Bench — Tax documents

2022 | Product Design, Project Lead

Bench is the largest bookkeeping provider for small businesses in the US.

Context

When Bench helped their customers file for taxes, our bookkeepers would need to collect a set of document depending on their business structure and their tax filing situation.

Problem

Bookkeepers had no way of tracking what documents they had from customers nor did they have a definitive list of document that they needed from customers: they had to use their own individual system — often pen and paper — and a high degree of tacit knowledge to get the job done.

Solution

We built what essentially amounted to a to-do list generator that was stored on the Customer object and synced to Salesforce, where the existing bulk of document tracking happened.

Though simple in concept, taking away the manual aspect of tracking tax documents lead to a slew of quality of life and efficiency improvements. Most importantly, It meant that clients could be handed off between bookkeepers, we had visibility into and could track a client’s tax preparation progress, and had historical access to a customer’s documents to make their future tax filings even easier.