Leaving Bench: How to Get Your Books Out and What to Check Before You Trust Them

TL;DR: Download everything from Bench before you decide anything, including the years you are not thinking about. Then check the export the way an accountant would: does the general ledger tie to the balance sheet, does each month reconcile to the statements, and are the receipts actually there. Whatever is finished stays finished and nobody needs to pay to rebuild it. Whatever is not is backlog, and TidyMonth quotes backlog as a fixed price in writing before anything is charged.

If you were a Bench customer at the end of 2024, you already know the feeling of opening the site and finding the service gone. Most people who search for a way out are not reacting to that week anymore. They are deciding whether to keep paying, and they want to leave with their records intact this time.

This guide is the practical version of that decision. The dated record first, because the timeline is what people misremember. Then the export, which is the part that actually matters and the part most owners put off. Then what a fixed-price month looks like if you want a person to own it.

What happened, with dates

December 27, 2024. Bench emailed customers and posted a notice on its site that the platform was immediately inaccessible. At the time it had over 12,000 small-business customers and described itself as North America's largest bookkeeping service for small businesses. The notice went up days before year end, which is why so many owners found out while assembling tax records.

December 30, 2024. Employer.com announced it was acquiring Bench, three days after the shutdown. It said it would revive the platform and that customers could either continue service under the new ownership or move their data to another provider.

January 7, 2025. Bench filed for insolvency in Canada, reporting liabilities of about $65.4 million and roughly $2.8 million in cash.

January 2025 onward. Operations resumed under the Bench brand as a subsidiary of the acquirer. Today the Bench home page describes the business as part of Mainstreet, a bundle that includes bookkeeping, taxes, banking, and entity formation.

Where the public record stands as of September 10, 2026. It is mixed, and it is worth reading both halves. On Trustpilot, Bench carries a TrustScore of 4.2 out of 5 across roughly 1,353 reviews, with positive reviews about bookkeepers and response times, and negative ones citing staff turnover and serious delays on annual tax work. On the Better Business Bureau, the profile shows a D- rating, no accreditation, 23 complaints closed in the last three years, and 21 customer reviews averaging 1 out of 5, with recurring themes of billing disputes, bookkeeper turnover, and errors in prior work.

Two things are true at once. Plenty of customers are fine. Enough are not that the complaint record is visible. We are not going to tell you which experience yours will be, and anyone who does is guessing.

What the timeline does justify is a habit: do not let the only copy of your financial records live in a service you do not control. That was the lesson in December 2024 and it applies to us too.

Step 1: Get your data out, today, before you decide anything

Do this whether you stay or go. It costs an hour and it removes the thing that made 2024 painful.

Download from the app rather than asking for a file. Bench's help documentation covers the reports available in the platform: an overview, the income statement, the balance sheet, 1099 reports in the Tax Center, and the year-end financial statements, which sit under My Books, then Documents, then Processed Documents, then the Tax folder. Its FAQ says Excel exports of your financial documents are available at any point.

Take every year, not just this one. Owners download the current year and stop. Your accountant will want the prior year to confirm opening balances, and a lender or a buyer may want three. Pull each year's statements and each year's year-end package.

Take the transaction detail, not only the summaries. A profit and loss is a summary. The general ledger is the actual record, line by line, and it is what anyone rebuilding or reviewing your books will work from. Bench's FAQ says the year-end package includes the profit and loss, balance sheet, general ledger, and a running list of journal entries.

Collect the source documents separately. This is the gap to plan for. Bench's own FAQ says receipts and complete 1099 filing data have to be collected separately from the year-end package. Receipts are the part you cannot reconstruct later, so gather them now: your email, the vendor portals, the card statements.

Save the files somewhere you own. A folder in your own cloud drive, named by year. Not a link, not a login. Bench's FAQ says login access is not removed when a subscription ends, and that is a reasonable policy, but the whole point of this exercise is not depending on it.

If your books are behind as well as in transit, the order of work matters. Export first, then read how to catch up on bookkeeping when you're months behind.

Step 2: Check the export before you trust it

An export is not the same thing as finished books. Here is what to check, roughly in the order a bookkeeper would.

Does the general ledger tie to the financial statements? Total the ledger's activity for a year and compare it with that year's profit and loss and balance sheet. If they do not agree, something was adjusted outside the detail, and you want to know that before anyone builds on it.

Is there a trial balance? A trial balance is one page that lists every account with its ending balance, and it is the fastest way to see that the books balance. It is not in the standard report list, so ask for it if you want it. Failing that, the balance sheet plus the general ledger gets you to the same answer with more reading.

Which months are actually closed? This is the question that decides what you pay to fix. Go month by month, account by account: checking, savings, every card, every payment processor. A month is closed when every account's ending balance in the books matches that month's statement and nothing is sitting uncategorized or flagged as a question. The most recent month where every account passes is the month your books are reliable through. Everything after it is backlog, no matter what the reports look like.

Are the reconciliations evidenced? "Reconciled" should mean someone compared the books to a statement and the difference was zero. If you cannot see that anywhere, treat the month as unverified and check one yourself: take a statement's closing balance and compare it with the books' balance on that date.

Are the receipts there? Spot-check ten transactions, weighted toward travel, meals, large one-off purchases, and anything that could be mistaken for personal. A category with a receipt is a record. A category without one is a guess your accountant will have to defend.

Do the balance sheet accounts make sense? Look for the usual leftovers: an "uncategorized income" or "ask my accountant" account with a balance in it, old receivables from clients who paid years ago, a loan balance that never moves. See old balances and stale bank rules.

Are transfers booked as transfers? Money between your own accounts, and card payments out of checking, are not income or expense. This is the single most common way a set of books overstates revenue. See money moved between your own accounts.

Write down what you find. If eleven months are clean and one is not, you have a one-month problem, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a bigger job than you have.

Step 3: What a fixed-price month looks like

If you want a person to own the monthly work from here, this is what TidyMonth is and what it costs. All of it is published, so you can compare it against anything else before you talk to anyone.

You see the catch-up price in writing before anything is charged. It starts with a Books Check, which is free and yours to keep whether or not you hire us. You answer a few questions, a person replies within one business day with the one thing needed to look, and the check reports which month your books are reliable through, how many months need catch-up, what was checked, and what could not be verified from the records available. Nothing in your accounts is changed while we look. No bank login and no card.

Up to three months of backlog is included. It comes with the $199 per month subscription rather than as an extra line. Four to six months behind starts from $399, and seven to twelve months starts from $799, each a one-time charge alongside your first month. Those base prices cover up to three accounts. More than twelve months behind, more than three accounts on paid catch-up work, or more than about 300 transactions a month needs a review first, and then you get a number. These are starting prices, not a quote for your business. Your number comes from your Books Check, in writing, before anything is charged.

A bookkeeper reviews every close. The monthly work runs on Prosper, the system TidyMonth uses to do it, and a person reviews the close before you see it. You answer the business questions only you can answer, which for most service businesses is a handful a month. You get a profit and loss, a balance sheet, a close packet each month, and a year-end package your accountant can work from.

You can export anytime and cancel anytime. Your ledger and financial reports are available to export from your account, not on request. Cancellation is from your account too. There is no setup fee and no hourly billing.

If the first close is not worth it, the first month is refunded. Your first $199 payment comes back in full, no questions asked, if you tell us within 30 days of your first close. Completed catch-up work is not covered by that refund, because it is work already done.

The monthly service fits a US cash-basis service business with one entity, USD transactions, up to six accounts, and up to about 300 transactions a month. Inventory, job costing, multiple entities, and multiple currencies are outside the scope. We would rather say that here than after you have paid.

What we do not do, and what your CPA still decides

TidyMonth does not file taxes. If your current provider bundles filing with bookkeeping, that is a real part of what you are replacing, and it needs its own plan and its own deadline. What you get from us is a year-end package your accountant can work from without chasing you for context.

Everything else on the tax side stays with your CPA: your accounting basis, how owner money is treated for your entity type, what filings your contractors require, whether a purchase is an asset or an expense, and how to handle a year that was already filed on numbers that later turned out to be wrong. Ask before anyone touches a filed period.

Our job is narrower and we would rather state it plainly. We keep the records complete, reconciled, and traceable, and we tell you what we could not verify.