Starting this week, we are going to publish one or more cool features of the week. Like many technology-oriented services, we know that many of our customers derive a ton of value from a relatively small subset of features. In this weekly segment we hope to highlight some important features that are often over looked.
Why would an accountant want to use Bill.com and Intacct or QuickBooks?
In short: Because clients need a simple solution for collaborating with their accountants, and accountants need the powerful and sophisticated capabilities to deliver their high value services.
For many businesses and organizations, bill management involves people and teams that are not financial experts and do not and should not have, need, or want access to an accounting system. This results in numerous manual, error-prone, and paper-based bill entry, review, approval, and payment processes to fill the gaps-- filing, routing, follow ups, document retrieval, check printing, check signing, etc.
- This is inefficient (especially if the business and accountants work in many locations) and lacks controls and audit-ability, and ultimately means that financial processes are happening in silos.
- It creates operational and data silos-- vendor payment usually involves manual check writing/printing/mailing from the accounting system or requires separate online banking systems, both resulting in duplicate entry and lack seamless audit trails. These are huge issues with the volume of payments most small and midsize businesses make.
- It creates risk-- even with new online technologies, vendor payment exposes businesses to check fraud unless special services are purchased and managed.
To ease the pain of bill management, millions of businesses rely on accountants and bookkeepers to manage their cash flow and manage vendor payment-- accountants and bookkeepers can add tremendous value to their clients by applying their expertise to these daily financial tasks. However, getting a weekly shoebox full of documents, having clients manipulate data in the accounting system, mailing paper checks from a client’s bank account, or even using various bank bill pay solutions is inefficient, time-consuming, risky, and not scalable.
A combined solution with Bill.com and Intacct or QuickBooks provides an optimal solution:
- Accountant clients get a simple, paperless, web-based interface for managing bills and collaborating with their accountant, making it easy to participate in the bill management process without being overburdened (and even avoid handling some bills altogether!).
- Accountants and bookkeepers benefit from advanced data capture, controls, audit trail, accounting software integration, and secure bill payment, so they can provide sophisticated and accurate financial reporting and advice on the health and strategy of the business, while eliminating numerous manual, paper-based, and risky processes.
Clients (or preferably their vendors!) simply scan, fax, or email bills directly into Bill.com-- no more shoeboxes, couriers, or manual scanning, filing, and emailing. Accountants automatically receive bills and other financial documents in Bill.com and ensure proper expense categorization in the chart of accounts, get any additional approvals through paperless workflow, and manage payment schedules in a simple calendar that displays predicted cash flow directly from Intacct or QuickBooks. Bill.com offers unlimited document storage so accountants and clients can store and retrieve any associated documents -- past bills, past payments, and contracts -- at every step of the process.
Bill.com's paperless workflow leads directly into online bill payment so there are no document and bill payment “silos”-- Bill.com handles payments via checks or electronically via ACH (starting early summer!) from any US bank (no need to learn different systems for different clients!) with enterprise-class fraud protection, unlimited cleared check image retention, automatic consolidation of multiple vendor payments, visual payment remittance information (many business invoices do not involve account numbers, so proper payment credit is an issue), and many other unique features.
Intacct and QuickBooks Integration: Key to making it simple yet sophisticated
We continue to make a significant investment to make sure that integration between Bill.com and accounting systems eliminates duplication and adds value at every step of the accountant/client workflow.
- The chart of accounts in Intacct or QuickBooks is automatically loaded to Bill.com so there is complete consistency in how expenses are recorded in the GL, even when a bill is split amongst multiple accounts.
- Bill.com supports unique features of the different accounting systems. For example, supporting Intacct departments and locations.
- Vendor information is synchronized so there is no duplicate entry. If a bill arrives from a new vendor, the vendor can be added in Bill.com and it will automatically be added to Intacct or QuickBooks at the next sync.
- Bill.com loads the current book balance from Intacct or QuickBooks with every sync, so accountants and clients can get an accurate view of cash flow when scheduling payments in Bill.com.
- Payables and payments in Bill.com are loaded into Intacct or QuickBooks without requiring duplicate entry of accounts or vendor information. Bill.com even handles all the journal entries necessary to show proper cash movement from bank accounts into expense accounts to reflect how the payment was actually made (even if you make the payment "offline" using a credit card or other means).
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