Silicon Valley Snake Oil

The old west is alive and well in Silicon Valley – and Silicon Valley North.
The closure of Bench Accounting Inc – self-described as the “world’s largest bookkeeping and tax advisory platform” – last week in Vancouver, would have been devastating to the Canadian economy.
Except that it wasn’t!

First of all, it wasn’t the “world’s largest bookkeeping and tax advisory platform”.
While the company seems to have told anyone who would listen that it has 35,000 regular customers, it turns out that it eventually sold “all 12,000 customers” to Employer.com in a private deal.
If you consider that the 5 tiers of customer plans averaged a little over $3,000 per month – that probably translates to about $36 million in annual revenue.
Compare that with H&R Block’s $3.61 billion in its 2024 audited statements (about 1,000 times as much) – and it doesn’t seem to have been very big at all.

According to the company “Bench used a proprietary software to complete bookkeeping. All information needed for bookkeeping services can be derived from your bank, credit card, and merchant accounts, once they have been connected to Bench’s services.”
Of course that isn’t very proprietary. My own accounting firm used the same approach – but substituted commercial spreadsheets for ‘proprietary software’.

Silicon Valley Snake Oil –

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Launch – June 16th, 2023

The MAIN STREET JOURNAL was launched online in 2023, as a kind of Canadian, small business counterpoint to the venerable WALL STREET JOURNAL (WSJ), established in New York City in 1889.

Canada’s small businesses are smaller than most people think.

This is true for people that work in small businesses, for policymakers, business schools, and the business press. The self-employed and other small business owners don’t ‘get no respect’ and yet about 73% of private sector employment in Canada is made up of the 2.85 million self-employed individuals, and 1.3 million small employer businesses which average less than 7 employees.

We believe it’s time that these workers, and the small business owner-managers that employ them, got some respect. What’s more, we believe that business schools and policymakers should get out of their ivory towers and take a walk on Main Street!