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Bench after accounting starts suddenly closed Purchased by Employer.com on Dec. 27 in a purchase, Bench customers are now learning that they can easily just take their financial information and leave.
And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch.
To recap: When Canada-based Bench, a startup that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shut down, it deprived thousands of businesses of access to accounting and tax records. Days later, the Bench announced that it would has been obtained At an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal by Employer.com.
Employer.com, a San Francisco-based HR tech company, focuses on payroll and recruiting, unlike Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax.
On the surface, Employer.com appears to be a relatively new company: its CEO, Jesse Tinsley, announced that he had received of the domain name in November for about $450,000. Tinsley is behind many HR, recruiting and recruiting related businesses including Recruiter.com and BountyJobs.
However, digging deeper, TechCrunch found out Employer.com is the dba for Recruiting.com Ventures. Tinsley Acquired Recruiter.com According to Employer.com CMO Matt Charney, in 2023, when it was a Nasdaq-listed company and went private. According to him, this institution has been operating since 2015.
In the consent form, Bench described Employer.com as “a highly successful and profitable organization with a proven track record of acquiring and managing companies over the past ten years.” CMO Charney said the company is actually profitable. However, Employer.com’s lack of accounting and tax expertise worries some Bench clients.
One Bench customer told TechCrunch that in two of the five years he’s been a Bench customer, he’s been asked to “hit the consent button” when trying to retrieve his records.
“The text on that page said that if you agree, then you agree to a non-refund, and I think that was very stupid and low-key,” he said. The company later changed the page to remove the note that it would not issue a refund.
Below is a screenshot of the original consent page before Employer.com updated it:
The customer said he was able to contact his credit card company and get a refund for the two years of prepaid service. But he was still dissatisfied with the treatment.
“It’s disappointing because I used to speak very highly of them and my clients used to work with them,” he said.
Another long-term customer said Employer.com “shows a message” on Bench offering users the option to continue with the service and accept the updated terms, or to stop the service and download the data. He chose the latter.
“A few days later I got a message saying you still need to accept the terms to export your data,” he said. “In this case, I just clicked ‘Accept’ to go ahead and deal with this general issue, but forcing users to do this to hand over their data is relatively questionable. By accepting these terms, I choose to continue using Bench services.”
In other words, it appears that Bench customers had to agree to transfer their information to Employer.com in order to access that information.
Below is a screenshot of what a customer who has been a Bench customer for 10 years received.
The client decided that he did not feel comfortable remaining a client because Employer.com “doesn’t look like that. He is considering his options for an alternative provider.
Another client, Michelle Gale, who serves as a business consultant at Core Insights Group, said she understood her husband’s company could download its data after agreeing to certain terms.
He told TechCrunch that the company has updated its consent page to remove the opt-out option from moving to Employer.com. Below is a screenshot of the updated page.
“They concealed that this new ‘presentation’ was the same as the previous ‘consent’ and was backed by an inadequate privacy policy for the financial services that Bench.com provides,” he said. “Furthermore, they offer discounts on recruiting services that seem dumb and inappropriate given the situation.”
He went on to describe Employer.com privacy policy like funny.
“This policy has nothing to do with financial data protection, and I received a bounce back when I tried to email legal@employer.com about this woefully inadequate policy,” he said.
The above complaints are reflected reddit thread full of comments from disappointed past customers.
For its part, Employer.com says that customers can access their data by giving consent, which gives Employer.com the right to “make their data available for download.”
“Once consented, customers can manage their data, including downloading, removing or continuing services on the platform,” Employer.com’s Charney told TechCrunch. “Once consent is granted, they can choose to continue with the same contract and prices as before or to cancel their service.”
As for customers seeking refunds for advance payments covering future services that the defunct Bench will no longer provide, Charney said they will need to contact Bench Accounting Inc.’s bankruptcy attorney or request a refund through Stripe.
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