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Bench accounting services shutting down

bench.co

311–320 of 399 posts

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#311

They charged us for our next month of service the day before they shut down. That’s fraud.

Think of it as two months of read access rather than one month of read/write access!

> You will have until Friday, March 7th at 5:00pm ET to download your Bench data from this website.

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#312
post #283
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, they took down all of their accounting articles without notice. They had valuable summaries on various tax topics. Thankfully, Wayback Machine has archives of my bookmarks. All the more reason to self-host your own archived versions of bookmarks...

is there an easy solution for this? I recently found myself looking through old bookmarks from a long previous project and only about 1/3 worked and it made me sad.

This open-source bookmark manager, hoarder, was posted recently and offers local archiving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746

Recently, I've started messing around with vimwiki and saving pages as PDF or as safari web archive.

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#313
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a version readable for people without twitter accounts?

Swap the domain of the URL with nitter.poast.org https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/18727242319993817... More about nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Nitter's been dead for about a year at this point. I'm pretty sure any Nitter instance still running is using some abstract method and not the actual Nitter system.

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#315
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swap the domain of the URL with nitter.poast.org https://nitter.poast.org/ianwcrosby/status/18727242319993817... More about nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Nitter's been dead for about a year at this point. I'm pretty sure any Nitter instance still running is using some abstract method and not the actual Nitter system.

Yea I don't think there's an alternative after Elon made changes to Twitter's API

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#317
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think cash basis precludes having a liability on the books for un-delivered services. It just means you recognize the revenue when the payment is received. Lots of small companies use cash basis because it's simpler and easier to understand. IANAA.

I thought by definition you never have any revenue liability on the books (no unearned revenue) with cash basis because you’re recognizing the revenue on the date the cash is received. Nothing is deferred therefore no liability.

If someone pays up front for a service to be delivered over a period, you have a liability, no matter whether on a cash or accrual basis.

The difference is that you can recognize the revenue on receipt of the cash, but at the same time, you also recognize the liability to deliver the service (based on COGS etc for the liability).

The liability reduces as you expense (and actually pay on a cash basis) the cost of supplying the service.

At least that's my non-accountant idea of how it works.

I may be completely wrong.

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#318
Glad I dropped Bench a few months back for my own solution. They started out great, but over the past 18 months, I was always having to reconnect via Plaid and then be told way after the fact to manually upload bank statements because my data wasn't syncing. Even worse, I started having to manually categorize nearly all transactions despite there being existing identical transactions they could auto-categorize from. Finally just built an app that imports data from my bank and lets me bulk categorize/fuzzy search transactions.

Re: Bench accounting services shutting down

#320

Perhaps I'm old school, but how hard is it to hire a bookkeeper part time, a CPA a few times a year, and use Quickbooks? Was there some special value that Bench provided?

I use GnuCash for my personal accounting, and have a flow down to import my monthly cashflow and categorize everything into my ledger. What does such accounting software provide on top of that?
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