ParoReviews of paro.ai

Buyer beware! This is not a real accounting firm. It is simply an "accounting" startup that is only focused on sales/meeting quotas so they can get their next round of venture funds. They charge their clients a ridiculous fee for the services provided and simply hire the youngest, cheapest accountant/bookkeeper they can find and pay them less than 50% they are charging you per hour. Word is out that they have nothing of value to offer their clients which makes them go after small businesses promising everything and the moon. Do yourself a favor and get yourself a real CPA in person that you can trust. And if you have hired these guys for a project and it's starting to go poorly, fire them! It will only get worse.

During the sales pitch, everything seemed great. We even liked our bookkeeper. We quickly realized that our bookkeeper was young and didn't know anything, her management was clueless, and there was essentially no support. in each of our weekly updates with the bookkeeper, it was clear that she was doing nothing-- adding NO VALUE -- but waiting for us to tell her what to do. So, we told her very clearly what to do and it wouldn't happen. I tried to reach a manager to work through the issues (get a new bookkeeper?), but they couldn't be bothered to return a call or email. At 90 days, neither bookkeeper nor her manager could tell me anything they had done for the last 90 days. Not one thing. And yet the bills kept rolling in. We fired them on the spot, hired another company immediately, have been VERY happy,and haven't looked back. Firing Paro was the best thing we have ever done...hiring them was the worst. Don't do it.

I agree with most all other reviews. They sub the work out to “professionals” Sadly they are very far from professional. Tried It for several months and then canceled. They drop communication instantly. Charged me for the rest of the month but did nothing and refused to help. Now months later they are still trying to bill us. Very very disappointed.

We worked with Tammy for over a year. We are not a large company so we didn’t have much work assigned. She was in charge of our invoicing, QBO (QuickBooks) and that’s it. Every time we asked for something to be done we felt like we were asking too much. We would wait days for reply’s to emails. By far the worse business relationship we’ve had. I advise to stay away from Paro and Tammy Sexton.

I would advise other small business owners AGAINST using Paro! I contracted them to handle basic book keeping for my company and they over-charged me by almost 50% and refused to provide any details regarding how the billed hours were spent. My account manager Austin took days or weeks to respond to my inquiries about the discrepancy and then refused to refund me for the over-payment. He said I could use the credit toward future services but I explained that given my experience I had no interest in utilizing their services ever again. Terrible customer service, no accountability for or by their subcontractors, inaccurate billing...overall a very poor experience.

Proceed with extreme caution when your company and or/personal financials are on the line. Top 1%? Not a chance. Our first bookkeeper was a convicted felon with crimes stemming related fraud and embezzlement. To make matters worse, I was the one that found this out. Before handing over my bank login, I ran a simple Google search and a slew of criminal complaints populated. It blows my mind that a simple background check – let alone a 10 second Google search – is not a part of their vetting process. From here we were paired with a new bookkeeper and accountant. Without any notice from Paro, we found out that the bookkeeper was pulled and someone else was put on our account. Now, this old bookkeeper had full access to all of our financials for another couple months and I was never alerted by Paro. Who was the new bookkeper? Your guess is as good as mine as no introduction or transition was made. Don't be fooled by the "Paro account manager" as they are no more than glorified sales reps that will up-sell you on additional services. Don't even get me started on our final accountant. Both personal and business tax returns were never filed. Required paper work was never filed. Any sort of paper trail of his work was never received since he stopped returning all phone calls and emails. I am still paying the consequences of trusting this service. This is no different than Upwork or any freelancer database. Thousands of dollars later, Paro still haunts us. Find a real accounting firm with real recommendations behind them.

Their consultant nearly ended my business but at least they knocked off 10% when I complained. I was excited about the prospect of using Paro for my small business (less than 10 people). We needed help in forecasting, budgeting, and reconciling expenses. Our team vetted three different consultants, and agreed to one with experience in our industry. She was hyped up a lot by the salesperson as someone dependable and in high demand. What we found was that this consultant missed hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions and provided us a forecast that was radically different from reality. The consultant ignored emails, missed deadlines, and reconciled items without attributing them to invoices in order to sweep issues under the rug. It's taking us weeks to catch up and we are still finding errors in the reconciliations. We actually ended up in a worse position than when we started, and we had to pay $130/hr to get there (Minus the 10% off we get from the last invoice after airing our grievances). I do not have faith in their ability to vet and recommend consultants after this experience. Paro provides no guarantees in regards to the quality of their consultants and will charge you whether the consultant did a good job or a downright damaging one. This review was written on 5/6/2019 after 4 months of engagement. I'm just thankful that we were able to catch these errors early, and that they did not compound until we were facing a more dire situation. For small businesses, I would highly advise AGAINST using Paro, as they are expensive, high risk, no guarantees, and lacking in accountability of service.

The lesson I learned dealing with Paro is to always trust my intuition! I'm a CPA and Advanced Quickbooks Certified. So first they gave me a multiple choice test to do, which took me about 30 min to complete, which I believe was reasonable. They notified me that I successfully completed the test and sent me another one to do, which was a simulation of a QB data import. After, I looked at it, I knew it was going to take about 4 hours to do and at that moment my intuition told me Not to. I'm an extremely busy professional and I took four CPA exams and three QB exams to prove my expertise, I have 10 year of experience, so I thought if that was not enough for them, I shouldn't be wasting another 4 hours of my life on that company. Somehow I just didn't feel like doing it at all. So I ignored the test. However, they continued sending me emails asking to complete it for about 3 month. At some point I felt bad and agreed to do it. So on my only day off I spent 3 hours of my precious free time to do the test. After that they scheduled a skype interview, which I believe was nice and friendly, however they sent me a notification that they rejected me and to reapply in six month. I will definitely not going to reapply! I wish I listen to my gut feeling and not wasted my Saturday time on them. If my credentials are not enough for a freelance bookkeeping services, then I don't know who they accept, it might be just a scam.