Bills 2.0

Happy Earth Day!

In celebration of Earth Day we thought we would share a cool site from payitgreen.org that allows you to calculate the environmental savings of paying bills electronically. 

Did you know that by paying 20 bills a month electronically (a decent average for many small businesses) you save 177 pounds of greenhouse gas from entering the environment. That's the equivalent of:

• Not driving 174 miles in your car 
• Planting 2 trees (a month!) 
• Saving 24 square feet of forest  

That sounds pretty compelling! Now imagine the savings of all those Bill.com customers making hundreds of payments per month. Those are real numbers. And that doesn't even count the savings Bill.com customers achieve from:

• Eliminating paper bill handling, copying, and filing (not just bill payment) in the office
• Providing a simple way for vendors to send digitized bills directly into the bill payment system without mailing them 
• Eliminating courier/mail and transportation costs routing bills to a remote bookkeeper or accountant (the shoebox of bills has to get to the accountant somehow!) 
• Eliminating internal office mail (especially between remote offices) 
• Consolidating vendor payments (yes, some of this is still paper-based, but its less paper) 

The point is, electronic/paperless bill management and payment is great for the environment and Bill.com reduces our client's carbon footprint immensely. 

Stay tuned for even more carbon savings when we expand our electronic payment capabilities next month!!!!! (We normally don't pre-announce features, but it's Earth Day after all!). 

If you want to get updates on our upcoming new features be sure to follow us online on Twitter and LinkedIn!

Happy Earth Day!

 

Cool Feature of the Week: Consolidating Payments to a Single Vendor

Businesses often pay the same vendor many times a day, week, or month. When this happens, it is usually most convenient for the vendor (and the environment) to consolidate bills into a single payment. There are a few basic challenges in doing this, however:

• The bill payer typically needs to take manual action in the accounting system to consolidate invoices into a single payment 
• If the check signing authority is different from the person preparing the bills for payment, then supporting information usually needs to be forwarded for review prior to signing the check.   
• If the business is not careful, it is possible to confuse the vendor if there is not enough remittance information with the payment (so the vendor knows how to apply the payments). 

What extra steps do you have to do in Bill.com to pay the same vendor with one payment for multiple bills? None! 

With Bill.com you review and approve bills through our normal workflow and audit trail features. If an approved payer pays the same vendor for multiple bills on the same day, Bill.com will automatically combine those bills into one payment and send the vendor the appropriate remittance information so they know how to apply the payment. No decision-making, no manual processes, no need to review the combined payment amount, no printing or mailing, no hassles, and very happy vendors. 

Next week, another cool feature!

Why can't small businesses pay bills using online bill payment from their bank?

One of our most frequently asked questions is: why can't a small or midsize business just use their bank bill payment system to pay their bills? 

In a previous post we discussed some of the differences between business bill payment and "consumer" oriented bill payment. All of the issues raised in that post apply to using consumer-oriented online payment from the bank. Here's the bottom line: 

Bill.com addresses the needs of the entire business bill management and payment process, not just online payment. Whereas your bank can help you make a payment, Bill.com optimizes your entire bill management and payment process-- saving a ton of manual effort and providing unique capabilities for fraud protection and auditability. 

For example, Bill.com offers:

• An easy way to digitize bills and manage paperless workflow between financial and non-financial participants in the bill payment process (should everyone in your bill approval workflow have access to your online banking system?)
• A financial filing cabinet that allows businesses to store and retrieve (using simple search) all documents involved in the bill payment process, including bills, contracts, and other supporting information (anywhere, anytime) fully indexed by optical character recognition (OCR)
• Seamless integration from paperless workflow to bill payment (with equivalent functionality using any US bank account)
• Synchronization of vendor, chart of accounts, and payables with your accounting software (QuickBooks or Intacct) including support for complex account splits (no duplicate entry!). Your bank will only sync cleared transactions and require you to manually update your accounting system with all other accounting information.
• Fraud protection against check manipulation with no additional fees (positive pay)
• A complete audit trail of bill and payment approvals and activities   

• Unlimited retention of cleared check images online (no additional fees to get image CD's)
• Easy access to payment evidence (cleared check images attached to approved bills) that might be required during audits 
• It's cost effective: Businesses that use Bill.com for a large number of transactions save a ton of time in data entry and do not have to maintain minimum bank balances to use the service.   

Online bill payment has been around for a long time and is extremely useful for consumers, but business bill payment requires deeper functionality to support the real world bill workflow of small and midsize organizations.

Cool Feature of the Week: Intacct and QuickBooks Integration

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. 

However, for this first installment, in recognition of yesterday's announced partnership between CPA2Biz (a subsidiary of the AICPA and exclusive provider of Bill.com to the accounting profession) and Intacct, the leading SaaS Accounting solution (also a Bill.com partner) we want to highlight a feature that most people who follow us know about-- our integration with Intacct and QuickBooks. And specifically, why this helps accountants and bookkeepers. 

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.

Here's how it works (30,000 ft view):

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).  

The result: A simple, low-cost, web-based interface for managing bills and payments that supports the sophisticated accounting and workflow needs of the business and their accountants.

To learn more about how Bill.com works with accounting and bookkeeping professionals visit http://www.cpa2biz.com/bill/. 

Next week: We'll discuss another cool feature in a much shorter post! We promise! :-)