Bento for Business: Instantly control and track employee expenses from anywhere

I have been a marketer at Bento for Business for 20 months; my educational and professional background is a mix of research, customer insights, branding and communications. This is my first time working at a fintech startup, and every day has been a learning experience!

I was drawn to Bento because it’s doing something different: helping small businesses that are often underserved by big banks and left without a solution tailored to their expense management needs. Plus, I fell in love with the diverse and welcoming people at Bento who truly care about solving real problems for real businesses.

Functionality and main features

Bento for Business was founded by two finance industry veterans with a strong belief in helping small businesses spend less energy on expense management hassles and more on growing their business the way they envision. We are here to help business owners and accounting pros take proactive control of employee spending. Say goodbye to the traditional reactive approach involving petty cash and/or reimbursement! Through Bento’s physical and virtual employee debit cards and powerful desktop/mobile platform, businesses can remotely control when, where and how much employees can spend so they never go over their pre-authorized spending limits. Plus, companies can save a ton of time and headaches by automating fund transfers, card reloads, expense reporting, monthly statements and custom alerts. Smooth QuickBooks® Online auto sync ensures transactions and uploaded receipts/tags/notes are always up to date.

What sets them apart

Bento’s end-to-end solution replaces traditional expense management and tracking processes, and provides controls, insights, reporting and visibility not available any other way. Small businesses and accounting pros now have access to a suite of tools on one growing platform that targets multiple expense management pain points, from budgeting to expense policy enforcement to reporting.

Customer feedback

Bento is a very customer-forward company. To ensure a holistic view of customer feedback and not lose track of them in our product planning, we have an internal process that reports customer feature requests from multiple sources (review sites, surveys, day-to-day support emails and phone calls) to one place where our team can review, discuss and prioritize.

Even before we built our QuickBooks Online integration, we surveyed and interviewed accountants, bookkeepers and business owners to make sure we were aware of their needs right from the pilot phase. Since then, we’ve reviewed their feedback and continue to incorporate it in our integration.

Working with QuickBooks

We published our app in QuickBooks Online App Store in July 2017. QuickBooks is a popular accounting tool among our users, so we are thrilled to provide a seamless experience in partnership with Intuit®. Intuit has great rapport and reach among SMBs and accounting pros, which has helped us build trust, name recognition and partnerships in the QuickBooks community. The Intuit team has been supporting us in both product development and marketing, whether it’s a one-on-one meeting with a product manager, sharing content and social media opportunities, or keeping developers up to date with workshops and emails.

It’s exciting to see that Intuit is doing more with third-party app developers, giving us more resources to improve our integration and more opportunities to bring Bento in front of more users. We are also aligned with Intuit with its focus on the increasingly complex needs of modern business owners as more and more begin to embrace automation in their financial operations. At the end of the day, it’s all about providing a reliable and truly customizable experience for our users. I am excited to see where we can go with this!

I have loved chatting and working with Intuit’s extended community of apps, QuickBooks ProAdvisors® and QuickBooks users, and we’re grateful to be a part of it and support one another.

Who we cater to

Business owners, accountants, CFOs and controllers. Bento is great for business owners, as well as finance and operations-related roles who need to manage, control and report business expenses in and out of the office.

Accounting firms that help clients with all of the above.

Various industries. Construction companies love the Bento cards and app for on-the-go convenience, but Bento is also perfect for any SMBs that manage employees and crews who need to be on the road and/or spend company money as part of their job. Bento will make your life much easier and your money safer by keeping all cards, controls and accounting seamlessly and in one place.