After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on Dec. 27 and was bought by Employer.com, Bench clients are now learning they can’t just take their financials and walk away.
And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch.
To recap: When Bench, a Canadian-based startup that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shut down, it left thousands of businesses without access to their accounting and tax documents. Days later, Bench announced it would be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal.
San Francisco-based HR technology company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, 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 its acquisition of the domain name in November for about $450,000. Tinsley is behind a number of HR, onboarding and recruiting related businesses, including Recruiter.com and BountyJobs.
However, digging deeper, TechCrunch learned this Employer.com is a dba for Recruiting.com Ventures. Tinsley acquired Recruiter.com in 2023, when it was a Nasdaq-listed company, and took it private, according to Employer.com CMO Matt Charney. This entity has been in existence since 2015, he said.
In its consent form, Bench described Employer.com as a “highly successful and profitable organization with a proven track record of acquiring and operating companies over the past decade.” CMO Charney said the company is actually profitable. However, Employer.com’s lack of accounting and tax expertise worries some Bench clients.
A Bench customer told TechCrunch that when he tried to obtain his records for two of the five years he was a Bench customer, he was asked to “press a consent button.”
“Inside the text on that page they said if you consent then you agree to no refund and I think that was a very slimy, low thing,” he added. The company then later changed the page to remove the mention that a refund was not possible.
Here’s 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 two years of prepaid service. But he was still unhappy with the treatment.
“It’s disappointing because I used to talk so much about them and I had clients who worked with them,” he said.
Another longtime customer said Employer.com “showed a message” on Bench offering users the option to either continue service and accept the updated terms or stop service and data downloads. Choose the second one.
“A few days later I got a message saying that in order to export your data, you have to accept the terms,” he said. “In this case, I pressed accept just to go ahead and deal with this general issue, but it’s quite suspicious that I’m forcing users to do this in order to transfer their data. My acceptance of these terms has elected me to continue using the Bench services.”
In other words, it appears that Bench customers had to agree to transfer their data to Employer.com in order to access that data.
Below is a screenshot of what the customer, who has been a Bench customer for 10 years, received.
The customer decided that he was not comfortable with remaining a customer because Employer.com “doesn’t seem…familiar with the operation of this type of business.” He is considering his options for an alternative provider.
Another customer, Michelle Gayle, who serves as a business consultant for Core Insights Group, said she understood her company – which is owned by her husband – could download her data after agreeing to certain conditions.
He told TechCrunch that the company has updated its consent page, removing the opt-out option from being transferred to Employer.com. Below is a screenshot of the updated page.
“They have concealed the fact that this new ‘identification’ is the same as the previous ‘consent’ and is backed by a privacy policy that is inadequate for the financial services that Bench.com provides,” he said. “Furthermore, they are offering discounts to recruiting services that seem tone-deaf and inappropriate given this situation.”
He went on to describe Employer.com privacy policy as ridiculous.
“This policy has absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding financial data, and when I tried to email legal@employer.com about this woefully inadequate policy, I got a bounce message,” he added.
The above complaints are repeated a reddit thread full of comments from disappointed former customers.
For its part, Employer.com says customers can access their data by providing consent, which authorizes Employer.com to “make their data available for download.”
“After consenting, customers can manage their data, including downloading, deleting or continuing services on the platform,” Employer.com’s Charney told TechCrunch. “Once consent is given, they can choose to continue with the same contract and pricing as before or cancel their service.”
As for customers seeking refunds for down payments they made that cover future services that the defunct Bench will no longer provide, Charney said they should contact Bench Accounting Inc.’s bankruptcy trustee. or attempt to request a refund through Stripe.
After the publication, Charney provided the following quote about consent regarding customer data: “Simply put, the only way they can get their data is if they choose to give Employer.com permission to access their data, because the only other entity that currently has that data to begin with no longer exists and is in active bankruptcy. So if they don’t consent to give Employer.com access, then they’re not going to get that data at all. It’s really the only way we can make sure that any Bench customer, whether they choose to stay or not, can access these files. We will delete all data of any user who chooses to opt out immediately after receiving the data and will not retain their information at all.”
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