Pilot vs Bench vs Flight Financial: Full Comparison Guide [2022]

Without excellent accounting and bookkeeping services, a business can’t continue to operate for long—let alone grow.

Pilot and Bench are two common names that pop up when talking about accounting solutions. Both of these offer excellent services and manage the books for hundreds of small businesses.

But there’s plenty of options out there.

To help you make a decision, we’ve compiled this Pilot vs Bench comparison article. And because we think we’d make a great fit as well, we’ve added our own service to the mix: Flight Financial.

But first, let’s look at some must-have features for accounting solutions.

What makes for a great accounting solution?

There are dozens of accounting services out there. They all claim to be “the best”.

They might be, no doubt—but only for specific businesses.

A great accounting service, in our opinion, is the one that gives you a variety of options and helps you with most of the major accounting tasks.

Here are some qualities that can make an accounting solution better than others:

Features: Bookkeeping, financial forecasting, strategizing, payroll management are some of the basic accounting tasks that they should be able to help you with.
Experts on hand: If you’re going to pay hundreds of dollars for certain services, you deserve to have access to experts who can guide your financial decisions.
Scalability: If your business does well, then your accounting needs will grow. That’s why a good accounting solution should have multiple plans so you can easily upgrade.

We’ve only scratched the surface with these three features. You should also look for ease of use, reliability, payment gateways, hidden fees, and the overall cost of the solution you choose.

Flight Financial: an alternative to Pilot and Bench

Bench and Pilot are two of the most widely used accounting services because they offer great services. But also because they’ve been in this business for years.

Flight Financial was designed to specifically cater to the challenges SaaS, eLearning, & online business owners face in the current marketplace.

With us, you’ll not only get essential financial services, but also have one-on-one access to fractional CFOs with decades of experience who can advise you about your business’s financial state.

You won’t have to deal with financial lingo, deadlines or other tasks that require your active involvement—we’ll take care of everything.

But if you do want to know how we’re managing your financial statements or creating budgets, then we’re just an email away.

In the sections below, we’ll compare our features and pricing to two of the top accounting solutions and show you how we stack up against them.

Pilot vs Bench vs Flight Financial

Now onto the meat of the matter.

Let’s see how Pilot, Bench, and Flight Financial compare to each other so you can decide which one is the best option for you.

But first, let us give you a bit of a background on Pilot and Bench.

What is Pilot?

Pilot is an accounting solution that caters to small businesses and startups.

The service helps gather all your financial data from sales to credit card transactions and then performs actions such as tax filing, forecasting, and auditing.

It’s great because it covers all essential financial tasks that a business might need.

Here, you have access to experienced professionals from bookkeepers all the way up to the CFO level to help steer your business towards the direction of success.

Pilot was launched in 2016 and its products are integrated with QuickBooks. Since its launch, it has added more features to its roster and thus attracted more users which are primarily startups.

Pilot prides itself on its ability to grow with you as your business grows, which is an excellent feature for any accounting solution to have. They work with the latest tools to manage your financial data most efficiently.

This platform can help you with smaller tasks such as bookkeeping and invoicing clients and also with bigger duties such as generating accurate monthly statements and providing expert advice.

Here are some features that make Pilot a great option for small businesses:

Dedicated support team to fix issues for you whenever you need to.
Helps growing businesses with fundraising and planning for growth.
Affordable packages for businesses of all sizes.

What is Bench?

Bench calls itself a one-stop-shop for US-based small businesses’ accounting needs.

This accounting solution mainly focuses on bookkeeping and tax filing although it does also help with preparing your financial statement and helping you manage receipts.

One of its best features is the one-on-one time you get with an expert bookkeeper.

With Bench, you get a team of bookkeepers and accountants working on your business, but you’ll mostly interact with just one bookkeeper. That way, they ensure that your financial reports and tax filing are absolutely error-free.

You can also view your financial reports anytime by logging into your dashboard.

Here, you can view every transaction that your employees have made and see how that’s entered into your monthly report.

Bench also offers its users visual reports to see how the business is performing against set KPIs.

Here are some features that make Bench great as an accounting solution:

No need to learn how accounting software works.
Team of experts instead of just one accountant or bookkeeper.
Many features even in the most basic monthly plan.

Features: Pilot vs Bench vs Flight Financial

Since your choice of accounting platform for your small business depends on its features, we’ll now compare the features of the three accounting solutions.

While reading through this section, we recommend that you not only look for the features you need today but also the services you’ll need as your business grows.

Pilot Features

Pilot’s main features include its bookkeeping services where they prepare financial statements, balance sheets, and payroll reports. Some of its other unique features include:

CFO services: You can choose to interact with a CFO-level expert every month or at the time of preparing your annual budgets so that the expert can analyze your reports and guide your next moves. You can also utilize the CFO services only for fundraising support when you’re raising money for your growing small business.
Tax preparation and filing: Pilot’s experts can help you with federal and state income tax filing and Delaware Franchise tax filing. This feature also comes with a dedicated tax preparer who you can talk to about the tax filing process and get answers to tax-related queries that you might have.
Project-cost reports: Especially for consumer goods and retail businesses, Pilot prepares reports to determine the ROI of each project and helps you create a strong financial foundation for your business. They do the forecasting with automated tools while industry experts look it over to simplify the information for you and help you make decisions.

Bench Features

The top features of Bench are tax advisory, tax filing, and monthly bookkeeping. Some of its other features include:

Catch up on bookkeeping: This helps you organize your books even if you’re years behind. Bench has an effective system for compiling records to create reports for tax purposes and fundraising.
Impressive visual dashboard: You get a dashboard in Bench where you can view your accounting history as well as your taxes, bank statements, and business spending. You can connect your bank accounts to your bench profile as well.
Manage Payroll Transactions: Bench works with Gusto to manage your payroll transactions and file state and federal taxes as well. Not only that, but it also manages employee information, benefits, and records all that in the form of reports that you can look at at any time.

Flight Financial Features

We help small businesses with basic bookkeeping, budgeting, setting up and monitoring KPIs, P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Some of our more extensive features include:

CFO services: Our team has MBAs and CPAs who’ve worked with many businesses to get them to stand on the right financial footing. With our CFO services, we help you plan for your business’s future by accurately monitoring your performance.
Here, we oversee your bookkeeping, annual budgeting, scenario analyses, variance analyses, and provide value enhancement recommendations.
Year-round financial management: To make tax time easier for you, we maintain your books and bank records throughout the year. That way, handing off your data to the CPA at the end of the year won’t make you rip your hair out.
Simplified financial reporting: We make it a lot easier for you to set up and manage metrics, analytics, budgeting, forecasting, and cash flow projections.
You’ll get easy-to-read reports from us that help you make smart financial decisions.

Pricing Plans: Pilot vs Bench vs Flight Financial

Pilot, Bench, and Flight Financial all come with multiple packages.

Pilot Pricing

Pilot’s pricing is divided into multiple categories.

Pilot Bookkeeping: With plans at $599 & $849/mo., this service’s top features include finance experts on hand, bookkeeping services, prioritized books delivery, and monthly phone calls to review books and discuss concerns.
Pilot CFO Services: With the “Monthly Engagement” plan at $1,050/mo., you’ll get monthly updates on your financials and forecasts rolled out every month. The “Annual Budgeting and Forecasting” plan starts at $6,300/year and includes 1-on-1 CFO consultations and revenue projections.
Pilot Tax: All “Essentials” (Filing of state, corporate, and income tax) for $1,950/year and a “Standard” plan at $4,950/year that includes support for entities with foreign subsidiaries, LLCs, and S Corps.

Bench Pricing

Bench offers two packages.

The good news is that you can sign up for a 30 day free trial before buying a membership. Also, if you opt to pay annually as opposed to monthly, you can save $50 or $100 each month, depending on your package.

Here’s what Bench packages cost:

Essential: At $299/mo., you get monthly bookkeeping done by a team of professionals, have a research team on-hand to guide your business’s financials, and receive financial statements for tax filing.
Premium: For $399/mo., you get personalized tax consultations and experts will file your individual and business annual income tax.

Flight Financial Pricing

We offer three packages suited for different sized businesses. Each of these comes with a one-time set-up fee which is equal to one month’s fee for your package.

The best part? If you pay annually, you can get anywhere between 17% to 19% discount on the monthly price.

CFO Lite: A certified bookkeeper to prepare tax-ready financial reports, P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements.
CFO Growth: Annual budgeting reports, budget and forecast vs actuals variance analysis, financial insights, and performance measurement against standard financial KPIs.
CFO Premium: Bookkeepers and accountants with over 15 years of experience in working with small businesses. They can help you with rolling forecasting, scenario analysis, value enhancement recommendations, bookkeeping with accrual method reporting, and more.

Our competitive pricing is tailored to your business’ unique needs. Schedule a free call for a custom quote.

Which service should you be using?

We know that all three solutions offer similar services. But each is targeted at businesses dealing with specific challenges.

Here’s when Pilot is ideal:

You need help with fundraising for your startup.
You want to outsource bookkeeping and don’t want constant questions from the bookkeeper.
You need a CFO to help with complex revenue recognition and forecasting.

Bench is great for the basic bookkeeping needs of small businesses or freelancing firms with 1-10 employees. Here’s when you should choose Bench:

You’ve fallen behind on bookkeeping for two or more years.
Tax filing is not your forte and you need professionals to step in.
You’re looking to expand internationally and need forecasting advice and bookkeeping services.

Flight Financial is perfect for eLearning, SaaS, small online businesses, and startups that want to clean up their bookkeeping and financial reporting with the goal of scaling and eventually selling their business for $10M+.

You should choose Flight Financial when:

You need someone to manage your books and explain complex financial lingo and reports to you and your team.
Your small business is growing and you need help with managing your books as well as your financial performance.
Your books are in order but you need experienced professionals to guide you with planning for growth, organizing financial operations to scale faster, and give you valuable insights based on their experience.

Pilot vs Bench vs Flight Financial [Comparison Table]

To help you make your final decision, here’s a comparison table that includes highlights from all the sections we’ve discussed above and then some.

	Pilot	Bench	Flight Financial
Top Features	Tax, R&D tax credit, accounting, and bookkeeping	Mainly bookkeeping with some CFO services	Bookkeeping, accounting, CFO services, forecasting, financial performance management
Pricing	$599-$4950/mo.	$299-$399/mo.	Competitive—schedule a call for a pricing based on your needs!
Ideal users	Small businesses and startups in need of an accountant	US-based small businesses that need bookkeeping services	Growing small businesses and SaaS companies that need CFO and accountants.
Drawbacks	Don’t have much backup for historic information, update issues	Teams unable to manage complex bookkeeping requirements, US-based residents only	Relatively new platform, but many years of experience
What do customers love the most?	Top-notch staff, integration with software such as QuickBooks, customer service	Direct bank connection. Automatic categorization, beautiful interface	Ease of use, actual experienced professionals with proper credentials, excellent customer service

30 seconds summary

Finding the right financial performance management service for your business depends on your specific needs, budget, your preferred accounting software and the complexity of your business’s financials.

Pilot, Bench, and Flight Financial are all great solutions overall. The best one for you, however, is the one that can solve your accounting issues and free you up to make boss moves for your business.

The MBA and CPA certified experts at Flight Financial have helped multiple small online businesses, eLearning, and SaaS companies take control of their finances with incredible accuracy.

If you’d like to see how, schedule a 25-minute online meeting with our experts who’ll discuss your concerns and provide a brief financial inspection of your business.