* Our books are stored in QuickBooks Online, and you have access, so you're never locked in. If you need to work with another provider or just don't like us anymore, you can hand your data to any bookkeeper in the world, because it's just QuickBooks (vs. being handed an Excel export from a custom accounting system)
* All we do is startup company bookkeeping, so we've developed super-deep expertise in it (vs. aiming to solve it for, e.g. the bakery or yoga studio)
* We do accrual-basis bookkeeping (vs. only supporting cash-based bookkeeping)—this is a pretty inside-baseball thing, but it matters as the startup gets larger
I don't know how much automation Bench has already built, or if it's all just humans under the hood, but one structural advantage of #1 for us is that it means our engineers can spend all their time focusing on automating error-prone work (rather than needing to build out a QuickBooks clone).