Botkeeper vs Veryfi
We love speaking with Accountants, Bookkeepers and Business Owners on how Veryfi tools can help them automate their Bookkeeping responsibilities to the tax office and gain real-time field intelligence. A question that often pops up is how is Veryfi different to Botkeeper.
About 90% of companies playing in the automation of accounting space use human labor to do all the AI/Bot claims without being upfront about it. One of those recently exposed by Blake Oliver & David Leary from Cloud Accounting Podcast is Botkeeper. Read the full story here: https://www.blakeoliver.com/blog/what-is-botkeeper
Botkeeper lured the media (TechCrunch, Interview on Fox etc) with their $22m funding from the likes of Google’s AI team “Gradient Ventures” for the AI/Robot that replaces Bookkeepers.
What is Botkeeper?
“Botkeeper is humans in the Philippines.”
Blake Oliver: https://www.blakeoliver.com/blog/what-is-botkeeper
Botkeeper represents itself as an AI-powered automated bookkeeping and accounting solution, but in reality it’s offshore labor in the Philippines doing most of the work.
Source: https://www.blakeoliver.com/blog/what-is-botkeeper
Why you should care
1. Botkeeper puts CPAs at risk
Technology companies serving CPAs in California not disclosing offshore labor are causing these CPAs to fall out of compliance.
2. Botkeeper puts you at risk of a future data breach
“ITRC reported that Commercial businesses accounted for more than 50 percent of data breach targets, and more than 157 million compromised records in 2017.”
BNA: https://www.bna.com/2017-year-data-b73014473359/
Business financial activity is a wealth of data that can easily be used for social engineering. (Social engineering is when a bad actor knows enough about you to steal your identity by being able to answer security questions from your bank, online services you use etc.)
Think twice before handing over the keys to your kingdom.
3. Botkeeper Pricing is going to send you broke
- Botkeeper pricing page: https://www.botkeeper.com/pricing-packages
- Veryfi pricing page: https://www.veryfi.com/plans-pricing/
4. Botkeeper tells the rest of the world it’s ok to mislead
It’s sends the wrong signal to other technology companies that it’s ok to be shipping US customer data offshore because building real technology is hard. Thus encouraging more bad behavior.
It’s no surprise that Expensify and Receipt Bank also use offshore data teams. Receipt Bank at least is upfront about it in their Privacy Policy (thanks GDPR!)
5. Botkeeper lacks important US compliance and transparency
Services like Botkeeper do not comply with HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA or data-privacy standards.
- HIPAA compliance is mandatory for healthcare companies in the US.
- GPDR compliance is a must for any US company selling their services in Europe or managing European customer’s data.
- CCPA in California is a smaller version of GDPR.
6. Your Team Cares about the use of their PII data
Security and Data-Privacy is in the media everyday. From Facebooks to the Big4. Your employees care about this topic since it can put them and their families at risk. As a business owner or a CPA making technology decisions, you will need to factor that in and be transparent. eg. That Uber receipt with their home address they submitted for reimbursement is going to be seen and transcribed by someone in another country. Read more on privacy here.
In Summary
Back to the original question; how is Veryfi different to Botkeeper?
| Botkeeper | Veryfi | |
| FREE Trial in seconds? | No | Yes |
| Real-time machine data extraction OCR (Optical character recognition) to protect your PII (Personally identifiable information)? | No Humans in Philippines look at your PII | Yes Avg 3 seconds |
| In-house AI or Machine Learning? | No | Yes |
| Uses human offshore accounting / data extraction teams? | Yes | No |
| Unlimited Document (receipt, invoice or bill) processing? | Yes $800+/mo for 200 documents | No Unlimited for $15/mo |
| Provides their own bookkeeping automation tools | No They use 3rd party tools and human bookkeepers in Philippines | Yes All tools are Veryfi’s |
| HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA or data-privacy compliance? | No | Yes |
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How Veryfi stacks up against others…
Receipt Bank“Receipt Bank’s data extraction team, certain members of which are based outside the EEA,” Source: Receipt Bank Read more on Receipt Bank | Expensify“Expensify’s deceptive mechanical turk army may have resulted in me coming within seconds of losing $30k.” Read more on Expensify |
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