Two weeks after buying online bookkeeping services provider Bench Accounting, acquirer Employer.com is engaging Bench customers to leverage their institutional knowledge.

The acquirer seeks to retain subject matter expertise from Bench and collect customer feedback to enhance the bookkeeping platform, said Matt Charney, chief marketing officer of Employer.com. 

San Francisco-based Employer.com will install “a lot of” former Bench associates in leadership roles by the end of the year as the two companies integrate, he added. 

Bench filed for bankruptcy in a Canadian court on Jan. 9, Charney said. 

Fintech Bench, launched in 2013, handles bookkeeping and taxes for small business owners by pairing “intuitive” software with human bookkeepers, according to its website. 

The Vancouver, Canada-based fintech informed customers on Dec. 27 that it would shut down. Former employees told TechCrunch that the company abruptly announced its plans to shut down without giving any notice or severance, while one former staffer said Bench continued making sales until the last day.

Bench was compelled to shutter after a lender demanded repayment of their venture debt, according to The Information.

However, within three days, Bench notified its customers that it had been bought by Employer.com, which worked “diligently behind the scenes to ensure a seamless transition.”

Employer.com learned about the bankruptcy after the notice was posted. Charney said it occurred on a Friday, and negotiations began the next day. He said Bench never shut down its service, but customers could not access their accounts for around 48 hours.

“While the challenges Bench recently faced were unexpected, we recognized an extraordinary opportunity to integrate their capabilities into our own suite of solutions,” Jesse Tinsley, CEO of Employer.com, said in a statement. “By combining forces, we can create even more value for Bench’s loyal customers while extending the reach and impact of Employer.com’s offerings.”

The HR tech company has decided to maintain the same pricing that Bench offered its customers while providing additional services like payroll, HR compliance, and new hiring through a single platform, according to Charney. Since Employer.com offers global capabilities, customers can expand into new markets and manage multinational staff without onboarding new vendors, he noted.

“Our goal with Bench is to let it continue to operate as Bench, to have it be essentially an autonomously run business, and to have it so that customers, in as much as we can with the transition, have minimal disruption to their product, their services and their contract, which is why we are abiding by all pricing that's in place,” Charney said. 

While the transition is still underway, more than 150 former Bench employees currently work for Employer.com. The company expects this number to rise as the teams are integrated and workforce plans are finalized, a person familiar with the matter told Banking Dive.

Bench has had its share of challenges at the leadership level. In November 2021, the company fired its then-CEO and co-founder Ian Crosby within days of raising $60 million in funding and after turning down a “highly lucrative acquisition offer,” to bring in a new CEO “to take the company to the next level,” Crosby wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Bench promoted its CFO Jean-Philippe Durrios to the CEO role in August 2022, only to replace him with Adam Schlesinger, an executive-in-residence at VC firm Inovia Capital, one of Bench’s investors, last October. 

Charney said that as part of the Employer.com acquisition, Bench customers can choose to continue using Employer.com services or opt-in to share data with Employer.com to download and import their records.

Thus far, around 85% of Bench customers have chosen to remain with the company, the person said.

Employer.com, which also acquired Recruiter.com and Bountyjobs.com, speeds up market entry and saves costs by acquiring existing businesses rather than building new models internally, Charney highlighted. 

The company also bid to acquire fintech Level, a recently shuttered startup that offers flexible employee benefits. Because the process is ongoing, Charney couldn't comment further. Employer.com's goal is to expand its customer base to include startups and leverage the expertise offered by those companies. 

“I see us expanding our customer base to potentially include what would be more aligned with startups or scaleups than just small business…their revenue sizes and head counts are often the same, but they certainly have different tools and solutions that they look at,” Charney said.