Security
We take privacy and data security seriously. That’s why we’re committed to protecting your information using the highest standards of security available. Working with Bench gives you peace of mind.
Customer Data Protection
As a SOC 2 compliant business, Bench's security systems ensure protection, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of all our customer data.
Employee background checks
Every Bench employee goes through a rigorous screening process, including multiple interviews and a criminal record check.
Expert help
Each customer’s main point of contact is a dedicated professionally-trained bookkeeper, based in North America.
Meeting or exceeding industry standards
Bench undergoes annual SOC 2 and SOC 3 examinations of our security controls against the AICPA defined standards.
Auditing is conducted by a third party audit firm to assure security of our platform and its supporting infrastructure. Fill out this form to download our most recent SOC 3 report.
Bench and Plaid: The safest way to share your financial information and automate the exchange of information
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Connect your accounts with peace of mind We use Plaid, which lets you securely connect your financial accounts to Bench in seconds. This feature saves you the time and effort of manually uploading documents.
Feel secure about your financials Both Bench and Plaid are SOC-2 compliant with security practices that meet or exceed industry standards. Plaid keeps your data safe and private with best-in-class encryption protocols like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 256) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Responsible Use of AI
AI will continue to revolutionize the way we work and the world around us, including the practice of accounting. As Bench continues to integrate AI, responsible use of these tools, as well as privacy and security will continue to be core to everything we do.
The data you share is only for you
Bench’s AI runs on closed, protected models. Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Bench’s AI Assistants remain within Bench’s isolated boundaries and aren't used to train public or third-party AI tools or LLMs.
Industry-leading security
Bench and its AI suite operates in secure, industry-leading AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud-hosted environments, trusted by governments, healthcare, and financial institutions worldwide.
Innovating with integrity
All of Bench’s products, tools, features and models adhere to our unwavering privacy, security, and compliance commitments. We conduct regular audits and update our commitments as our service and technology evolve.
Always maintaining the safety and integrity of your financial data
Bench upholds appropriate security safeguards designed to protect your information from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access or disclosure, and to ensure its confidentiality, integrity and availability. Our security program accounts for both the sensitivity of the information we process and the current state of technology.
All third-party services that could potentially impact the security of our information or customer data are reviewed by our platform team. Bench requires all service providers to agree not to retain, use or disclose personal information for any purpose other than for the specific purpose of performing the services specified in their agreement with Bench.
New features, functionality and design changes at Bench go through a security and privacy review process by our teams. Code is tested and is manually peer-reviewed prior to being deployed to production.
Our production environment implements a centralized logging and monitoring system to track information pertaining to security, monitoring, availability, access and other metrics about our services.
Our infrastructure systems are fault tolerant and our operations team works continuously to make Bench’s platform a highly available service you can rely on.
We protect the security of our network through the use of software and tools, such as firewalls and load balancers, and we implement multi-factor authentication for all servers across our various environments, including production.
All customer data processed by Bench infrastructure is encrypted in transit (with TLS 1.2) and at rest (with AES-256 encryption) using the latest cypher suites and protocols. In addition, we enforce full disk encryption on all corporate devices.
Bench employees are subject to written confidentiality obligations and are prohibited from accessing customer data unless absolutely necessary. Our security policies include limiting access to systems only where individual roles require it (least privileged).
Bench conducts background checks on employees appropriate for their responsibilities (with more extensive background checks required for key employees that have elevated privileges), provides ongoing privacy and security training to its staff, and requires employees to read and sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements as conditions of their employment.
Bench maintains an information security program for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.
Bench undergoes a SOC 2 Type 2 examination of our security controls against the AICPA defined standards on an annual basis with a third party audit firm to assure security of our platform and its supporting infrastructure. The environment that hosts our services maintains multiple certifications for its data centers, including ISO 27001 compliance, FedRAMP authorization, PCI Certification, and SOC reports. For more information about their certification and compliance, please visit the AWS Security website and AWS Compliance website.
PCI: Our platform has been deliberately architected to limit the handling of payment card information. We rely on PCI-compliant service providers (Stripe, for example) to process credit card information securely.
View our privacy policy for more in-depth information about how we handle our clients' data