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Bill.com's Fast-Growing Business Payments Network is Converting More Than 40% of Customer Payments to ACH

Bill.com is the Only Company Helping SMBs Change Their Check Payments to ACH By Automating the End-to-End Cash Flow Management Process

PALO ALTO, Calif.— April 25, 2013 — Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash flow management solutions for businesses, today announced that it is converting more than 40 percent of customers payments from check to ACH, meaning Bill.com is the only company making ACH—commonly known as ePayments—adoption a reality for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs). Bill.com is achieving this feat by going beyond single ACH transactions and automating the end-to-end cash flow management process, connecting people, documents, payments and accounting systems.

Today, more than 80% of transactions between U.S. small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) involve paper invoices, paper checks, or manual reconciliation, resulting in costly inefficiencies and errors.  Bill.com is turning this paradigm on its ear. Bill.com is the first platform to digitize the whole process, integrating electronic payments seamlessly with accounting software and digital documents.  

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By René Lacerte, Founder and CEO

A few weeks ago Bill.com had the honor of being the gold winner for Best Innovation via ACH at the 2013 PAYMNTS.com Innovations Award. It was a great night and part of the excellent Innovation Project™ two-day program that brought together payments industry leaders and overall innovators/legends like Al Gore and Warren Buffet to talk about what’s next in the payments space.

I was thinking again about this great event because I recently received the picture you can see above. I’m fond of this photo not only because I think it captures the energy and enthusiasm of the event, but because of the amazing irony of the people posed together. For there I am being presented the ACH (aka ePayment) Innovation Award by none other than B.J. Novak of “The Office” fame. Is there anything more ironic than a Dunder Mifflin Paper Company worker giving out an award for achievement in bringing businesses paperless? What would Michael Scott say?

Well, Michael Scott would likely miss the point, but a worker like Dwight Schrute might get it eventually in his own weird way. The world has moved again. Paperless is the new paper, as much as texting is the new way of talking, and Instagram is the new photo album. As with all inflection points in our society, massive change has happened without us especially noticing. Having an Office cast member present an award for going paperless is as incongruous as having Steve Jobs recognize an early green-screen PC for beautiful UI. And we are in on the joke. Paper is passé. We can laugh about it. And we can act on it. In fact, we already are.

Business payment networks have been redefined. In fact, Bill.com is the fastest growing business payments network in the nation, enabling more than 175,000 businesses to pay and get paid. Bill.com manages more than five million bills per year, worth $10 billion-plus.  The times, as they once said during another inflection point in our nation’s history, they are a-changing.

So, keep an eye out for how often you are making ePayments, note how you are making more and more digital transactions while you need less and less paper money. Because that’s the thing about inflection points: they sneak up on you when you aren’t looking. But rest assured, when we do look back on 2013, it will be as the year that ePayments went from being a nice convenience to a fact of life.

Put a "Dent in the Universe"
Webinar Features CFO of World’s Largest eTextbooks Provider Sharing Time-Saving Strategies, Productivity Boosters

PALO ALTO, CALIF.— April 12, 2013 — Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash flow management solutions for businesses, today announced that it will offer a free webinar on how you can eliminate your biggest time wasters and gain more hours to “put a dent in the Universe,” as Steve Jobs once said, on Wednesday, April 17, at 11 a.m. PT. Registration is available now at http://cashflow.bill.com/DentInTheUniverse_041713.html.

Learn more here.

Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash management solutions for businesses, today announced that CEO and founder René Lacerte will share tips on how entrepreneurs can manage their companies’ finance and accounting functions effectively at a TiE Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Education event on Tuesday, April 9, from 6-8:30 p.m. in Santa Clara, Calif.  To register or for more information, please visit https://sv.tie.org/event/how-manage-your-companys-finance-accounting-effectively. 

All companies must manage their finance and accounting functions efficiently to ensure they meet their strategic and operational goals. These functions are often an afterthought for startup companies, however, and can limit the company's growth if not managed effectively. Fortunately, new approaches and tools make this a much easier task than ever before. Lacerte will share his thoughts on the best practices for managing core processes such as payments, receivables, and balance sheet transactions. He will provide insights on how these processes affect business performance and impact customer satisfaction. Lacerte will also share how these mission critical decisions and transactions can now be accomplished from your mobile device. 

“It is amazing the difference well thought-out and executed finance and accounting functions can make for a start-up,” said René Lacerte, founder and CEO of Bill.com. “I look forward to sharing my own experiences as both an entrepreneur and the creator of Bill.com with this audience of emerging business leaders.”

Bill.com delivers a complete web-based financial solution for businesses and accountants that provides the tools, information, and collaboration required to better manage their financial tasks and optimize cash flow. Bill.com's game-changing technology allows users to access online bill payments, e-invoicing, document management, and automated workflow through one easy system. In addition to seamlessly integrating with businesses' existing accounting software programs, Bill.com provides financial leaders with a comprehensive view of their cash forecast - making it the only solution that connects a user's banks, bookkeeping, and business.

By René Lacerte, Founder and CEO

Typically, for business owners, tax season means months of toil and tension. Where did that old bill go? How much can I write off this year? How can I get my accountant everything he needs in a timely manner? And why do I have a discrepancy every time I add my numbers up?

Help is finally on its way. Internet-based technologies, like what we offer here at Bill.com, are emerging to ease not just the burden of tax season, but of managing a business’s cash flow year-round. In short, by moving all of their finances to an online solution, business owners are able to easily manage their money, bill their customers and pay their bills. Plus, online information is much more secure given that it is behind advanced security measures rather than scattered about multiple offices, desks and briefcases. Come tax season, with online finances, businesses can record, collect and file needed data with no hassle, no worries and no paper.

I know, it is already April 1st, so maybe it is a bit too late to enact much change for this year. But here are some tips to get you started on the right path for next year—or to help you finish off this year if you have filed an extension:

1. You can finally dump the file cabinet. With an online solution, you don't need to pull together endless paperwork for your accountant. Give her access to your files via a secure password, and she can get all the information that she needs online. Think of the endless phone calls and mailings this will save.
2. Having everything online helps you prepare for taxes because all the documentation you need is in one place. No more searching for files in your desk late into the night.
3. Once all your information is online, you don't have to re-create the wheel every tax season. Your documentation will be in one place and it will be updated throughout the year as you use the system. You can also schedule easy-to-forget standing tax payments so you never have to worry about that again.
4. Being online lets you be audit-ready at any time. You have all the information you need to show the IRS at your fingertips – even on your mobile device.
5. Being online not only guards against errors but it also eliminates fraud. Using today’s advanced security measures, your data is safer than it has ever been.

Best of all, going paperless means an uncluttered desk, which leads to an uncluttered mind. This is, of course, always good to have, but especially hard to achieve in tax season until now. So good luck and God speed, for these last 15 days! And be sure to lean on us next year, if you haven’t yet, so that we can show you how easy tax season can be! And that is no April’s Fool!

By Lisa Lang, SVP Marketing

They’re texting now instead of sending email. SnapChatting instead of tweeting or posting on Facebook. Some of them have never owned a CD or DVD. Many have never addressed an envelope or written a check – and never will. And by the way, there are 76 million of them in the U.S. alone, with $200 billion in spending power. What does all this mean for your business? 

Demographers call them the Millennials, or Generation-Y (as in “y r u still writing checks?”). Planet-wide, there are about a billion of them. The oldest of them turned 30 just last year. Soon they’ll be running everything. 

They’re wired 24/7 (wirelessly, of course). And one of their greatest impacts on business of all kinds is their continuing, unstoppable shift away from paper-based, manual processes, to the most recent digital technology.

“Remember how impatient you felt the last time you were forced to wait in line while someone ahead of you took forever writing a check?” asked one young finance manager recently. “That’s how we feel when you bog us down at the office with paperwork or send us a form we can’t fill out online.”

No wonder the Federal Reserve Bank reports that check use is steadily declining. Over the last decade, the average daily volume of commercial checks fell from 67.0 million in 2000 to just 26.4 million in 2012 – a drop of 60.5%.

Of course, Generation-Y is just one reason for the rapid demise of the check in favor of electronic payments. Business owners of all ages benefit from an automated cash flow system that allows the business to pay and get paid electronically – all from a mobile device.

Companies that convert to paperless, cloud-based systems such as Bill.com experience streamlined internal processes and substantial cost savings. Management gets mobile access to documents and data from anywhere at any time, enabling more immediate insight into business performance and better decision making. Executives gain more time to focus on strategic priorities.

And going digital isn’t just for payments. While you’re at it, why not digitize all your documents from now on, and store them in the cloud? Eliminate the time spent filing paper (and the time spent searching for misfiled paper) with one-click access from wherever you need to be. Employ the space now taken up by filing cabinets more usefully. Employ your employees more productively. More and more companies are updating their processes in all these ways now.

For all these reasons, going paperless would be a smart decision in any case. But now there’s an added incentive: As more and more of these mobile, digitally active young people become your customers, vendors and peers, their world view is becoming the dominant paradigm. It’s just good business to fit in. 

   By Christina Del Villar, Senior Director Marketing

CourseSmart, LLC is doing very well today – even though CFO Patti Randall’s dog loves eating books. “When we first launched in 2007, we were a bit concerned,” she says. However, her dog’s strange appetite was the least of the founders’ worries back then.

The iPhone was brand new, Twitter was only a year old, and no one yet foresaw how established processes and revenue models in virtually every business were about to be slammed by the rapidly oncoming shift away from paper-based, manual processes to the new digital and mobile technologies.

For many traditional publishers, the impact has been devastating, but for CourseSmart the shift has meant a rapid rise to the top. Now the world’s largest provider of digital course materials for college students, CourseSmart offers nearly 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers, selling over 90% of the top-selling textbooks – at up to 60% off the paper version prices.

“Our real concern back then was that adoption might be slow,” says Randall. “We thought it might take longer for students’ behavior to change. But as it turns out, eTextbooks are the fastest growing part of the textbook industry, growing at five times the rate of print textbooks. College students today work, think and operate in a digital world. They even read their textbooks on their smartphones.”

Despite the company’s vision to transition textbooks from print to pixels, ironically, CourseSmart’s own offices were awash in cash flow management paperwork at first, until Bill.com came to the rescue. 

"Bill.com has done for us what we do for our customers – eliminated the paper."  Patti Randall, CFO of CourseSmart

 “I used to dread coming in on the days when a two-inch thick blue folder would be waiting on my desk, full of checks to sign.  I had to go through each one, make sure the back-up was there and match the check, sign the checks, and then, because we were small, I’d pass the folder on to our CEO, who also had to go through and sign them all.

“It probably took me eight to 12 hours a month, and that’s just for my own time. Now that we do it all online, it’s down to a half-hour per week, if that.

“Bill.com has done for us what we do for our customers – eliminated the paper. No shuffling paperwork or making copies, no printing out emails, no filing, no filing cabinets. We have only two printers for 40 people, and we don’t have a copier at all. 

“The mobile aspect is exciting because of our travel schedules. We like to pay our bills on time, and that used to be challenging if the CEO or a department head was out of the office. Now we can do everything from our smartphones.

“But what stands out the most for me is the time savings. I’ve had time to put in a whole new budgeting package, more time to work on strategic issues, talent acquisition, and all of the high-level decisions that keep us competitive in a rapidly-changing marketplace. In a fast-growing company like CourseSmart, there are so many opportunities to change entire industries and “put a dent in the Universe,” as Steve Jobs said – but that’s only possible if you create efficiencies, and increase productivity – so you have more time for the big ideas.”  As for her book-loving pet, Randall laughs, “That’s just one more reason CourseSmart is the ideal solution.”

Interested in going paperless? We’re presenting a free webinar on the topic with Patti Randall as the featured speaker, April 17^th. Click here to sign-up.

Get your stuff into Bill.com faster

Drag and drop bills, invoices, and other documents directly into your account. One at a time, or several together. No more choosing/searching/uploading. Just hit the bull’s eye!

Payables - Make it a policy to require approvers

Require approvers for any bill or vendor credit, based on the dollar amount. Require a minimum number of approvers, specific approvers, or both. If the person entering a bill or vendor credit fails to assign the required approvers, we stop them and show your approval policy.

Payables - Did any other approvers change something?

Are you one link in a chain of people who approves bills and vendor credits? Do you ever wonder if any of those people changed something before you see it? Wonder no longer. When a bill or vendor credit reaches you for approval, just click a link to see “who” has changed “what”.

Payables & NetSuite - Categorize the bills you pay with your NetSuite classes

Use NetSuite for accounting? You're about to get greater insight into your bill payments: we now support NetSuite classes for payables. Enter, categorize, and pay your bills in Bill.com. Sync the transactions to NetSuite, then run reports and analyze your spending.

Receivables - Show/hide the payment link on invoices

Most times, you want customers to pay you through Bill.com. Sometimes you don’t. And sometimes customers prefer to pay by check.

For those times when customers won’t be paying you through Bill.com, create an invoice template that hides our payment website. Your invoices look cleaner, customers aren’t distracted, and the Amount Due and Due Date stand out more prominently!

Receivables - Lock in a customer’s commitment

A customer has given you permission to directly charge their bank account or credit card. You enter all the details. You invoice them. You wait for payment. And wait. And wait. What’s up? They deleted the bank account or credit card from their Bill.com account, without telling you.

But not anymore. Choose to lock in their commitment, so that they must contact you before they make any changes.

Receivables - Privacy when one customer is several people

Have any situations where you invoice one customer, but get paid by several different people? For example, you might be a landlord who collects rent from several roommates. Each pays from their own bank account or credit card, but they don’t want their roommates to see or use their finances.

Our solution: when they sign up to pay you through Bill.com, each roommate marks their finances as Private. Then, only each individual roommate sees their respective bank account or credit card.

Receivables - Export details anywhere

We work with most of the popular accounting software, but not all (yet). To export your receivables transactions to software or a system we don’t yet support, use our new Invoice Details Report. You get everything, including line item details, accounts, and departments, in a convenient comma-separated value (CSV) file.

By René Lacerte, Founder & CEO

As I’ve said many times, the reason I started Bill.com was to solve my biggest challenge managing the back office at my first company.  As a CEO and entrepreneur there was simply too much paperwork moving through too many people’s hands to ever have an easy way to manage payables and receivables.  As a result it was pretty hard to have any kind of grasp on cash flow. At Bill.com, we’ve finally solved this age-old problem through our powerful, Cloud-based solution. And now we’re teaming up with like-minded companies to help bring the paperless revolution beyond our rapidly-growing network and out to every consumer in the nation. We have taken the Paperless Pledge and joined the Paperless 2013 movement.

Paperless 2013 is a coalition of companies that are helping consumers and businesses go paperless. Member companies include HelloFax, Google Drive, Fujitsu Scansnap, Expensify, Manilla, HelloSign, Xero, Eventbrite, Lemon, Nitro, Shoeboxed and, of course, Bill.com. The coalition notes that according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the average U.S. office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. In 2010, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 334 pounds for each person living in the US, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Pretty amazing numbers. And it’s even more amazing that by making some simple changes we can not only make the earth a better place, but we can make our businesses more successful.

Because being paperless is not just about saving trees. It is about increasing efficiency, enhancing collaboration, and bringing visibility where it never was before. It is about empowering that new generation of CEOs and finance leaders, the “No Check” CEOs we often talk about, to throw off the shackles of paperwork and replace time-consuming paper processes with fast, efficient cloud-based systems everywhere in their businesses.  Goodbye file cabinets, hello data at your fingertips.
There are a million good reasons to join this movement-- and not a single reason to wait. Please join us and take the paperless pledge at http://www.Paperless2013.org. Once you do, you will receive an email with links to a set of web services that, used together, can remove the need for ‘paper’ from paperwork.  For more information, you can also follow the paperless 2013 campaign on Twitter using #Paperless2013.

But don’t delay. Help us save trees, better our earth and better our businesses by finally freeing ourselves from all that paper. I’ve done it and it feels great. Join me and let’s make our world a better place.

By René Lacerte, Founder & CEO

These are exciting times at Bill.com. Our solution continues to be embraced at a record pace. In fact, I have the pleasure of telling you today that Bill.com is the fastest growing business payments network in the nation, enabling more than 175,000 businesses to pay and get paid. Bill.com manages more than five million bills per year, worth $10 billion-plus, by combining payments, workflow, document management, and integrating accounting solutions in a way never before done.

I firmly believe that the reason the Bill.com Business Payments Network is growing so rapidly is because companies recognize the need for a more efficient and effective way of not just making business transactions but encouraging business collaboration. By bringing together people, systems and documents, we are redefining what business payments networks are. It is no longer enough to use a credit card—to do business today you need to build a community where more happens than just one-off transactions. Businesses need to collaborate any time, anywhere. This is what the Bill.com Business Payments Network is all about.

And it’s gratifying, as always, to get industry validation that what we are doing is making a big difference. To that end, I am thrilled to let you know that Bill.com was recognized as the Best Innovation via ACH at the 2013 PYMNTS.com Innovation Awards last week, which were held as part of the Innovation Project conference at Harvard University.

Ironically, the emcee of the event was none other than B.J. Novak of “The Office”. It was great to meet such a talented and funny guy, but  the irony of the moment can’t be understated. What’s funnier than Bill.com, the vanquisher of unnecessary documents, getting an award from a staff member of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company!

Thanks to all of you for helping us achieve this important milestone and industry recognition. We’ll keep you posted as our network grows and our innovations continue.