Bench (Bench Accounting, Inc. and its affiliates, collectively “Bench”) maintains 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. The following sets out our security practices with respect to your information.

Written Information Security Program

Bench maintains an information security program for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

Compliance Certifications

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.

Personnel Practices

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.

Confidentiality & Access Controls

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).

Encryption

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.

Availability

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.

Network Protection

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.

Logging and Monitoring

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.

Product Security & Privacy by Design

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.

Service Provider Relationships

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.