#BENCH BOOKKEEPING COMPETITION SOFTWARE#

This difference between the two explains why both have radically different characteristics. While most accounting firms are just thinking about producing a tax return or a financial statement, these tech startups are looking at solving customer pain points. The characteristics I listed above are what’s required today to solve the typical accounting pain points that many business owners face. And they are developing solutions and technology around solving that problem. The problem that they are trying to solve is to make accounting easy and automated. This is exactly what is taking place now. And the tech space will move swiftly when they sniff out that there is an underserved market out there. The key here is that these new players recognize that bookkeeping, accounting, and tax are painful for small businesses. Many cloud accounting firms out there understand the shift taking place and have adopted many of these characteristics, though, they are lacking the large amounts of funding that players like Botkeeper, Pilot, Bench, and the likes have received. Yet, these are the characteristics that are likely required to stay competitive in the digital age. These characteristics are almost 100% opposite of most accounting & bookkeeping firms out there.

Focus on eliminating pain-points and are customer experience-oriented.

Not timesheet based and implement fixed subscription pricing.

The tech startups in the accounting space are:

And these attributes are very different from most traditional accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms out there (though quite similar to cloud accounting firms in many respects). The tech startups I listed above all share similar attributes. Given this, can your firm compete in this day and age? And if so, how? Accounting Tech Startups Overview

#BENCH BOOKKEEPING COMPETITION SOFTWARE#

And the market is big enough as apparently $60 billion is spent on bookkeeping and accounting in the US alone.Ĭouple that with software juggernauts like Intuit starting to offer add-on bookkeeping services to their QuickBooks Online product and we get a space that is getting insanely competitive and exceptionally crowded, fast. Clearly, they see the accounting, bookkeeping & tax space as a market ripe for disruption and they are throwing tons of money and shiny technology into it to help automate as much as humanly possible. These are just a few examples of accounting tech startups raising a ton of money to offer accounting, bookkeeping & tax services to small businesses. Visor, an online tax service, raised $9 million in November 2018.īotkeeper raised $18 million in November 2018 for their online bookkeeping service. Hot off the press, Pilot in the US just raised $40 million for their online and tax bookkeeping service bringing their total funding to $59 million.īench, an online bookkeeping service based out of Canada, raised $18 million in funding back in January 2018. Enter the era of accounting tech startups.

Bench bookkeeping competition