The leaders of Employer.com, an HR tech company, hadn’t considered acquiring Bench Accounting, an online bookkeeping services provider, until they heard the fintech was shutting down. Six hours later they were in talks to buy it and four days later — January 1st — they closed the deal.”I personally had never even heard of the company; the first I heard of it was Saturday around midnight,” said Matt Charney, chief marketing officer of Employer.com, a San Francisco-based company that also owns Recruiter.com and Bountyjobs.com. Jesse Tinsley, CEO and owner of Employer.com, was on vacation with his family in Florida when an industry contact tagged him and Charney with the news and suggested Bench might be worth acquiring. Tinsley immediately got on the phone to inquire about it, according to Charney.Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Employer.com is now the sole owner, and none of the previous investors in Bench now have stakes in the business, Charney said.Employer.com is also finalizing a deal to purchase another recently closed fintech, New York-based Level, a dental and vision benefits technology provider, he said. That proposed deal is for $30 million in cash and stock, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.Bench, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, was attractive because it provides cross-selling opportunities with Employer.com’s services and clients. “This was a company that we could incorporate into our existing offerings and do so without a lot of heavy lifting,” Charney said. Bench collects bookkeeping information from its clients and provides them with bookkeeping, tax-preparation services and a comprehensive financial overview via its own technology and its own human bookkeepers. The Bench acquisition will also enable Employer.com to expand into the Enterprise Resource Planning realm: software that integrates all the processes needed to run a company, he said. Employer.com’s previous acquisitions were in HR technology and payroll services. The company also provides bank accounts and debit cards. “The ability to offer the accounting and bookkeeping services truly moves us from an HCM (human capital management) play into a larger ERP play,” Charney said. “It’s exciting for us to not only be able to offer those services to our current customers, but also to be able to have potentially 12,000 new customers for our payroll and some of the HR services that were not included as part of Bench’s core offering.”Similarly, the pending acquisition of Level’s benefits technology “fits beautifully into our HR business” and its artificial-intelligence-led expense management tech that categorizes expenses and flags inconsistencies would “uplevel the capabilities of Bench,” Charney said. Employer.com had been looking to buy a benefits administrator/provider since October, he said.Employer.com doesn’t yet know how many of Bench’s 12,000 U.S. customers it will be able to retain, but the new owner has been in contact with
Ven. Gen 10th, 2025
