Found Business Checking Review 2023
This article is part of a larger series on Business Banking.
The digital banking platform Found is an excellent business checking option for freelancers, self-employed individuals, and sole proprietors looking for affordable digital banking solutions. Aside from having $0 monthly service fees, Found offers useful features—such as free built-in bookkeeping tools, invoicing software, and tax tools—that can help any business owner save time and money on business paperwork.
It doesn’t do credit checks, which makes the platform accessible to any type of business owner. And although it offers a wide range of business tools, it lacks brick-and-mortar branches.
Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont Bank, Member FDIC. The Found Mastercard® debit card is issued by Piermont Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard Inc. Found’s core features are free. Found also offers a paid product, Found Plus.
What We Like
- No monthly fees, minimum balance requirement, and initial deposit requirement
- No credit checks
- Free bookkeeping software
What's Missing
- No free cash deposits
- Interest earning only through paid-tier Found Plus
- Cannot purchase checks or issue them from the app
Features
- Provides a business debit Mastercard, which allows you to track expenses and receive purchase alerts
- Debit cards can be frozen in the Found app
- Desktop and mobile apps
- Connect to accounting software and payment apps, such as Cash App, PayPal, Square, Venmo, and eBay
- Integrated bookkeeping allows you to categorize expenses, customize invoices, capture receipts, and set custom rules
- Track tax write-offs in the app
- View your tax estimate update in real-time
- Pay your taxes directly from the app
- Send your Schedule C directly from the app
- Customer service via email, online form, and support guides on the website
How Found Stacks Up With Its Competitors
 Business Checking* |  Pro* |  Business Checking* |  Standard* | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Monthly Fee | $0 | $20 | $0 | $0 |
Detailed Expense Tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
Built-in Bookkeeping | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
Tax Tools | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
Personalized Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ |
*Providers are fintech platforms backed and FDIC-insured by a supporting bank partnership (Choice Financial Group for Lili, Middlesex Federal Savings for Novo, and Evolve Bank & Trust for Relay).
When Found Is a Good Fit
- You are comfortable with banking exclusively online: Found is among the providers listed in our roundup of the best online business banks. While it lacks brick-and-mortar branches, it still lets you move money through debit card transactions, bank transfers, and payment apps like CashApp, PayPal, and Venmo.
- You want to bank without monthly fees: The Found business checking account does not have monthly fees, minimum opening deposit requirements, or minimum balance requirements, which is one of the reasons it made our list of top-recommended free business checking accounts. These low fees make it suitable for self-employed professionals, freelancers, and sole proprietors.
- You don’t have a good credit history: Found will let you open an account without performing a credit check.
- You want a bank that can help you keep track of your expenses: In our roundup of the leading banks for self-employed individuals, we named Found the best provider for detailed expense tracking. Whenever you make transactions with your Found debit card, Found automatically tracks and categorizes the expense. It uses your banking history to create detailed expense, income, profit, and loss reports in real time.
- You want a platform that can help you stay on top of your taxes: The Found business checking account offers expense management and tax planning tools, helping you categorize expenses and track tax write-offs for more savings. This is one of the reasons Found is one of our top small business checking accounts.
When Found Is Not a Good Fit
- You use wire transfers regularly: Found only allows outgoing wire transfers to other Found customers. The best provider for affordable wire transfers is Mercury, which charges zero wire transfer fees. Read our review of Mercury business checking for more information.
- You need access to a full range of banking products: The only banking product Found offers is business checking. If you’re looking for an online provider with a complete business banking product selection, consider First Internet Bank, which offers business checking, savings accounts, money market accounts, CDs, and lending products. Our First Internet Bank business checking review discusses these products in depth.
- You want to earn interest on checking deposits: The Found business checking account does not earn interest. The best provider for high annual percentage yield (APY) is Bluevine, which earns 2.0% APY on qualifying balances up to $250,000. To learn more about how to qualify for Bluevine’s APY, see our Bluevine business checking review.
If your small business meets one or more of these scenarios, check out our guide to the best small business checking accounts for additional recommendations.
Found Business Checking Overview
Found Business Checking Requirements
You can visit the Found website to open a business checking account. You will be asked to provide the following information:
- Legal name
- Address
- Social Security number
- Date of birth
- An estimate of how much you expect your business to earn within the year
- Tax filing situation
- Additional details about your tax situation.
Found does not require a self-employed individual or freelancer to provide information on any kind of business structure when applying for an account, but if you have a limited liability company (LLC), you can add your employer identification number (EIN) once you sign up.
Certain types of businesses are prohibited from opening an account. See Found’s list of prohibited businesses for more information.
Before opening an account, read our guide on how to open a business bank account. It includes a free downloadable checklist of required documents.
Found Business Checking Features
Found’s business checking account offers no monthly fees, a Mastercard debit card, and built-in bookkeeping and invoicing software with tax planning tools.
Business Debit Card
All accounts come with a business debit Mastercard, which provides easy tracking of expenses and payments. You can also freeze your card for security in the Found app. In addition, you can connect Found to useful business platforms, such as Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and Etsy.
Bookkeeping
Found will track and categorize expenses automatically whenever you use your Found debit card. You can also add expenses made on other platforms manually or add receipts to your transaction history with the app’s built-in photo receipt capture feature.
To give you a clear picture of your business activity, Found uses your account history to create real-time expense, income, profit, and loss (P&L) reports.
Tax Tools
When Found tracks and categorizes your expenses, it notes down tax-deductible items and analyzes your banking data to provide real-time estimates of how much you owe in taxes. It even auto-generates a self-employed Schedule C form to reduce your paperwork during tax season.
Invoicing
Small business owners can create free, unlimited, and customized invoices for professional branding. The invoicing software includes credit cards, debit cards, direct deposits, Cash App, Zelle, Venmo, and PayPal as payment options. It also allows automated billing through scheduling future and recurring invoices.
Mobile Banking
All of Found’s features are also available through the mobile app. To summarize, the app lets you:
- View balances
- Transfer funds
- Get notifications for transactions
- Create, send, and schedule invoices
- Categorize transactions
- View your tax estimate
- Freeze cards
- Generate your Schedule C form
Reception for the app is mostly positive. It has a rating of 4.8 stars on the App Store1 and 4.6 stars on Google Play2. The majority of recent reviews are positive. Reviewers said that the platform is easy to navigate and that its numerous business tools are useful and reliable. However, a few users disliked that Found does not support check deposits.
Other Found Business Products
If you want access to more advanced business tools, you can upgrade to Found Plus, which costs $19.99 per month (or $149.99 per year). Through Found Plus, you can:
- Create unlimited rules for bookkeeping categories
- Create custom bookkeeping categories
- Pull expense data through photo receipt capture
- Export bookkeeping data
- Pay taxes directly from the app
Found Business Checking Reviews From Users
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| No monthly maintenance fees, no minimum balance requirement, and no initial deposit requirement | Does not offer joint accounts |
| Free bookkeeping software and tax planning tools | |
| Hassle-free online account opening | |
Found business checking reviews are mostly positive. The platform has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot3, based on 140-plus reviews. The majority of users said that they are satisfied with its services, and self-employed individuals and full-time business owners find its tax preparation and expense-tracking tools useful.
Users like that having built-in features helps them save money they might have otherwise spent on additional bookkeeping software or services. Most also noted that the platform’s interface is well-designed and easy to navigate.
Dissatisfied customers claimed that the provider’s customer service team takes a long time to respond to concerns and inquiries—and since email is the only contact channel Found uses, the customer service team can be difficult to reach for urgent concerns.
Bottom Line
A Found business checking account is ideal for freelancers, self-employed professionals, and sole proprietors who do the majority of their business management on their own. With Found, you can save on zero monthly fees and streamline your business operations with built-in accounting, invoicing, and tax tools.
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