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Botkeeper vs. Bench

We've compiled a few key differences between two automated accounting solutions: Botkeeper and Bench. Choosing the right automated bookkeeping solution is critical, and we want you to have the best information possible to do so — that's why we created this Botkeeper review. Ready to see the power of Botkeeper? Click below to book a live presentation. 

 

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Overview

Don’t settle for incomplete platforms.

A true automation-based bookkeeping platform will help you operate your end-to-end bookkeeping programs. While many bookkeeping solutions are available today to help streamline specific bookkeeping tasks, not all solutions are built comprehensively. This page will help you understand the differences between Botkeeper and Bench, so you can decide which bookkeeping solution is best for your firm.

 

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Here’s an overview of Botkeeper and Bench.

Botkeeper

Botkeeper offers firms the ability to choose the right approach for each of their clients: tech-only gives firms total control over the Botkeeper platform (automated transaction categorization, exception surfacing, teak and project management, and much more), while tech plus add-on services provides your firm with dedicated, professional accountants who can both run your Botkeeper platform and offer much more according to the service plan chosen. In short, Botkeeper delivers a full-suite bookkeeping and pre-accounting solution to accounting firms and their clients.

The powerful combination of our proprietary AI and machine learning with skilled accountants makes for a complete, end-to-end solution.

Bench

Bench Accounting provides bookkeeping and tax services tailored for small businesses—it's not designed specifically for accounting firms. It combines its software with dedicated bookkeepers who handle transaction categorization, bank reconciliation, and financial statement preparation. Bench also offers tax preparation and filing. Bench helps small business owners streamline their finances, save time, and gain financial clarity.

 

Bookkeeping Services

Automating the time-consuming and laborious aspects of bookkeeping is where Botkeeper shines. While Bench helps find coding errors by reviewing the books, Botkeeper actually categorizes transactions automatically. It continuously monitors what's coming into your clients' QBO or Xero instances, surfacing exceptions automatically. Botkeeper's machine learning provides accurate automated categorizations from millions of transactions, learning from your changes as it goes. But it also creates a unique model of your client's transactions—so it isn't overlooking the individualized ways your clients conduct business.

Bench also automates transaction categorization, but there are no bespoke models and limited machine learning—that creates generalized rules rather than learning specific transaction categorizations. Bench doesn't offer automated reconciliations, and isn't able to automatically surface exceptions. Categorized transactions flow into Bench's proprietary general ledger—it doesn't integrate with QBO or Xero. And because it's primarily aimed at businesses, many of the functions a bookkeeper at an accounting firm needs are missing from Bench's features.

But of course, your firm still has plenty of work that neither Botkeeper nor Bench automate—which is why Botkeeper goes a step farther with our four add-on services packages.

Bench offers some additional services, but they are limited in scope.

 

 

 

Technology & Features

Finding the right automated accounting solution for all your bookkeeping needs can become the foundation of your practice and the differentiator you need to grow. As a result, it’s important to seek out technology and features that fit your firm, staff, AND client base. This is why we’ve made Botkeeper with our accounting partner firms in mind—we can grow and adapt our platform to your organization’s wants and needs, offering unsurpassed value for your clients.

Bench is built to serve businesses; lack of support for common bookkeeping systems like QBO and Xero, inability to auto-reconcile bank or credit card accounts, no automated continuous review and surfacing of exceptions, and a far higher price point than Botkeeper make it a difficult for accounting firms under most circumstances.

Botkeeper leverages proprietary machine learning technology to handle labor-intensive bookkeeping tasks by processing and categorizing transactions at an incredibly high accuracy level. This goes FAR beyond static rules—our global models are continuously refining, while your client's specific model improves with each transaction successfully coded or updated. This is smart tech that adapts.

As an end-to-end bookkeeping solution, Botkeeper integrates with QBO and Xero, auto-categorizing and matching transactions, surfacing exceptions, automatically reconciling bank and credit card accounts and recording of principal/interest loan splits. It also offers centralized communication, task and project management, secure password management, and a close tracker that helps you see at a glance how closing is proceeding.

Interacting with your team and even your clients is made simple with Activity Hub, a central space for all comments made anywhere across the platform, while Client & User Management helps you control access and permissions, customize your portal with your logo and favicon, and more. Botkeeper's Documents feature incorporates a secure portal for document storage, exchange, and review—it even includes version tracking and a customizable folder structure. And all of it is super-secure, with 256-bit encryption that's SOC 2 Type 2 accredited.

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Average accuracy on transaction categorized by Botkeeper

Number of new clients you can bring on daily with Botkeeper

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Average time saved by clients with Botkeeper

 

Training and Support

When your firm streamlines its bookkeeping with Botkeeper, your support and training needs will be unique.

To accommodate all needs cases, Botkeeper offers different service tiers. While everyone gets in-app step-by-step guides, access to our comprehensive Knowledge Base, live chat, monthly group training  webinars and access to Botkeeper University (our vibrant user community), we also offer additional options:

Our Enhanced Onboarding & Support tier adds our four-week Essentials training course, a quarterly strategy consultation, and an assigned client success associate. This plan is included when adding 11-50 entities, but it available for a one-time fee if you are adding fewer than 11.

Choose Premium Onboarding & Support to add your own outreach concierge and everything in the Enhanced plan. This plan is included when adding 51 or more entities, but it available for a one-time fee if you are adding fewer than 51.

Bench offers some in-app AI assistance, and human assistance.

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Security

As a firm, you want to ensure that your clients' personal and financial information is held in the strictest confidence. Before choosing a solution, ask about the level of security employed and whether the vendor's security standards are in line with those of your industry.

Botkeeper’s automated bookkeeping solution takes security seriously, with industry-standard SOC 2 Type 2 accreditation, two-factor authentication, and 256-bit encryption for data at rest and data in transit.

SOC 2 Type 2 accreditation means:

  • Botkeeper has the required data security controls in place to protect customer data against unauthorized access.

  • Botkeeper can detect anomalies and security incidents across its entire ecosystem.

  • In addition to preventing risk situations, Botkeeper can quickly repair damage and restore functionality in the event of infrastructure or system failures.

  • Botkeeper’s security controls are both correctly designed AND function as intended.

Botkeeper’s SOC 2 Type 2 accreditation is granted by an industry best, reputable independent third party, and Botkeeper renews the report annually with continuous testings. That means any information shared with Botkeeper is protected to the highest current standards, and you can rest easy knowing your data is in good hands.

Botkeeper does not collect any personal information about you unless you voluntarily provide it to us, and it does not sell, rent, or lease your personal information to third parties without your consent. Your personal information is secured from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure, using the following methods for this purpose: SSL Protocol; Two Factor Authentication; and Database Encryption.

Botkeeper is also a member of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX), a nonprofit dedicated to unifying the financial industry around a common, interoperable, royalty-free standard for secure and convenient consumer and business access to their financial data.

Bench maintains SOC 2 compliance, encrypts data with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 256) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), and only accesses transaction data based on client-defined settings, ensuring privacy.

 

 

MEASURE ROI

Measure the performance of your bookkeeping when you integrate an automated solution, and see what your firm is able to achieve.

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Bench provides bookkeeping software and a team of professional bookkeepers to handle most of the bookkeeping work for a business. This saves hours of employee time working on books.

Botkeeper goes a bit farther. Our solution allows you to automate bookkeeping and pre-accounting procedures so you can dedicate more time and resources to your client base. Built-in collaboration via task and project management as well as centralized communication cuts down on emails, texts, or prolonged water cooler conversations. And while our investigations have shown time savings for firms at or in excess of 50% for bookkeeping activities, we've even included a module called Transaction Insights that allows you to see the savings for yourself.

 

Cost of Ownership

The cost of ownership is a way for you to assess the long-term value of an automated accounting solution to your firm. While the cost of the package is certainly a key component to keep in mind, it's not the only cost that you should take into account.

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Bench starts at $299 per client/mo. for their Bookkeeping package. The Bookkeeping & Tax package is $599 per client/mo.

Botkeeper’s pricing for our Infinite (tech-only) package is $69/entity/month, and that includes everything the platform can do. Looking for even more? Add services to bring professional accountants into the fold for those clients with even more complex needs.

 

SCALABILITY

As the bookkeeping decision-maker, you probably think about your business every day (probably multiple times a day). Finding a bookkeeping solution that works for you today is as important as finding a solution that continues to work for you in the future. Will the solution you pick today be able to grow as you and your clients grow?

As the bookkeeping decision-maker, you probably think about your business every day (probably multiple times a day). Finding a bookkeeping solution that works for you today is as important as finding a solution that continues to work for you in the future. Will the solution you pick today be able to grow as you and your clients grow?

Bench is designed for businesses. Neither its processes nor its pricing are designed to accommodate multiple entities, making it tricky to scale effectively.

Botkeeper supports small, medium, or large accounting firms — we’re talking to all of you! By both managing AND reviewing the books, Botkeeper saves enormous amounts of time allowing firms of all sizes to scale endlessly. Need to add more clients? We can take it. You'll save precious time all along the process, not just at the end.

Botkeeper is much more than just software.

Choosing a bookkeeping automation provider is a crucial decision. Considerations such as ease of use, security, features, and more are top of mind, Botkeeper isn't only thinking in terms of selling software,

  • Free Training & Education — Botkeeper resources are available to help you and your entire team learn best practices and successfully execute tactics that grow your business. Take a look at the dozens of resources available, and get started today.

  • Firm-first mentality — Botkeeper doesn't compete with firms. Our platform isn't available to businesses directly, because we support the accounting profession and understand the expertise required to do the job right.

  • Deployment — When you start using Botkeeper, you'll have a dedicated team to help you get started with the software, and technical setup tasks, and execute your first successful dive into the tool. 

    Learn more about Botkeeper Deployment here.

We've built the Botkeeper Platform to be easy for Accounting Professionals and their clients to use. That's why we're happy to share reviews of everyday professionals using Botkeeper to grow better, just like you. Click below to request a demo.

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Resources

The beauty of Botkeeper is its ability to scale and adapt to our growing business. After using Botkeeper for only 6 months, we’ve been able to save 30 hours per week on transaction categorizing, 5 hours per week of reconciling deposits, and 10 hours per month on reconciling revenue for just one of our clients! With bookkeeping running seamlessly with Botkeeper, I’m able to focus my time on reviewing output and making recommendations to my clients.
TM2 Tiffany Miller
Tiffany Miller
Tm2

Grow your business like a team twice your size.

Bring your team, tools, and data together to drive high-impact efficiency in your bookkeeping department- in less time.

 

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