Both Pilot and Bench can offer you tech-forward bookkeeping. But only Pilot provides reliable reporting and a dedicated financial expert who gets to know your business.
You can rely on Pilot to handle your back-office finances and tax prep, as well as trusted advice for managing cash and growing from a CFO advisor.
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Pilot’s software is excellent— 4.9 out of 5 stars on Capterra. But you also get a team. That’s the real secret to trusting your finances: Smart, tech-enabled people who’ve done this for 2,000+ other companies.
Pilot provides industry-specific guidance on managing your margins, building dashboards, creating board presentations, calculating sales commission, and more. They’ve helped companies raise $2.1 billion.
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Clean financial books provide a foundation for making great business decisions. You’ll know what products or services are profitable and when to hire. Because Pilot’s are done by experts, they’re GAAP compliant.
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Pilot has continuously served our customers since 2017 and isn’t going anywhere. We apply everything we know about scaling startups and managing cash to ourselves, and customers love that they know we’ll be around.
Serious owners who need stability
Founders who want a focus on tax and CFO
Startups seeking true expertise in their business model
Venture-funded startups or those soon to raise
Trusted by 1000s of builders
We tried to write a more balanced description but here’s the reality. On December 27, 2024, Bench ran out of cash and shut down. It was then acquired. At the time of the shutdown, some customers said it hadn’t done their books for nine months. Now it is operational again. Many customers have left.
Whereas Pilot lets you use QuickBooks, which is portable, Bench forces you to move onto their custom platform. This means it isn’t interoperable with the rest of your finance stack. If you ever want to move off, your books are stuck.
Bench claims you can talk to your advisor anytime but as their shutdown and the TechCrunch article about it showed, this was not the case. Employees told journalists they were disillusioned by successive layoffs. The former CEO declared the company had lost its way.
One of the top complaints is there is no customization. Former customers report having to export their data to Excel to fix it so they can present it to their board. This is time most founders can’t afford.
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Accept the risk
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Have no need for customization
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Will just export the data to Excel anyway
Trevor, Co-Founder at Ethos, felt the service quality at Bench wasn’t good, but it worked well enough. Then it shut down. He and his co-founder knew they knew they needed more stability. Pilot gives them total confidence so they can get back to building the product—“I don’t even have to think about it,” says Trevor.
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Nothing has ever met up to the service quality I was looking for before Pilot.
Rely on Pilot like an extension of your team
You get personalized attention to streamline your operating and processes. Plus, a tax accountant, CFO, controller, and more.
The benefit to working with Pilot over Bench is the human touch and the experience.
Save countless hours on reporting
Pilot streamlines your financial reporting, making it easier to communicate financial health and runway to internal and external stakeholders.
I think it’s easy to miss how important people are when you’re evaluating accounting services. Look for that human element.
Make stronger financial decisions
With Pilot handling bookkeeping and accurate financials, you can focus on strategic decisions without getting bogged down in the day to day.
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