Technology

> BY KATE WILSON

Few people love their first job. Ian Crosby, cofounder and CEO of Bench accounting, was no different.

As an 18-year-old aiming to get into the video-gaming industry, he called the CEO of a Vancouver company to tell him what was wrong with his organization and how he could improve it. Crosby’s go-getter attitude caught the attention of the business, and he was hired to fill the only open role—bookkeeping. He quickly found, however, that it wasn’t a particularly fun job.

“I wanted to beta-test the video games, because that’s what everyone wants to do,” he tells the Georgia Straight with a laugh, sitting across a table at Bench’s downtown office. “I taught myself Visual Basic for Excel so I could automate as much of the bookkeeping job as I could so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time on it. But the bigger question was: ‘Why was hiring me your best option?’ It seemed crazy that there wasn’t a thing where you could go online and get a standard financial package.”

The idea became the foundation of what would become Bench. Rallying his best friend from UBC, Jordan Menashy, childhood pal Adam Saint, and Siberian coder Pavel Rodionov, Crosby aimed to create a standardized product that would do all the bookkeeping and accounting for small businesses or freelancers.

“Bench does the simple, sensible basics in terms of accounting,” Crosby says. “So you don’t have to know anything; you don’t have to think about it—you just come to us and know that you’re going to get taken care of and not have to worry about the IRS [or CRA] breathing down your neck.

“A lot of small businesses or freelancers view finance with anxiety,” he continues. “There’s this not-knowing aspect. You can go and teach yourself on the Internet, but then you’re wondering if that article was even right. You can hire someone but, typically, it’s really expensive. A small business can’t spend $10,000 on accounting, and accountants won’t work for that kind of money. So we really fill that gap.”

Bench differentiates itself from other accounting software by automating the laborious parts of the process and relying on humans to handle the more individual elements of a business’s finances. The company uses machine learning to better organize its customers’ debits and credits and become more efficient over time.

“A lot of people talk about efficiency and automation, but it’s like an engineer’s rendition of efficiency,” Crosby says. “They don’t really understand the problem, but they’ve connected two systems together and it’s now automated. The way we look at automation is by looking at a person and working out that they spend eight hours doing a job. How can we turn that into six hours? That’s how we’ve managed to create the cheapest offering but with high quality.”

Shortly after Bench launched in New York, the company made the choice to move back to Vancouver—a decision that afforded it more financial leeway. Returning to the city, however, had its own challenges. The Lower Mainland’s tech industry is rapidly expanding, boasting a startup ecosystem ranked among the top 15 in the world. As a result, local businesses have to compete because of an increasing talent shortage. Bench—now America’s largest bookkeeping service for small businesses and a growing player in the Canadian market—has set an ambitious target to hire 100 people by Christmas. Defying the city’s labour shortage, it’s well on the way to hitting that number.

“In the last month, we’ve made 30 offers,” Crosby says. “We’ve got another 70 to go. We’re hiring across the board, so sales, marketing, engineering, design, and a lot of bookkeepers.

“Bench has this unique program where you can come in no matter what your background is and learn the skills—so for bookkeepers, you can learn how to do bookkeeping. We’ve found there’s no correlation between things that society traditionally rewards and who’s actually going to do a good job—even more so in this bookkeeping world, because there’s almost no relation between an outside bookkeeping job and bookkeeping at Bench.

“We’re not looking for people who look a certain way or talk a certain way or have a particular background,” he continues. “We’ve had philosophy-diploma grads that are way more successful than topinstitution accounting grads. What we look for a lot more is just attitude and people who are just excited to go build something together.”