On December 27, 2024, Bench Accounting replaced its website with a shutdown notice.

With no real warning, thousands of small business owners were locked out of their own financial records — years of books, tax documents, everything — days before year-end. Bench gave clients until December 30 to download their data. Three days.

For a small business owner trying to close out their books, run payroll, and prepare for tax season, that’s a crisis. A few weeks later, Botkeeper announced it was closing too. Between them, these two companies had raised over $100 million. They had real teams, real clients, and by every outward measure, real promise. When the economics stopped working, their clients were the last to know and the first to suffer.

I’m not writing this to pile on. Building something in this industry takes real courage and I have genuine respect for anyone who tries. But I think there’s a real lesson in these stories,

What those clients lost wasn’t just software access or the inconvenience of scrambling for a replacement during tax season.

What they lost was continuity — the person or team that actually knew their books, understood their situation, and could be held accountable when something went wrong. Relationships matter.

Maven Cost Seg Tax Advisors Is Intentional

Maven Cost Segregation Tax Advisors isn’t a name we landed on because it sounded good. The word tax advisors mean something. It means someone who looks at your full picture — your properties, your income, your goals — and tells you what they actually see, not just what the software calculated. I take those two words seriously.

Take an example from one of my clients recently.

He’s a broker who had spent fifteen years building a real estate portfolio on the side — paid-off duplexes and triplexes, about $1.5 million in equity, throwing off solid cash flow every month. Half a million dollars a year in commission income on top of that. Successful by any measure. But every year, he was writing a big check to the IRS on that commission income and had no idea his own portfolio could have been offsetting it the whole time.

When we sat down and actually looked at his situation — his income, his properties, his goals — it became clear pretty quickly that accelerating the depreciation on his portfolio could shelter a meaningful chunk of that commission income going forward. We ran the numbers together. We talked through the timing. We looked at which properties made the most sense to study first based on his basis and hold period.

That’s not something you get from a platform. There’s no dashboard that looks at your full picture, asks the right questions, and helps you build a plan around the answers. That conversation has to happen with a person.

The advisor gap is real, and it shows up everywhere. I’ve worked with commercial investors holding hotels, strip malls, portfolios worth eight and nine figures, who had been depreciating everything straight-line for years. Millions of dollars of accelerated deductions sitting unclaimed because nobody with the right knowledge was close enough to the situation to flag it.

Where AI Fits into Cost Segregation

AI helps with research, document processing, and efficiency. There are things it does well, and we’d be leaving productivity on the table if we ignored it.

But here’s what it can’t do. A cost segregation study doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The timing relative to a potential sale, a 1031 exchange, and a change in how the property is being used are conversations that need to happen. It requires someone who knows whether you’re planning to sell in two years or hold forever, whether your CPA is aggressive or conservative on certain positions, whether the passive losses you’re about to generate can actually be used or will just sit on the shelf.

AI doesn’t know that your short-term rental had 47 personal use days last year and that it changes your passive loss picture. It doesn’t know you’re planning a 1031 next spring and that the timing of your cost seg study matters. Those aren’t data problems. They’re judgment calls that come from actually knowing you and your situation.

The platforms that failed weren’t undone by bad technology. They were undone by a model that tried to replace the advisor relationship with something more scalable. It turns out that when the relationship is the product, you can’t automate your way out of that.

What the Bench and Botkeeper shutdowns made visible is something that was always true: when a client relationship is built around a platform, it disappears with the platform. When it’s built around a person who knows your properties, your goals, and your tax picture, then it doesn’t. That’s the difference between a software subscription and an advisor.

This is a human business. It always has been. If you want a platform, there are plenty of options. If you want an advisor who takes that word seriously, that’s what Maven is built to be.