CollectiveReviews of collective.com

I can't speak highly enough of my experience with Collective. They've been like a trusted partner that helped make the confusing, complicate process of forming a company into a breeze. They made the timeline easy to understand and made expectations clear every step of the way. I appreciated how they broke the process into manageable, bite-sized chunks. I never felt overwhelmed. Instead I just had a thing or two to accomplish each day during on-boarding. Every member of the team, from on-boarding to my accounting professionals, has been knowledgeable and professional. I'm very happy that I chose to work with them!

I came across Collective in 2021, attracted by its promise to assist small business owners in obtaining their S Corp tax status. Overall, my experience with Collective was rather underwhelming. While they did help me with my monthly accountable plan for employee reimbursements and reminded me to fill out forms and upload bank statements, their service left much to be desired. Recently, I decided to end my membership with Collective due to a significant decline in service quality, coupled with across-the-board rate increases. It was unacceptable to me that they raised prices while lowering the level of service. During a call with a Collective representative, we mutually agreed that my business had outgrown its services, prompting my decision to terminate my investment. One of the recurring issues I faced with Collective was their failure to reconcile my QuickBooks on a regular basis. There were instances where they went three months without reconciling, which was unacceptable. The final straw came when they failed to reconcile my QuickBooks for two months in a row. After calling them out on this, they refunded me for the two months of membership fees, which was appreciated but should not have been necessary if they had fulfilled their responsibilities. While Collective may be helpful for small, one-person businesses looking to convert their status to an S Corp, it's important to be aware that as your business grows, you may outgrow their services and need to seek alternatives.

Run away fast. 1) Their work is frequently wrong. I've had issues every tax return. If I didnt catch them I would have lost money. The first time they told me to pay $50K in additional taxes when taxes were due. Turns out I was entitled to $30K refund. The second time I caught a mistake, I would have had to pay $20K in extra taxes if I didn't correct 2) Their advice is bad. i end up with a way larger tax return every year than I should, while at the same time incurring penalties. 3) Their communication is bad - very confusing, hard to follow, and hard to get a hold of when you really need them

I've used Collective for over 2 years now to set-up and assist with my S-Corp, and it has been a life saver. I had no idea what I was doing before using them, and random tax and regulatory things will pop up that I would not have known/paid/understood if Collective had not flagged them for me and been there to answer my questions. Before using Collective (they weren't available in my state at the time) I also tried to find another service that does the same thing, but after weeks of looking I literally could not. Some companies do parts of what Collective does, and some do others, but none of them did it all. I recommend Collective 100% and I'll continue using them for sure! :)

ABSOLUTELY love everything collective has done (and continues to do!) for my business. My only regret is not working with them sooner–I can't tell you how much stress they've relieved!

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.

5 stars for Jennifer Rutledge 2 stars for Collective’s system and policies Jen was so helpful to soothing my anger about how communication has been and the system they have to communicate with the bookkeeper Aser. Jen thoroughly has been great sharing transparency but not making excuses for the bad experience I’ve had. She even comp a month of services bc I shared after filing for both business and personal taxes I will no longer continue with collective. They have no efficient way of categorizing expenses it’s all do it yourself spreadsheets which leaves room for error even though they have you link your bank statements to a 3rd software party. Gusto is one software Collective is another platform And the book keeping platform. So unifies for 300 a month. Compared to quick books.

If you're a creator, stay far away from Collective. Their service is unreliable, and it's impossible to get ahold of one person who is actually able to get anything done. During sales calls, I was promised their tax service would be prompt. I gave them everything they needed mid-Jan and explained I was pregnant (due Apr 1st), so I needed my business tax return ASAP. I was promised it would be prioritized. Instead, it's been over a month, I've been passed around to about a dozen different people, and I still have yet to receive anything I need. Communication is slow. Their dashboard is buggy and annoying to use. I've also received emails from them with other business financial data, so their privacy and security are also major concerns. As a business owner, I don't like having my time wasted. The whole point of turning to this service was to save me time. Instead, I've quadrupled the number of hours I'm spending on the financial side of things because I have to waste so much time chasing them to get anything done. All in all, just a terrible experience, and I wish I'd never used them.