What happened to Bench, and how to protect your books

Bench was a Vancouver-based service that combined bookkeeping software with human bookkeepers for small businesses in the US. Its customers included many freelancers and sole proprietors. Below is what happened, with each date and its source, followed by what you can do so that no provider failure leaves you without your records. Facts come from news reports and from the companies' own statements; where a figure is a company's claim, it's marked as one.

Timeline

Why it hurt freelancers in particular

The timing was the problem. A shutdown at the end of December left customers with no access to the year's books just as they needed them for fourth-quarter estimated taxes in January and for the return in April. Many sole proprietors had no copy of their own records: the categorized transactions, the year-end profit and loss and the receipts lived inside Bench. Rebuilding a year of books from bank statements takes days of work, or a bookkeeper's fee in their busiest season, and the statements alone don't show which purchases were business ones.

If you're short on time before April 15, IRS Form 4868 gives an automatic six-month extension to file. It doesn't extend the time to pay: estimate what you owe and pay it by the deadline to avoid interest and the late-payment penalty.

Checklist: keep your books safe from any provider

1. Every month, download your bank and card statements as PDF from the bank itself, not from the bookkeeping app.
2. Every month or quarter, export the general ledger or transaction list as CSV, plus the profit and loss report as PDF.
3. Keep receipts in a folder you own (cloud drive or local), named by date and vendor, not only inside the app.
4. After year-end, export the full-year reports your preparer needs: profit and loss, balance sheet if you have one, and the transaction list.
5. Keep those files for as long as the IRS can ask about them: three years from filing in most cases, longer in some. See how long to keep business records.
6. Before you sign up anywhere, check how to export, in which formats, and whether exports stay available if you cancel.

Questions to ask any bookkeeping provider

• Can I export everything (transactions, categories, receipts, reports) myself, without asking support?
• Who owns my data under the terms of service, and what happens to it if the company is sold or closes?
• Is the bookkeeping done by staff, contractors or software, and in which country?
• Does the price depend on a promotion or a plan that may change at renewal? Bench's new owner blamed legacy pricing for losses on some customers.
• Will my CPA or enrolled agent get direct access, so someone outside the company also has the numbers?

If you're moving books to another service

Start from your own exports, not from the old provider's promises. Load the transaction CSV into the new app, check that the year's income and expense totals match your last profit and loss report, then reconcile each account to its bank statement. The bookkeeping software comparison lists current prices, and how to switch tools without losing data covers the cut-over plan for any app.

Where SoloWOS fits

SoloWOS isn't a bookkeeping service and doesn't replace one. You can log business expenses with receipts and export them to CSV for a month or the whole year, which gives you a copy of your costs and receipts outside any accounting app.