It’s been another great year for the Bill.com family. We’ve gained new customers, made major technological strides, offered new solutions, and entered new markets, like banking. And we’ve had fun doing it—which is such an important but often forgotten part of work and, for that matter, life.

I’m looking forward to spending a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family and friends, for which I am incredibly grateful. But, before the turkey coma sets in, I wanted to share a few other things that I am grateful for this Thanksgiving day.

• First, last, foremost and always, I am grateful for our customers. I just finished reading the comments from our annual Net Promoter Survey. I loved seeing all the comments about how we are making folks’ lives easier, simpler and more convenient. But I also loved seeing the great honest comments about what we can do better. I am so thankful that our customers take the time to tell us where we excel and where we need some work. It’s thanks to customers who care enough to give us feedback that we can keep moving the ball forward.
• I am extremely fortunate to be surrounded and supported by an amazing team.  They are passionate, dedicated and committed to everything we do.   Every day folks go to work to make a difference and every day they do. You only have to read the Net Promoter survey to see that our employees help customers daily with product innovations and great support. Well done, team.
• Finally I am glad that the election is over. Maybe this isn’t a politically correct thing to say, but it feels like our nation has been on hold in many respects for the last few months. Regardless of whether or not you like the outcome, we can finally stop listening to the commercials, pundits and hype, and get back to work solving the problems we have.

We have much to be grateful for, including where we live and the time we live in.  Pausing to give thanks is always good to do.  As you each take time off, I thank you for reading and hope you enjoy peace, family and laughter on this Thanksgiving day.

Receive thanks from any key vendor - mail separate checks

Schedule a lot of payments by check to the same vendor? If you schedule them for the same day, we’ve always combined the payments and mailed one check to your vendor.

But sometimes you want to mail separate checks. Maybe you need a separate check for a tax payment. Or you (and your vendor) like the simplicity of reconciling specific bills with specific checks. Whatever the reason, we now give you a choice: make specific payments on separate checks, or combine payments onto one check.

What about the email that went to the vendor for each payment?  If you scheduled a lot of payments for the same day to the same vendor, they received a lot of email (even though they received only one check). Now we’ll send one email for each check. So if you mail separate checks, a vendor still receives separate email confirmations. If you combine payments onto one check, a vendor gets one email.

Your vendors will give you thanks.

Do our improved Approvals meet with your approval?

Approve bills. Easier. Faster. Simpler. Cleaner.

• Add approvers directly to a bill. Previously, you had to step through several pages. Now it’s easier.
• Click Approve (instead of My Bills) on the Payables tab. We’ve renamed My Bills to Approve. With a more obviously intuitive name, you actually know where to click! Now it’s faster.
• Fix denied bills from your To Do list. Customize specific user roles to resolve bills (and vendor credits) that have been denied. Previously, if an approver denied a bill you’d entered, the bill appeared on the Payables tab > My Bills. Now it’s simpler.
• Assign one set of approvers to bills that are split. We’ve removed multiple sets of approvers for split bills. That allowed us to tidy things up. Now it’s cleaner.

We think you’ll approve.

See the last 5 payments to any vendor

Previously, you had to dig through each bill to find a specific payment to a vendor. Now, see the last 5 payments to any particular vendor with no digging whatsoever. So put your shovel away until you need to clear snow from the driveway.

Send your customers a message right from Bill.com

Have an urgent message for a customer? What if they have a question for you? Exchange messages directly with any customer, from your Bill.com account to the customer website where they sign in to pay you. It’s quick. It’s easy. And best of all, you get a permanent record of all your exchanges. Keep it all together in your Bill.com account.

Outside these customer conversations, ever need to jot down something about a customer? Their favorite product? Their birthday? Their purchasing habits? We’ve moved these notes front and center. Actually, they’re front and a little off to the right. But they’re right where you need them.

We’ve copied these note-able improvements to Payables, too, so it’s easy to store notes about your vendors.

The Bill.com experience - well, that’s obvious

We strive to make your payables and receivables as obvious as possible. Hopefully our most recent improvements make the experience so obvious that we don’t even need to explain! But just in case you forgot how it was in the old days (last week), here are a couple highlights:

• We’ve cleaned up the pop up (modal) dialogs, which hold things like your bills and invoices. We’ve made it clearer to get to them, and easier to get around inside them.
• We’ve added some consistency to links and buttons: links take you to another page, buttons make something happen.

Why bother? Because when you know what to expect, you get things done faster. That leaves more time for your business, and more time for yourself.

Sync with Xero effort

Do your accounting in the cloud with Xero? Paying bills and invoicing customers just got a lot easier for you, because we now sync with Xero.

Syncing brings over everything from Xero that you need for your payables and receivables: vendors, customers, products, and details. Syncing also sends your Bill.com payables and receivables transcations back to Xero, efficiently keeping your accounting up-to-date.

Keep using Xero for all your accounting, and Bill.com to pay bills and invoice customers. We’ll keep everything in sync. In the cloud.

Company Named Top Winner in the ‘Support Department of the Year’ Category

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Nov 15, 2012 – Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash management solutions for businesses, has been named a gold winner in the Support Department of the Year category of the Best in Biz Awards, the only independent business awards program judged by members of the press and industry analysts.

Bill.com delivers a complete web-based financial solution for businesses and accountants that provides the tools, information, and collaboration required to better manage their financial tasks and optimize cash flow. Bill.com's innovative technology digitizes a historically paper-based and time-consuming process, allowing users to access online bill payments, e-invoicing, document management, and automated workflow through one easy system. In addition to seamlessly integrating with businesses' existing accounting software programs, Bill.com provides financial leaders with a comprehensive view of their cash forecast - making it the only solution that connects a user's banks, bookkeeping, and business. Bill.com empowers finance leaders to get paid 2 to 3 times faster and save over 50% of the time spent paying bills – all with unprecedented control, precision, and security.

More than 400 entries were received in this year’s awards program, from a wide array of public and private companies of all sizes and from a variety of industries and regions in the U.S. and Canada. Best in Biz Awards 2012 honors were presented in more than 50 categories, including Company of the Year, Most Innovative Company of the Year, Executive of the Year and Best New Product of the Year.

“We are pleased to be named a gold winner in the Best in Biz Awards, especially in the category of ‘Support Department of the Year’ since customer satisfaction is one of the most important asset any business can have,” said René Lacerte, founder and CEO, Bill.com. “We constantly strive to deliver superb service to our customers, and are pleased to see that our hard work is paying off for our customers.”

Winners of Best in Biz Awards 2012 were determined by an independent panel of 32 judges from top-tier news, business and technology publications, as well as broadcast outlets and analyst firms, such as ABC, Businessweek, Computerworld, ECT News Network, Entrepreneur, eWeek, Examiner, Financial Times, Forbes, FOX News, Hartford Business Journal, IDG Ventures, IEEE Institute, Inc., Insight Media, King Features Syndicate, Lab Reviews, Network World, The News and Observer, PC Magazine, ReadWriteWeb, South Florida Business Journal, Tech-Gaming, Techtalk, Upstart Business Journal, USA Today and ZDNet.

For a full list of gold, silver and bronze winners in Best in Biz Awards 2012, visit: http://www.bestinbizawards.com/2012-winners.

About Best in Biz Awards

Best in Biz Awards recognizes top companies, teams, executives and products for their business success as judged by independent panels of members of the press and industry analysts. Best in Biz Awards honors are conferred in three separate programs during the calendar year: U.S. and Canada, EMEA, and International. Any organization from any industry boasting demonstrated success in the awards program’s region can enter any of the more than 50 company, department or team, executive and product categories. Entries for Best in Biz Awards 2013 EMEA are being accepted from all companies based in or operating in Europe, Middle East and Africa until January 17, 2013. For more information about the entry process and categories in all three programs, please visit: http://www.bestinbizawards.com.

Banks Can Now Seamlessly Integrate Bill.com’s Cash Flow-Centric Banking Solution with Their SMB Offerings

Boca Raton, Fla., 17^th ANNUAL SMALL BUSINESS BANKING CONFERENCE— Nov. 7, 2012 — Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing, and cash management solutions for businesses, today introduced the next major milestone in its banking platform. Bill.com has added broad integration capabilities to its cash flow-centric banking platform for banks and their small and mid-size business (SMBs) customers. Bill.com enables banks to develop additional revenue streams and increase customer acquisition and retention by offering business customers a powerful accounts payable and accounts receivable service.More than 100,000 companies are now getting paid and paying millions of bills, worth billions of dollars, using Bill.com.  Bill.com is the only solution that empowers businesses to have full command and control over their cash flow at any time, from any location or device.

Current business banking solutions are limited to transactional payment processes. This leaves businesses of all sizes with the need to use disconnected bill payment and accounting solutions to gain control of their finances. The result is a cumbersome process plagued by inefficiencies, security risks, and errors. In contrast, Bill.com is the only solution that puts banks at the core of their customers’ business.  Bill.com allows banks to integrate the Bill.com solution with their own platform, creating their own branded offering. Bill.com empowers banks to own the entire cash flow management process—from payables and receivables, to cash flow visualization. Bill.com makes banks the focal point for all of their customers’ transactions, letting banks monetize the full cash management process while solving a significant pain point for SMBs by finally automating and connecting all of their financial processes. 

“Just as CheckFree helped banks revolutionize the consumer payments industry, Bill.com is now enabling banks to do the same for their business customers’ cash flow management and payments processes,” said Mark Johnson, former Vice Chairman of CheckFree Corporation and current Bill.com board member. “Bill.com understands the problem banks have faced trying to cobble together a business solution from their consumer offerings. Bill.com has fixed the problem via an integrated, efficient platform that helps banks win customer loyalty and brings them the ability to earn additional revenue.”

The Bill.com Banking Platform is based on six key components, all of which offer new and unique features. With this newest release of the Banking Platform, Bill.com has enabled API access to each of the components of the platform.  These APIs enable banks to seamlessly integrate with their banks’ SMB offerings, giving SMBs a seamless, cash-flow centric approach to running their businesses.

These components are:

• Authentication:  Bill.com offers single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA), meaning customers can gain access to their cash flow management control center anytime they log into online banking.  Using their bank’s authentication, their critical financial information is easy to access and secure.  The MFA framework enables the highest levels of security to enable business processes and secure payments.
• Entitlements: Entitlements govern the information employees and accountants have access to and the functions they can perform, such as approving bills and making payments. Bill.com alone provides out-of-the-box roles and permissions, while also enabling customers to create their own to suit their unique controls. It takes just a few clicks for payees and customers to be set up.
• Business Objects: Through the Bill.com platform, banks can offer their clients robust payables, receivables, cash flow management, document management, and workflow applications. Now they can also integrate Bill.com objects into their business banking services, using the company’s next generation API, based on JSON. The API gives banks an unprecedented ability  to customize business objects, incorporate them into their own user interface, and easily change them as the bank platform grows and changes. Bill.com’s extensive business objects enable banks to tailor and support their cash-flow centric platform like never before.
• Business Systems Integration: Bill.com integrates with all popular accounting packages so all your customer’s data is accurate and synchronized, and all of their existing financial processes and reports carry on as usual. Through advanced two-way synchronization, Bill.com eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone tasks of keeping all these various systems in sync. This sync process is superior to other solutions, which simply import and export data. As the Banking Platform expands, Bill.com will also be adding integration with a variety of other business systems in order to enhance companies’ overall cash flow control.
•  Payment Processing: Through Bill.com, banks can provide their clients a convenient and secure means through which they can send, receive, and reconcile payments across multiple payment channels, including ACH, checks, wire transfer, and credit card payments.  The Bill.com Bank Platform integrates with banks’ existing payment systems, to further leverage these investments.
• Payment Network: Bill.com offers a secure business network designed specifically for the needs of SMBs.  Through Bill.com’s cloud-based portals and payee directory, business can securely interact and transact with their customers and vendors.  They can exchange business documents, notes, eBills, eInvoices, and remittance information electronically to enable greater efficiency and convenience in traditionally cumbersome, paper-based processes.  The Bill.com network makes it easier for bank clients to connect and transact with their partners, vendors and customers while allowing the bank to capture a new source for fee-based revenue.

“Bill.com has already revolutionized how small and mid-sized businesses work and now we are transforming how they bank,” said René Lacerte, founder and CEO, Bill.com. “We built the Bill.com Banking Platform based on direct feedback from banks, who told us that their current systems just couldn’t meet their business customers’ needs. We are glad to be helping banks turn the old banking paradigm on its ear, by making banking solutions cash flow centric. The result will be banking solutions that work the way businesses do.”

About Bill.com’s Banking Solution

The Bill.com cash flow command and control system is the only solution that makes banks the core of their customers’ business. By allowing banks to integrate the Bill.com solution with their own platform, Bill.com empowers banks to own the entire cash flow management process—from payables to receivables to cash flow visualization. Bill.com makes banks the focal point of all their customers’ transactions, letting banks monetize the full cash management process while solving a significant pain point for SMBs by finally automating and connecting all of their financial processes. The award-winning Bill.com platform is being embraced by banks because it creates significant new revenue streams while enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction. For more information, please visit http://www.bill.com/for-banks.

Excerpt from Small businesses tap into cloud for efficiency - by Roger Yu, USA TODAY

".....With a niche focus, developers can also breed innovations that weren't possible with software that came in boxes, such as integrating the functions of other software by using open developer tools, says Rene Lacerte, CEO of Bill.com, which specializes in billing.

On Bill.com, users can tap into banks' online banking tools and other broader accounting suites, such as Intacct and Quicken. "In the last 10 years, the cloud changed the paradigm about how software is built," Lacerte says.

Read the full article in USA Today. Click here.