351–360 of 399 posts
I don't know much about accounting, but isn't shutting down an accounting service three days before the end of the year a huge slap in the face if the clients of the service, maybe even fraudulent? And if it is, is it really normal in this sector and "part of the deal" of working with startups?
Pages which are now mysteriously offline but still visible on way back machine
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Sorry but is there some source about this for a lame person?
I’m a CFO and was a layperson on this until I started having to deal with it. I don’t have any resources other than my work experience with a few companies that have debt covenants. First, they can be rather arbitrary as they’re literally made up for each deal and meant to align somewhat to the growth story that’s being “sold” to the lender during the debt issuance; they’re negotiated between lender/borrower so take…
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Not sure if sarcasm, but in case it is not: in theory accountants could see this coming but most benchmates were junior book keepers, with no visibility into their employer's financials.
If I can't see the books I move on. The only reason people hide books is because they are bad. You can't expect a bunch of mushrooms to help you grow a company. Employees deserve to keep tabs on the financial health of the company. Last company I was at was an ESOP. Talk about a scam. They are under no obligation to let employees monitor the health of their "retirement plan." It's a tax shelter for business owners wh…
Are you saying that as a software developer, or you work with other things?
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It seems unlikely they didn't know they were going down until just a few days before having to shut down services. And given that this happens during the holidays, ot wouldn't surprise me if some customers don't find out about this until after the window to extract your data has expired. Or people have to work on fixing this mess who were supposed to be on PTO.
It is irony of all ironies that an accounting services company would be surprised about their own insolvency. In reality, they had to have known for months. The director were probably just holding out for a Hail Mary funding injection. This is bad bad business, especially for a financial services company.
Interesting that they didn’t even consider doing an “AI pivot”
hmmm another "unicorn" from vancouver that bites the dust, i remember one with an owl as mascot logo can't recall what they did or their names but many ppl from vancouver mentioned it while ago. I wonder why that place can't compete with American cities, i think even Toronto /Montreal is more successful than Vancouver. for one the low salary must be demoralizing on top of being one of the most expensive cities in the…
This is another way of saying American tech VCs throw a lot of money around, often into poor investments, in the hope of cornering the market on $nextBigThing. In a world where any Tom, Dick and Harry can run up massive losses and still IPO through an SPAC, how is that an indicator of anything good?
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I’m a CFO and was a layperson on this until I started having to deal with it. I don’t have any resources other than my work experience with a few companies that have debt covenants. First, they can be rather arbitrary as they’re literally made up for each deal and meant to align somewhat to the growth story that’s being “sold” to the lender during the debt issuance; they’re negotiated between lender/borrower so take…
Thanks for such a nice explanation!
I can’t imagine the frustration you’re going through if you’re a Bench user. Paying for a service and not getting what you expect, especially when it comes to your taxes is no joke. Instead of having to start from scratch, our team at Kick is moved quickly to build these resources to help prior Bench customers: 1. Free Bench migration 2. Free 2024 Bookkeeping review calls 3. Free Daily Live Q&As (coming soon) We’re m…
Also, it seems a bit odd to me that the "balance sheet" ability is two non-free pricing levels deep into your service. Isn't that a baseline expectation?
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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
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.
always so annoying to find bookkeepers at a fair price. In particular, charging on expenses or on transaction volume isn't aligned with value generated. Instead, bookkeepers should charge on "anomalous transactions identified and corrected" https://www.ledgerup.ai/ (a YC co) has a bookkeeping agent integrated with quickbooks. I've migrated to them after trying Fondo (also a YC co) and a local SMB bookkeeper in the pa…