Bills 2.0

Tip: Digitize and access more than bills with Bill.com!

Most of our customers are used to the way Bill.com allows you to easily digitize bills, approve them, and pay them. But you can also store and access any document using Bill.com. Business bill payment usually requires access to many more types of documents than just a bill... signed vendor contracts, service level agreements, bank statements, work estimates, financial reports, expense reports, etc.Typically these are stuffed in endless file cabinets and require valuable time to find.

With Bill.com you can fax, email, or upload any type of document and store them in native format (Word, Excel, PPT, etc except when you send by fax) so they are digitized and accessible them anywhere.

By doing this:

• You have access to all the supporting documents you need to make financial decisions anytime, anywhere (even on a web-enabled mobile device)
• You can easily find documents because they are automatically scanned using OCR and search-able site-wide
• You don't have to worry about intermediate steps such as scanning/naming documents and filing them locally before adding them to Bill.com
• You can have vendors or customers send documents directly into Bill.com and avoid handling paper at all
• You can get rid of all those cumbersome file cabinets (yes, our customers shred documents once they are in Bill.com)

It's this easy-- Simply fax, email or upload a document to Bill.com and....

• Tag it as a "vendor document" rather than a bill. This will allow you to attach the document to a vendor and easily access it from the Vendor Summary page
• Tag a document as a "company document" and assign it to a hierarchical file folder so you can access it in a file folder or find it through integrated search

Do this and you have access to all your documents whenever you need them without waiting until you are in the office to look in the file cabinet or having to ask employees to find them and deliver/email them to you.

And, it's not just handy when paying bills.... getting ready to hire a contractor to work on a project and can't remember what rate you paid the last person to help you? Look it up in seconds in Bill.com.

Happy Shredding!

New Transaction Detail Export for Thomson Reuters Write-Up CS

Just in time for end-of-year write up (or getting started with 2010) we have added a detailed transaction data export for Thomson Reuters Write-Up CS users.

To export Bill.com transaction data into Thomson  Reuters Write-up CS simply go to the Reports tab and select the appropriate Thomson Reuters Write up report, either:

• Thomson Reuters Write-up CS Summary Export: This report contains transaction summary data for each GL account
  

• Thomson Reuters Write-up CS Detail Export:  This report creates detailed bill and payment data 

Both reports are created on a cash reporting basis. 

The new Detail Export allows Write-Up CS customers to do more detailed write up and perform bank account reconciliation because it contains every individual transaction and not just a summary of each expense account.

To import the data into Write-Up CS, go to the Accountant's Assistant and upload the exported report. 

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.

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

Good advice on scanners

One of the benefits of Bill.com is that we make it easy to go paperless by allowing businesses to digitize bills by using a simple fax machine (every Bill.com account gets a unique fax number as part of the monthly service fee). However, once you really get going we think it is a greeat idea to invest in a good scanner.

CPA2Biz points out in a blog post, as does Alexandra DeFelice that good scanners will make all the difference for accounting firms entering tax season, but also for any business in our opinion. 

A couple things we recommend in addition to their good advice:

• Speed is good. When dealing with bills you often have a lot of pages and don't have time to wait.
• Get a scanner that supports automatic Duplex scanning. Many bills are double-sided. You do not want a scanner that makes you flip the pages to scan the back pages. many scanners like the Fujitsu Scansnap will automatically detect and scan both sides of a document while not scanning blank pages.
• Get a scanner that supports "scan to email". Services like Bill.com make it easy to automate workflow and avoid having to handle and file documents on hard drives and corporate document management systems. If your scanner can automatically send a document to an email address you avoid having to save a pdf document on a host computer and then figure out what to do with it. You simply program the scanner to send documents to Bill.com and you never have to worry about the local document....it's filed automatically for you.

Paperless is the future. While you can get cheap scanners, in our experience spending a little more money (even only a few hundred dollars) will pay off by saving a lot of time and frustration many times over.

The Pitch

Apologies
First, my apologies for the long time between posts. The reality is that a month ago, a family emergency came up and all of my free time away from running the day-to-day activities of Bill.com has gone to supporting my family on the other coast. I bring it up here because I think “flexibility” in one’s schedule is one of the great things about being your own boss. I might always be working but I can do it when and where I need to. This allows for a different type of “work/life balance” that is very powerful when used appropriately. Let’s save that topic for another post in the future. The subject this time is The Pitch.

The Pitch
It’s the most essential part of your communication arsenal. Without it, you are dead in the water; with it, you are alive and well. Case in point: the previous two sentences have either grabbed you or not. You will either read the rest of this post or skip over to the next thing on your mind.

Do not underestimate the power of the pitch and do not under prepare. You will refine and hone the pitch over and over again and each time you will not have prepared enough. I have been “pitching” my businesses for the better part of the last decade. I have worked with great PR and marketing folks refining the pitch and still there are times when I just come off flat. So you have to practice, practice, practice. And, if you’re like me, you don’t need anyone to tell you once you have pitched whether it’s good or not. You just know.

Here are some things to keep in mind when developing your pitch: clarity and conciseness, imagery, and repeatability.
1) Clarity and conciseness. This is the proverbial elevator pitch. I like to think of it as 30 seconds long. It needs to be brief and to the point. I changed the name of my current company because I thought of a tagline that went with the name that accomplished this in four words. Bill.com. Send. Receive. Pay. Don’t try to be clever and don’t try to use big words. If you write it out and the sentence is a run-on or is more than 20 words, it is too long.
2) Imagery. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. So if you don’t have time to say a thousand words, create an image that is way more powerful. BTW, it is also quite memorable. To illustrate a scene for Bill.com services, I conjure up the images of paper everywhere, lost behind desks and even the way things were done when my folks were starting their first business (punch cards). Bill.com cleans up that mess. Images you conjure up for your business will work and will be remembered.
3) Repeatability. If you don’t say the same thing every time you are at your kids’ soccer game or sitting next to someone on the airplane, then how will your target market remember it? There is a fun game, called “Telephone,” that we used to play as kids. You line up a group of kids and whisper in one ear and then have that repeated to each kid along the chain. Invariably, what you get at the end of the chain is very different than when it started. Don’t forget this when you are developing your pitch. Your message will get repeated many more times than you know and you always want the last person to hear it to be as if you were talking to them.

Now that you have it, practice! Not once or twice, but hundreds of times. When we launched at Demo last fall, I practiced my six-minute pitch more than 100 times in the final three weeks before the show. We did win a Demogod award but I still wished I had practiced more. Once thing to keep in mind is your environment when you pitch. When you are raising money from VC’s it is different than Angel Investors and it is different than being on stage. Be prepared for interruptions in the form of questions, suggestions or bright lights/flashes going off, if on stage. The more you practice by yourself with friends that play the role, or actual advisors, the better you will be.

So good luck on developing that pitch, it is an art and it is never done.

P.S.: Check out the links on the right to read some excellent articles on The Pitch.