Bills 2.0

New Feature: Enhanced ePayment Setup

We have made it faster and easier to set up vendors to receive electronic ePayments from Bill.com. A few new features include:

Ability to add a vendor by entering their Bill.com Payment Network ID

Whenever a vendor registers for the Bill.com Payment Network they will now receive a Payment Network ID. You can set up that vendor to receive ePayments whenever you pay them by simply asking them to provide you with their Payment Network ID. This way you no longer have to "invite" them to join the network if you know they are already registered.

When you go to the "Setup ePayments" page for that vendor and you will see the option to enter their ID.

Invite Multiple Vendors to Register at Once

You can now invite multiple vendors to joint the Bill.com Payment Network rather than inviting them individually. From the Vendor page in Bill.com, simply select "Setup ePayments" without selecting an individual vendor and you will have the option to select multiple vendors from a list and send them all invitations at once.

New Feature: Enhanced Vendor Credit Management

This weekend we added Enhanced Vendor Credit Management to Bill.com. This new feature makes it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to accept vendor credits, route them for review and apply them when paying bills... all through Bill.com and fully synced with QuickBooks or Intacct.

You can now:

• Fax, email or upload credit documentation (credit memos, statements, etc) into Bill.com just like bills
• Route vendor credits to reviewers (including users that do not have access to your accounting system)
• View and apply credits when making payments (you can choose to apply all or a portion of the vendor credits)
• Get reminded of available credits whenever you are looking at vendor information or paying bills

In addition:

• Check vouchers and ePayment confirmation emails will indicate when credits are applied
• Credits will sync with QuickBooks and Intacct and can be exported using our standard reports

Enter credits

• Simply fax, email, or upload vendor credit memos or statements containing credits to your inbox in Bill.com
• Note that credits can now be recorded without needing access to your accounting system... you can delegate the task to an office manager or do it on the road!

Route Vendor Credits Automatically

• Using Bill.com you can have employees (and contractors) who do not have access to your accounting system review vendor credits
  
• If you need others to review the vendor credit, verify amounts or approve them for use, simply add their names and Bill.com will take care of showing them the digital image of the vendor credit and gathering approvals online
• When entering vendor credits you have access to vendor information, vendor contracts, and past vendor credits
• vendor credits can be assigned to GL accounts, jobs, and departments/classes so when they are synchronized with your accounting package they are properly classified

Apply Credits When Paying Bills

• When you pay your bills, Bill.com will inform you if there are available credits
• Simply click on the link to review and apply credits to the payment

Determine How Much of the Credit You Want to Apply

• Simply select which credits (and how much of the credit) you want to apply and Bill.com will adjust the payment amount!

Review and Pay Bills

• Once the credit is applied you are returned to the "Pay Bills" page where you can make the payment
• You will see that a credit has been applied and have the option to make adjustments at any time prior to payment
• When Bill.com makes the payment your vendors will be notified that a credit was applied (on both checks as well as their ePayment notification emails!)

Synchronize with your Accounting Package

• Bill.com makes sure that the vendor credit is properly applied to the bill in QuickBooks or Intacct and credits will be reflected in your chart of accounts
• You can view credits within your accounting package and see where they were applied

We hope you like the new features and will provide us feedback!

Paying employee expenses electronically with Bill.com

Businesses of all sizes routinely reimburse employee expenses. But small and medium sized businesses typically do it the old fashioned way, by filing paper copies or expense reports and receipts and cutting paper checks. This is is time intensive and results in slower payments, and slower access to funds for employees.

While employee expense reimbursement was not the primary reason for creating Bill.com, it turns out that many of our customers use us for just that. Especially now that our ePayment capability makes it easy to pay employees electronically.

In a nutshell, here is what our customers are doing:

• Filling out expense reports using a company's existing process (typically with Word or Excel files).
• Faxing or emailing those forms to their company's Bill.com account along with images of their receipts
• The finance team can then classify all expenses using the general ledger information synchronized with either QuickBooks or Intacct.
• The expense report is then routed to the employee for the "electronic signature" and then routed to management and the finance team. Every step of the process is recorded in the audit log for future reference and all the documents are stored digitally-- the employee can literally shred the receipts and any paper documents.
• Once the expense report is approved, the finance team (or employer) simply pays the employee via Bill.com. If the employee's bank information is present (and it typically is because the same finance team set them up in payroll) then the employee is paid electronically via ePayments, directly to their bank account. If their bank information is not in the system, they get paid by check (without requiring the finance team to print, sign, or distribute the check).
• As an added bonus, the employee receives an automated email when the payment is sent and when funds are available in their bank account. All without any work on the part of the finance team or whoever processed the payment.
• If an employee has a question about payment status, the finance team can look up payment information with a few clicks.

To learn more and try it 30 days risk free, visit http://www.bill.com/businesses/expense-reimbursement.php

New Partnership with Shoeboxed.com

We are excited to announce a new partnership with Shoeboxed.com! As our customer know, we are laser-focused on making bill management and payment as simple and efficient as possible for small and midsized businesses. We are also very focused on listening to customer feedback. One of the things we have heard time and again from many customers and prospective customers is that scanning and even faxing documents can be too cumbersome. Yet, everyone wants to go paperless these days for obvious reasons-- less filing, fewer manual processes, anywhere access to information, and it's great for the environment.

With Shoeboxed, we now offer the best of all worlds... customers can still scan, fax, or email bills to Bill.com or they can simply mail them to Shoeboxed and have them scanned and automatically uploaded to their Bill.com Inbox. And, you can try it for FREE!

Let us know how you like it!

Taking Your Accounting Practice Online

There is no question that accounting and bookkeeping firms are looking to gain efficiencies by taking their operations and client communications online. There are tremendous advantages to automating routine workflow and going paperless. 

Firms interested in taking their accounting or bookkeeping practice online should listen to this new podcast from CPA Technology Advisor. Actually, it is pretty applicable to anyone looking to take their bookkeeping activities online with a SaaS application. 

Darren Root and Doug Sleeter talk about several vendors featured at the recent Sleeter Group Conference in Phoenix, where Bill.com (and other vendors profiled in the podcast) won an Awesome Add-on Award.

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!