Using Botkeeper from its Early Days at Kinnami Software, a Seed-Stage Startup

Botkeeper absolves Kinnami from the drudgery and hassle of book keeping. Basically, all I have to do is ensure the receipts are there, and then all book keeping is handled. This makes filing the annual tax returns less painful as Botkeeper already has all the information the accounting firm needs to create the tax return. At Kinnam, we do not have nor want large teams of people to handle administration. Outsourcing book keeping to Botkeeper is a great way to solve part of that problem.

Pros

The best thing about Botkeeper's software is that it is invisible in the sense that it doesn't dictate how you should use it to collect information that it needs, and so it's very easy to fit into your workflow. Historically, Botkeeper had its own Dropbox-style integration, and now it is switching to Google Drive. This means that providing receipts and other information is as simple as putting the digital scan of a receipt into the Google Drive folder. Or if you prefer, you can upload files by hand using the portal. Secondly, their portal provides nice views that show the state of your company's finances.

Cons

Botkeeper is a young company, and so growing pains are painful. The system has undergone several major changes during the 2 years that I've been using it, and those transitions were not completely smooth. However, to date, all problems were successfully resolved and the team really worked to address them, and those problems were rare.

Botkeeper

Right now I'm only testing the Botkeeper team on my most important client. They have consistently performed (or outperformed) whenever I had feedback for them. This bodes well for the future when I expect to add at least 5-10 more clients in the future!

Pros

I just hung out the shingle on my new CPA firm, and I want to use a strategic partner like Botkeeper to help me scale. So I love that I can white label the platform while having a dedicated team of accountants assigned to my clients.

Cons

I feel like their portal still has room for improvement even after their recent upgrade. One of the worst problems was the difficulty editing the dashboards for your own needs. That was one of the improvements on this last rollout.

Mediocre platform; mediocre product; mediocre results

Pros

It's ok-ish if you don't know anything about bookkeeping and you're on a super super tight budget

Cons

Response times were slow Struggled to get anyone to answer basic questions about my SLA, bill, contract, etc. Regular errors on the GL

Saved me money

I love the management reports and up to date books the most. Also, they respond quickly with anything I need, they are capable with even the most complicated unrecognized revenue reporting, fast, responsive, and nice in their communications. My business is a corporation, and botkeeper has saved us a lot of money.

Pros

I liked their flexibility in working with my Quick Books online - my super complicated - incorporation with employees - setup! I saved over $2000 per month in accounting costs by switching to botkeeper. I'm hoping they don't raise their prices. They are super fast, and able to handle my business accounting which has "unrecognized revenue" calculations to do each month, and everything is in GAAP format "ACCRUAL" based because I was setup to take on investors and sell common stock from an equity crowdfunding fundraise. I would say I love their MANAGEMENT REPORTS! I love being able to look and see everything in one report and I also love that my books are reconciled and up to date nearly daily - so every time I look it is valid data - SO HELPFUL! Also - they take the time to teach me how to do things on my own if I am confused about anything. My old super expensive accountants never did that and they were super slow and it was always a point of pain for me. Botkeeper does everything I don't want to do - and they do it fast and accurately.

Cons

I have no complaints, because they are fast and accurate, and responsive for all of my accounting needs. They are highly capable of even the most complicated bookkeeping - I didn't think they would take on my books but have surpassed my expectations.

Came onto a team using BotKeeper

Overall, I do like it. I need to test if I can ask for transactions from a specific date to another specific date, but it is easier for me to use the Xenbot ledger and track it to my general ledger once per month than me having to remember to enter all expenses at the time its received. I would recommend it to another user.

Pros

As a new user to a program already using BotKeeper, I was intrigued by how it worked. I love the fact that I can simply email Xenbot and ask the status of my budget as a whole, or elements of my budget. Thus far I have been able to drop the Xenbot a note and I would have a ledger in my inbox not but 24-hours later. Their staff support is pretty awesome, too. As a new user, I did a call with their support staff early on to learn more about specific questions I had and use cases. The person I spoke with was pretty helpful and was very responsive to the feedback I had about the ledger from a user perspective.

Cons

It is a tad restrictive as a user and not the owner. For instance, I go very granular on my budget but the master budget is more broader in terms of categorization. With the master account being more broad, I cannot get my budget more granular, so I take the details from Xenbot and translate them over in my own spreadsheet. Granted, that may not be a use case for all users but as a new member to the team responsible for the department budget, I need to know where all of our funds go to make for a better budgeting process in the future. Also, it would be nice if the email ledger allowed you to dial-down to specific transactions. For instance, I can tell what is a vendor payment or a monthly payment as it matches spot on. But, if I have multiple payments (say for an event) all bucketed into the event, I can only see the total number and not the charges that make up that total.