After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on Dec. 27 and was acquired in a sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t simply take their financial data and walk away.
And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch.
To summarize: When Bench, a Canada-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, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax.
On the surface, Employer.com appears to be a relatively new company: Its CEO, Jesse Tinsley, announced the purchase of the domain name in November for about $450,000. Tinsley is behind a host of HR, onboarding and recruiting businesses, including Recruiter.com and BountyJobs.
However, digging deeper, TechCrunch learned that Employer.com is a dba for Recruiting.com Ventures. Tinsley bought Recruiter.com in 2023 when it was a Nasdaq-listed company and took it private, according to Employer.com CMO Matt Charney. That entity has existed 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 running companies over the past decade.” CMO Charney said the company is actually profitable. However, Employer.com’s lack of accounting and tax expertise is a concern for some Bench clients.
A Bench customer told TechCrunch that when he tried to retrieve his data for two of the five years he was a Bench customer, he was asked to “press an approval button.”
“Within the text of that page they said if you consent then you agree not to be reimbursed and I think that was a very weak and low thing to do,” he added. The company then changed the page to remove mention of not being able to get 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 two years of service he paid in advance. But he was still unhappy with the treatment.
“It’s disappointing because I used to speak highly of them and had clients working with them as well,” he said.
Another longtime customer said Employer.com “displayed a message” on Bench offering users a choice to either continue service and accept the updated terms or terminate service and download data. He chose the latter.
“A few days later I got a message saying that in order to export your data, you still have to accept the terms,” he said. “In this case, I agree to just go ahead and address this general issue, but it’s relatively questionable to force users to do this to transfer their data. Acceptance of these terms elected me to continue using Bench’s services.”
In other words, it appears that Bench customers had to agree to transfer their data to Employer.com in order to have access to that data.
Below is a screenshot of what the customer received who had been a Bench customer for 10 years.
The customer decided that he did not feel comfortable remaining a customer because Employer.com “doesn’t seem to be familiar with the actual 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 at Core Insights Group, said she understood her company — which is owned by her husband — would be able to download her data after accepted some conditions.
She told TechCrunch that the company updated its consent page, getting rid of the option to opt out of being transferred to Employer.com. Below is a screenshot of the updated page.
“They have hidden the fact that this new ‘acknowledgment’ is the same as the previous ‘consent’ and is backed by a privacy policy that is not appropriate for the financial services that Bench.com provides,” she said. , they are offering discounts on recruitment services which seem dull and inappropriate given this situation.”
She went on to describe Employer.com’s privacy policy as laughable.
“This policy has absolutely nothing to do with the retention of financial data, and when I tried to email legal@employer.com about this woefully inadequate policy, I received a bounce back message,” she added.
The above complaints have been echoed in 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 opting in, 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 price as before or cancel their service.”
As for customers seeking refunds for advance payments they made that cover future services that the defunct Bench will no longer provide, Charney said they will need to contact the bankruptcy trustee for Bench Accounting Inc. or attempt to request a refund through Stripe.
After the release, Charney provided the following quote about consent around customer data: “Simply put, the only way they can get their data at all is if they choose to give Employer.com permission to access their data because the only other entity that currently has that data in the first place no longer exists and is in active bankruptcy proceedings. So if they refuse to give Employer.com access, then they won’t get that data at all. It’s really the only way we can make sure that any Bench customer, whether they choose to remain so or not, can have access to that data all data of any user who chooses to opt out immediately after downloading the data and will not retain any of their information at all.”
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.
Want to get in touch with a tip? Email me at maryann@techcrunch.com or send me a message on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also drop a note to the entire TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com. For more secure communications, click here to contact uswhich includes SecureDrop and links to encrypted messaging apps.
