CPAs are well familiar with. CPAs may also be able to provide additional financial services such as advisory, tax planning, or projections. Due to the wider range of services, deeper knowledge, and often continuous involvement in their clients’ businesses, these services will come at premium prices. Bench’s core product is online bookkeeping software paired with in-house bookkeepers.

Without stating the obvious, financial reporting helps you run your business more economically. This feature helps you easily identify areas where you’re spending a little unnecessarily, which can help you save. Bench could work well for freelancers or small businesses that have easy monthly bookkeeping. But if yours is more complicated, you might look into other accounting software options besides Bench accounting. CPAs can turn your bookkeeping into an easy tax filing experience just so long as your recordkeeping is clean. If you’re already having your bookkeeping done by a CPA, it’ll be a smooth transition as they take your recordkeeping and turn it into a tax return without as much of a review process.

It’s easy to view monthly or yearly financial reports with a couple of clicks. The more time your team spends working with you, the better they’ll learn your books—and the less they’ll message you with questions. Right after you start out with Bench, your team may have a few questions about how certain expenses should be categorized. If they’re not sure how a specific transaction should be categorized, they’ll message you for your input. So, you need to be ready to put aside a certain amount of time every week to take care of your books. Whether you’re willing to do this likely depends on how many other business tasks you’ve got on your plate.

You should choose Bench over Quickbooks if you want to hire a bookkeeper to do your books for you. If you don’t want to hire a bookkeeper, you should use Quickbooks – it’ll provide you with the functionality to go it alone. They highlight the struggle they faced prior to hiring Bench – they simply couldn’t find a bookkeeper in their area who understood https://personal-accounting.org/accounting-articles/ their business. This person was also thrilled that they could integrate Bench so easily with APIs and other services. Now, there was one thread left on Reddit that caught my eye regarding Bench.co. It was from a reviewer who explained how they had initially purchased a Bench.co subscription to manage their income and expenses via reports from Bench.