Bills 2.0

Nice write up on SIIA Panel

Nice write up on the SIIA panel "SaaS Going Vertical" hosted by Dan Druker of Intacct last week. We were excited to participate and be part of such a great panel. It was great to see so many organizations moving beyond the question of "is SaaS the right model?" to "how do you deliver even more value to customers?" 

It was clear that going vertical (building capabilities that strongly align with vertical, or specialized organizations) and partnering with experts that can add value to customers are top of mind. And, it was very cool to see both new and traditional channel partners embrace the SaaS model.  

Surviving in a down economy

We attended and spoke at the Sleeter Conference last week and one of the key messages we heard repeatedly is that in a down economy, businesses need to focus on their customers and their services (or products). While paying bills and managing cash flow are critical, the last things business owners and their financial teams (if they have them) need to be worrying about are managing paper bills, filing, and writing checks. Many are turning to accountants and bookkeepers to manage the process. Even if business owners handle bill payment themselves, it is usually off hours or on the road, and they rarely have access to all the information they need unless they have gone paperless and web-based. 

Ryan Carter, in Small businesses finding ways to survive economic turmoil quotes Daniel Kehrer, editor and director of content development at Business.com:

Web-based bookkeeping and billing systems such as Freshbooks.com and bill.com can cut down on the expense of paperwork, and make an immediate difference on a small business' bottom line, he said. Digital check-depositing systems can also deposit money more quickly.

Based on our conversations at the Sleeter Conference it seems that a lot of small businesses agree with the statement and are hiring accountants and bookkeepers to make these processes more efficient. 

Taking SaaS Vertical: Come see us on the SIIA panel next week

Join us on Tuesday, November 18, 2008, at the SIIA OnDemand conference in San Jose where we will be on a panel hosted by Intacct's SVP of Marketing and Business Development, Dan Druker titled "Taking Saas Vertical".

The panel includes a great lineup of leaders including Dan Fishback of DemandTec, Adam Miller of Cornerstone OnDemand, and Vijay Saha of Sererra.

We see a definite evolution of business-oriented SaaS applications becoming more vertical as vendors focus more and more on specific user workflows as opposed to generic solutions. SaaS makes it much easier for vendors to deliver this type of industry customization and makes it much easier for our customers to try it, give us feedback, and help us evolve the service quickly.

At the same time, more and more organizations that have served as delivery and sales channels into specific industry's are expanding their offerings to include SaaS solutions (and not just traditional on premises solutions). They realize that there is a significant opportunity for focused industry experts to help customers adopt SaaS solutions quickly and most effectively.

It's an exciting time for all of us, and we look forward to discussing it on the panel!

Quickbooks Awesome Add-On and Intuit Gold Status

We are at the Sleeter Accounting Software Consulting Conference and have some exciting news to announce. We were selected as a recipient of a 2009 Awesome QuickBooks Add-On Award!

We are also excited about achieving Intuit Gold Developer status this week.

We'll be at the Sleeter conference all week in the CPA2Biz booth, come join us if you are here.

Randy Johnston compares off premise vs in house financial apps

Nice article by Randy Johnston of K2 Enterprises that discusses off premise vs. in house financial applications.

Business vs consumer online bill payment

One of the primary questions we get asked is “Why Bill.com when I have online bill pay from my bank”? It’s a great question with a fairly straightforward answer—most online bill payment systems are designed for consumers, not businesses, and the differences are significant enough to make it really time consuming and risky to use.

Some differences between business and consumer needs that we hear all the time:

Business bill payment involves more people. At a minimum the business owner and the accountant. In larger companies, as many as 20% of the people in the company have purchasing authority and need to approve the bills they incur. 
In the consumer model, there is one and only one user - consumers delegate this task to one person in the household. Businesses can't delegate this because of the controls necessary to insure all spending is valid and appropriately authorized. Bill.com was designed to streamline the approval process while providing the financial controls that allow users who should never go near a checkbook or online banking system to still be part of the process.

Business bill payment involves a lot more paper. Business people approve payments by looking at contracts, past invoices (to see if there are duplicates), and even examining when the last payment cleared. All of this is paper-intensive and involved more than simply the paper generated by the biller, which is the most that any consumer online bill payment system provides. 
Bill.com provides a central repository to digitally store all of this “paper”. Related documents are linked together in this repository, making it easy for business people to quickly get the information they need.

Business bill payment involves a lot more transactions from varied sources. A consumer account typically has 10 recurring bills from the same vendors every month. A typical business has many more vendors, some that are seasonal and others that are just one-time. 
Bill.com was designed to handle a high level of transactions, and makes it easy to manage and transact with a large group of vendors while synching all of the activity back with the core accounting system.

Don’t get us wrong, consumer online bill payment is great. We all use it. And, large enterprises have systems that handle many of the issues above. But for the small and mid-size business, there hasn’t been a great solution.

Are you a small or mid-size business struggling with these issues? Let us know what you think!

Why Bills 2.0?

Welcome to the new Bill.com blog! It’s been a little over a year since we officially launched at Demo 2007 and were awarded the prestigious DEMOgod award followed by several other great awards. Much has happened since that launch. We are growing our customer base rapidly, thanks in many ways to our relationship with CPA2Biz, the marketing arm of the American Institute for Certified Professional Accountants.

We have also launched several product upgrades, including cool features such as one-click, synchronization with leading accounting products like QuickBooks and Intacct.

In tough economic times small and mid-size businesses can lead the way to recovery. But at the same time they need to be laser-focused on their customers and business. That’s where we come in. Business owners and financial teams are still too inundated with day-to-day financial tasks—managing bills, filing papers, writing checks, avoiding check fraud, and figuring out how to best manage cash flow.

The process for managing bills and financial paperwork simply has to change. It’s bad for business. At Bill.com we are passionate about changing the way businesses and their accountants and bookkeepers handle these financial tasks so they can focus on what really matters.

We are also passionate about making customers successful. We are launching this blog so we can share our vision and passion with our customers, but most importantly so you can share your passion and vision with US.

So let’s get the conversation started!