They’re going out of business!

No wait. They’re staying!

Employer.com bought / bailed them out. But Employer.com has no experience developing accounting software. 

There are other issues as referenced in this TechCrunch article like, 

“One former employee told TechCrunch some customers were still waiting for their 2023 books in September 2024, well past key tax deadlines.”

If you are a Bench client and you ask me what I think you should do, my answer is, “Run Forest Run!!!”

Now what?

Here’s how you can get what you need out of Bench and into a system you can trust.

If you’re asking me, I say get your data into QuickBooks Online. And since I learned that apparently about 20% (this is not verified, someone shared this with me) of Bench customers are eCommerce, we should also get you into Webgility for the eCommerce part. 

These are the very standard reports you should be able to get out of Bench for all the years you want. As a backup you should grab everything. Then you can decide what you want to import into QuickBooks Online. 

General Ledger

Here’s an article in their blog about this report, so they must have it. It is the most standard report that any application that claims to be an accounting system must have. 

A further look into their documentation suggests that this is available by request from your bookkeeper:

Bench FAQs for Tax Professionals | Bench Accounting

See item No. 11.

I would request this report for each year separately. Preferably this would be in Excel format. If they are only able to produce a PDF, you will need to convert that to excel and then there will probably be some cleanup needed.

Ultimately you’ll want this in a “flat file.” I will explain and demonstrate what this means and looks like in the video.

The rest of what we will need for each year separately are as follows:

Balance Sheet (monthly)

Profit and Loss (monthly)

Trial Balance (monthly)

Accounts receivable detail as of now (current)

Accounts payable detail as of now (current)

The reason we only need what is open as of now, is because anything that is not open has been paid, so we don’t need to concern ourselves with that. To reconstruct every invoice and every payment will be overkill and a lot of extra work / expense. Going forward we will record things that way of course, but reconstructing the past, this is not necessary.

We want to get this done quickly and effectively. 

Once we have these reports, we’ll need to do some work to prep everything for import in a spreadsheet. 

For this I am going to use Google Sheets and a product called SaasAnt Excel Transactions. 

The main thing we are going to need here is the General Ledger. This has absolutely everything. Every transaction. Every line item.

The rest of the reports are just to confirm accuracy.

Since I don’t have access to a Bench account, I grabbed a sample General Ledger Report from the QuickBooks Online Test Drive company.

Next I am going to show you how to go about prepping the report for import.

Then I will show you the process of mapping transactions in SaasAnt so you can import all of your transactions.

Prep the file

Click the image for a closer look. Your GL from Bench may look different, but it should be close to this. 

Next we want to get this into a “Flat File”

First, duplicate the tab so we preserve the original.

Notice how this report has sections grouped together based on the account? We need to get rid of those. I’ve already got a column with the account, so we can delete that first column, and then sort the entire dataset by date. 

This will force all of the sub-totals and blank rows that don’t have a date, to the bottom. Then we can delete all of those rows. 

Now we have a “Flat File” which means that it has rows and columns with data with no other structure. If you select a cell in the Date column and press CTRL+[Dn Arrow] you should get right to the end. 

Now we want to sort by Transaction Type and then within that by date:

This is important because we can only import one transaction type at a time.

I am doing this in Google Sheets, but it works the same way in Excel.

Let’s say I want to import the Bills first. We should carve those out onto their own tab.

Notice we have both sides of the transaction here, because we pulled the General Ledger which gives us every line item, all debits and all credits for every transaction. 

For purposes of importing Bills I only need the debits. Every bill is credited to Accounts Payable by definition. So next we’re going to sort this by Account, and remove all of the Accounts Payable (A/P) ones. 

But first, make sure there is a reference number for every single Bill. If there isn’t one, make one up. Then do the sort.

As I was numbering the transactions in my sample data, I noted there is one bill for the purchase of inventory. This brings up an interesting question. I don’t know how Bench handles inventory. I do understand that a good portion of Bench clients are eCommerce companies so I imagine they must. 

Assuming they do handle inventory, bills for inventory purchases have to be imported separately, because we have to map the products that were purchased, instead of using Categories which is what we do for all other bills.

If Bench does not handle inventory that means that all purchases have been booked to COGS. Then all Invoices or sales are recorded to income without being matched properly to COGS. I’m going to assume that you would not want to continue doing it that way. It’s extremely poor form for any accounting system. 

Either way at this point we want to complete that sort by account, remove the Accounts Payable Lines, and then move the Inventory purchase over to its own tab.

Next Sort by Number to get what remains back into the right order.

For these, Note the account column. In theory these would be the accounts as they appeared in Bench. If you set up the same accounts in QBO, then you are good to go. If not, then you’ll need to add a column for the “QBO Account” so you can map from the Bench version to the QBO version. The QBO version is what you need for the import.

Now looking at the Inventory transaction. Here whatever Bench has, we will need to map each line item to the product or service in QBO. This means of course that we have to set these items up in QBO. 

At this point, if you review the previous two screen shots, you have what you need in order to import these transactions into QuickBooks Online.

SaasAnt Excel Transactions

Now we’re ready for SaasAnt.

I’m going to skip setting up your account. That should be easy enough 

Also be aware that a free SaasAnt account limits you to only a certain amount of lines per import. Spend the $10 or whatever it is per month for a paid account. You can cancel it if you don’t think you need it after this, but I find it to be a very handy tool to have around!

Once you are in, click to Import Transactions.

In the next screen we’re going to choose the type of transaction we want to import.

Finally in this screen we either drag the Excel file or paste in the Google Sheets link:

Whichever way you do it (Excel or Google Sheets), the next screen will be the same.

You may have to click past the tips screen where it says “Start Creating Mapping”

First verify everything. A few extra seconds now can save a lot of time and grief later on…

Once you’ve confirmed everything above, you can start mapping.

Don’t get overwhelmed. Just look at this one field at a time. It may help to open up an Enter Bill screen in QBO so you can confirm each piece of information that you want to make sure you map.

On the left you’ll see the QuickBooks Field. In the drop down you choose which column in the tab you selected in the spreadsheet you prepared goes to that field. SaasAnt will give you the sample from the first row in that spreadsheet tab so you can 100% confirm you’ve got the right thing going to the right place.

The more you do these, the more comfortable you will get.

Expect to get errors the first time. Don’t get frustrated. Think of this as a learning process. SaasAnt will give you an error log that will explain the reasons for the errors. In many cases there is one error that applies to many or all of the failed lines, so while it may look like a lot to fix, after a quick analysis you find you only need to correct one quick thing and then re-run the import. And since you already have your mapping done, once you fix any issues with the data it is super-fast to run the import.