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Comment by wdaher | Hacker News Reader

If you’re a tech startup and previously used Bench, I’d strongly encourage you to check out Pilot.com - we work with literally thousands of startups. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.)

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Genuine question: why did you raise $100 million Series C for a bookkeeping company? I'm a Pilot customer, and my heart dropped when I saw your funding announcement on the homepage a while back.

It's a fairly capital-intensive business.

Here's my best articulation of specifically what makes it hard: https://waseem.substack.com/p/tech-enabled-services

The disconnect you have with me (your customer) is that I don’t want or need a “tech enabled service”.

I just want the service.

Sometimes being a Pilot customer feels like I’m being experimented on. Instead of humans reliably doing our books, now I need to hire a fractional CFO (which you conveniently also provide) to double check your work.

We find errors in our Pilot books at a staggering rate. Things that would never be missed if we just had a human bookkeeper.

The value prop for a “tech enabled service” from a customers perspective is non-existent. It’s not cheaper for the customer (I pay you over $25k/yr for doing very little), the quality isn’t any better, and as we see with Bench (who also raised $100 million) there’s incredible risk in relying on it as a business critical service.

Anyone reading this, just please go hire a human bookkeeper. Don’t believe the marketing spin pitched by these tech enabled services companies.

Hey cj, just created an account here to reply to your thoughts, as they strike home. I own Merrittbookkeeping.com. It's a bookkeeping service run by humans, offering very affordable monthly rates. I'm surprised how many new companies are launching "AI powered bookkeeping", but for more money than we are! Why would the end user care if it's AI, unless it's way cheaper? Same thing you are expressing here. Not sure why companies promote fancy tech unless it is a benefit to the end user, not the company themselves.

I’m interested in migrating over to Pilot. How is the migration process from bench? It seems we can do a data export in a few days. Can pilot do 2024 catch up?

We have a number of folks who have switched from Bench, and as you can imagine there's enough volume here that it's worth building some bespoke stuff for this.

And yes, we can do 2024 catch-up work.

(waseem@pilot.com if folks have any specific questions)

Happy pilot customer at both my startups (gyroscope & bit.io), and will be using them again for my third.

Do you service single member LLCs/S Corps?

We do, yes.

Pilot looks very expensive!

I guess we now know that the price of a bookkeeping and tax preparation service that won’t shut down without warning is the 2x pilot are charging of what bench were charging.

You don't know they won't shut down. And how does this compare to a local accounting firm?

Price should be comparable to a high-quality local provider, but if that's not what you're seeing, I'd love to know that.

And how does this compare to a local accounting firm?

Hint: ask the salesman what happens in the event of an IRS audit. A good local CPA will go to the wall for you. Will the service you're considering do the same?

Your bookkeeping service shutting down with no notice over the holidays is not cheap either, my friend. Some things are worth paying for.

let’s hear your metrics on the issues of timeliness, accuracy, cost and bookkeeper churn that Bench faced?

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