In a Nutshell
pros
- Choice between a la carte or all-in-one solution
- Integrates with most good accounting software
- Serves a broad range of industries
cons
- Lack of transparency about pricing
- Lack of information about onboarding
- Doesn’t appear to specialize in any one service
FinancePal at a Glance
Best for: Small businesses, startups
Price range: Varies
Benefits & HR: N/A
Automatic tax filing: Yes
Apps: Web and mobile app (iOS, Android)
Features and Add-ons
Finance Pal provides tax-related services on an a la carte or all-inclusive basis.
Services include:
- Bookkeeping and accounting. Basically, if your business isn’t big enough to justify hiring a full-time bookkeeper, FinancePal can handle your books for a fraction of the cost.
- Payroll. Again, if you can’t justify having a full-time staff member handling payroll, FinancePal is well-positioned to handle this for you.
- Tax preparation. FinancePal offers tax preparation and filing services, including ensuring that you are compliant with local, state, and federal regulations.
- Catch-up bookkeeping. This is a really useful feature that gets you up-to-date whenever you find you’ve fallen behind on your account keeping.
- Entity formation. Although this isn’t their area of specialization, FinancePal can help you with business entity formation (such as LLC formation).
- Third-party integration. This service integrates seamlessly with the following third-party accounting apps to automatically record all your business transactions: Hubdoc, Intuit QuickBooks, Xero, TSheets, Bill.com, ADP, Gusto.
- Serves a wide range of SMBs, including hospitality, healthcare, SaaS (online software services), real estate, insurance, law firms and attorneys, restaurants franchises, and transportation services.
Tax Compliance
FinancePal is owned by Community Tax, a specialist in resolving IRS disputes, so you know it’s built to take tax compliance seriously. As mentioned earlier in this review, FinancePal gives you the option of selecting its services one by one or throwing them all into one all-inclusive package. Its services include tax preparation and filing.
According to FinancePal, your dedicated account reps can evaluate your liability for different taxes (including sales) and keep your business up-to-date with all government tax laws.
Payment Options
Because FinancePal works with different third-party accounting/payroll tools, the payroll options depend on which tool you use. For example, if you integrate ADP with FinancePal then the options include direct deposit and checks.
Pricing/Costs & Fees
Perhaps the biggest downside to FinancePal’s service is their reluctance to give away information about pricing. FinancePal only offers custom pricing, which is fine in principle, but it would be nice if they would offer some sort of indicative pricing on their website.
From what we can gather, the price is determined by what type of business you have, how big your business is, and how many of FinancePal’s service you wish to use. In other words, it could cost anything.
In better news, FinancePal does apparently offer free trials.
Usability
FinancePal is primarily a managed bookkeeping and accounting service, with no accounting software of its own. Actually, it integrates with all the best accounting/payroll tools, including ADP and Gusto. With this said, FinancePal does offer a mobile app where you can keep track of basic things to do with your FinancePal account.
Unfortunately, FinancePal offers very little information about how the onboarding process works. However, from what we can gather from customer reviews, most people are happy with the level of attention from their dedicated account managers and bookkeepers.
Conclusion
If you own a small business and don’t want to spend money employing people to do your bookkeeping and/or payroll, then you can outsource it to FinancePal. The best thing about FinancePal is it lets you pick and choose which services you want. You can choose one service—such as bookkeeping, payroll, or tax filing—or choose all services and pay one all-inclusive monthly price.