CollectiveReviews of collective.com

I ended up using Claude Ai to get the answers I need to proceed with my estimated tax payment. The copy provided by collective is direct however it can be interpreted a few ways when you get to steps 4-8.

I've been a member for about 2 years. It's a decent platform and good idea but lacks in customer service execution. Seems their customer service for longtime customers is understaffed and under-trained, at least at the basic membership level. Response times on Customer Service request messages were decent at first, but have declined (as much as 2 weeks, usually 3-4 days). When I've made simple accounting requests (e.g., please add an accounting entry for Venmo fees I paid), it takes a month to resolve. The customer service staff don't seem to be trained in accounting, so they'll respond 3-14 days later with irrelevant information. It's frustrating. After I flagged the issues for her, my "Member Relationship Manager" was responsive and monitored my Customer Service message threads and trained the staff; this improved the issue temporarily. But the issues re-surfaced a few months later and now she's gone unresponsive for ~3 weeks. I rarely need human customer service, but when I do, I don't have the time to explain accounting basics to the staff. Seems I can save money and frustration by finding a CPA firm that does small biz tax, S-corp compliance and bookkeeping.

It was an ok process, but the questions were too vague for an SCORP situation. It asks for example what is paid in federal taxes in my paychecks of me or my wife, but it was unclear if this was to include my Gusto Fica paychecks. If so, you already know this, so could include this in the wizard.

Good deal w/poor Accuracy I hired Collective a few years ago to take over bookkeeping for my LLC / small business. It's saved me about $3k+ per year, which is great. Their data entry accuracy was never stellar, however it's plummeted since switching over to a "team-based" bookkeeping approach. In spite of multiple phone calls, meetings, and very clear instructions about how to categorize my transactions INCLUDING annotated bank statements, their bookkeepers still make egregious mistakes on a monthly basis. I deal with it to save the money, but it's a terrible headache. If you need accurate books & don't want to double check everything (essentially doing the data entry yourself) don't hire this company.

I did not like that I could not bypass a sectio because I did not have the paperwork. I had to upload a document anyhow

After one year of working with them and changing my business to an S-corp, I am very disappointed with tax season. I've been telling them about a discrepancy in their accounting for 10 months, and they haven't been able to resolve it. The discrepancy is over 20K in income that was actually just bank transfers from one business account to another. 20K profit I didn't make that I was going to be taxed on if I didn't hound on this issue and finally catch their mistake.

I've started my own businesses before but this is the first time I've been an S-corp and the first time I've used a third-party service to get set up. There are so many forms and to-dos to cover, I just didn't want to forget anything. I also wanted to make sure I'm paying the proper amount for quarterly taxes and taking the best advantage of tax savings by having my books set up properly. Collective checked all these boxes and made the set up much less painful than it would have been if I was doing it myself. I don't have a lot of monthly transactions to manage but having Collective has been great for being kept up-to-date on S-Corp policy changes, keeping me notified of when it's time to do different things during the year, and making it easy to know how much quarterly tax to pay (without me having to figure it out and calculate it myself and hope I sent the right amount). It's been a useful service for me, for sure! Updated: The service certainly felt useful for setup but now I'm having an issue with the State employer account they set up (which the State has now closed so I've got to figure that out) and I'm now questioning how helpful the service really was. When I reach out for Collective support, I feel the people I'm talking to are not very knowledgeable and there's a lot of "we'll get back to you," responses with lags of time where I'm wondering what is going on. Overall, I feel a bit disconnected from the backend of my business, and I'm not sure I'd hire that service out again if I were to start another business. And since Collective shows up as my 'agency' on many of the business set up pieces, I don't know how painful it will be to untangle that with the various State and Federal agencies should I decide not to be a Collective customer anymore. I might have saved pain on the front end but it could just mean pain on the back end. End of story is, at this point (6 months in), I'm starting to feel like I should have just done everything myself.