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A long time ago, in what sometimes seems like a galaxy far away, there was an incredibly funny show called Seinfeld. One of my favorite episodes revolves around George and his wallet.

A long time ago, in what sometimes seems like a galaxy far away, there was an incredibly funny show called Seinfeld. One of my favorite episodes revolves around George and his wallet.

Now, George was immensely proud of the fact that his entire life could be found in his wallet. He had receipts from eons ago, with his wallet so stuffed that he had to sit at an angle and had immense back pain. He even had to go to the doctor, who told him he had to get rid of his wallet. George, being George, wouldn’t listen. Instead, he ended up stuffing his other pocket with paper towels to match the bulge. But, being George, he eventually loses all the contents of his entire wallet. Because, of course, the wallet ultimately explodes and sends documents swirling over a street corner while he stands below still bragging to Jerry.

The episode, like so many Seinfeld episodes, was classic enough that you can find it in the Urban Dictionary. Hey, don’t overstuff that or it’ll go like George Costanza’s wallet is the sample sentence.

So, being the “No Check” CEO that I am, I’m here to offer you that same advice today about your business. Don’t overstuff all those file cabinets, desktops and, worse yet, brain cells. Use ePayments and the power of the Cloud to clear your desk and your mind.

It is amazing the difference technology has made since that episode ran in 1988. The murse (male purse) has come and gone as an alternative to a wallet. Today, all you really need is a mobile device and you can conduct business anywhere, anytime. With Bill.com, for example, you can work as effectively from your backyard as your boardroom.

Today, more than 80% of transactions between U.S. small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) still involve paper invoices, paper checks, or manual reconciliation, resulting in costly inefficiencies and errors.  Businesses need to take a cue from consumer goods companies. Thanks to companies like Apple and Square, paper receipts are starting to go by the wayside and are being replaced with an email.  Sweet.  I look forward to the day that every retailer follows their lead.  Additionally, how many times do you make purchases without physically using your credit card, be it online or via swiping your phone? If not a lot yet, more and more every day. So why is it that these technologies have not come over to the business world?  Now is the time for businesses to catch up. We have the technology. You can be up and running on Bill.com in less than an hour.

So, go paperless, rid yourself of your bulging wallet and not only have a sleeker silhouette but have more peace of mind that you have what you need where you need it all the time. Because, let’s face it, although we all love George, none of us want to pull a Costanza.

Bill.com is offering a free webinar on Thursday, May 30, 11AM PT, on how to stay in control during summer vacation season. This webinar will explain how to keep your business humming without decision makers on site—and without having to FedEx documents to vacationing employees.

Stacey Lee, CFO, Earth Class Mail, and Curt Hill, CEO, PMRG, will share their secrets to summertime success. Moderated by Bill.com founder and CEO René Lacerte, the webinar will demonstrate how the cloud can save your summer vacation.

Register here.

To read the press release, click here.

By René Lacerte, Founder and CEO

We’ve all seen (or been) that guy. The one who comes to meetings with piles of papers. The one who pulls out an old notebook to dig up a fact from a conversation held months ago. The one who has piles of receipts tucked away in the corner of his office, big piles of paper that even the cleaning staff avoids out of fear of anything falling out of place. This is a person armed with paper power. Any fact, any tidbit, any bill, they are all within his reach.

So why does he look so worried all the time?

Let’s face it, being the keeper of so many pieces of paper is extremely stressful. How often in a day do you have to think about misplacing a bill or throwing out something that perhaps you needed to keep, just in case an audit might happen sometime down the road? If you are the guy with the stack of paper in the meeting, do you really feel confident? Or are you actually petrified that you might leave something behind?

I’ve been traveling a great deal lately and so I have really had to put my paperless pledge into action. And I have to say, it feels better to be the guy with no back-up needed than the guy with all the answers in tow. Because the fact is that even though I left my binders at home, I can get every piece of data I need at my fingertips, no matter where I am, via Bill.com and the cloud. It’s liberating to actually attend a meeting with no files, no notebooks, no documents in hand.

So, although Earth Day may have come and gone, it’s still a great time to take the paperless pledge, not just for the state of the earth but for the state of your mind.

Try it. Go to a meeting with nothing but your ideas and your smart phone. You will be amazed at all you can accomplish, no back-up needed.

By René Lacerte, Founder and CEO

Here at Bill.com, momentum and awards continue to build. In the past few months we have been honored by industry pundits, organizations and publications with some amazing awards.  Today, I am pleased to add another award to our trophy case: We have been named a winner in the Best Business Application or Service category of the 2013 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Awards.

This award is especially meaningful to us because it isn’t easy to get recognized as the best of the best in a backyard packed with talented minds, amazing companies and innovative products. Silicon Valley is bursting at the seams with great ideas and cool new companies. We are proud to be one of them.  We are proud to be on to something revolutionary.  It is especially nice to hear that other people feel that way too.

We aren’t about flashiness at Bill.com. We are about a straightforward, practical solution to an age-old problem. By harnessing the power of the cloud, we are able to help business leaders better manage their finances, letting them free their minds to dream bigger and build better things.

We appreciate the recognition and are excited for all that is to come. And we thank you, our customers, because without your input and your enthusiasm we wouldn’t have been able to create something worthy of this award.

Thanks again—and here’s to you!

You can read our press release here.

Bill.com Offers Free Webinar on How to Liberate Yourself and Your Business from Paper in Less Than Seven Days. Webinar Demonstrates How You Can Focus on Strategic and Personal Priorities Instead of Minutiae By Clearing Your Desk of Paper

Bill.com announced that it will offer a free webinar on how to set you and your business paper-free in less than seven days, on Wednesday, May 22, at 1:00 p.m. PT. Registration is available now at http://cashflow.bill.com/PaperFree052213.html?medium=pr.

Eliminating papers liberates you from time-consuming processes that drain your brain and keep you stuck at your desk, giving you more time and energy to focus on strategic and personal priorities. The webinar will feature Barry Yarkoni, CEO of Vinomis Laboratories, which is growing rapidly and has been managed by paper-free offices on both coasts from day one, as well as Joel Andren, Executive Director of Paperless 2013, the paper-free initiative backed by more than 30 innovative tech companies including Bill.com.

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Our recent webinar, now available for replay, features Tom Boyle of Boyle CPA which provides outsourced accounting services for small businesses. We asked Tom to share with us his experience moving from a manual to an automated process and how this has helped Boyle CPA and their clients gain efficiencies and control, giving Tom more freedom to chase his dreams.

Tom was looking for a technology-based solution to allow Boyle CPA to use their resources for enhanced client services. While using a manual process, employees were spending a great deal of time on data entry, processing invoices and routing paper from person to person. Additionally, payment approvals were cumbersome and time-consuming. Particularly with busy clients, collaboration and matching up schedules was a constant challenge.

The company began using the Bill.com solution in the summer of 2012. Automation of the accounts payable process has dramatically increased efficiency and improved collaboration. Tom was pleased to discover that synchronization with their Quick Books accounting software took less than 30 minutes; the process was automated, fluid and gave him peace of mind, unlike previous products they had implemented. Bill.com also supports Sage, NetSuite, Intacct and Xero accounting solutions.

Tom also told us that the Bill.com interface makes it much simpler to enter invoices. No more duplicate data entry required!

The Boyle CPA team was relieved to find that collaboration for invoice approval is automated with a centralized online platform, eliminating the need to schedule time with busy clients for approvals and check signing. Approvers simply log on at their convenience, approve payment and the Boyle team takes care of the rest. Physical checks aren’t needed so the check signing process is eliminated.The improved efficiency adds up to savings of time and money. 

Just as importantly, Boyle’s clients have improved financial controls  with online insight into accounts payable status and cash flow.

And Tom can use the time and resources he saves to provide enhanced services to his clients as well as chasing his own dreams.
To learn more about moving your finance operation to a paperless system, listen to the webinar replay or view a demo.

Offers Deep Customer Insight, Market Knowledge from Years of Leadership  at Intuit, PayCycle and Sun Microsystems

PALO ALTO, CALIF.— May 2, 2013 — Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash flow management solutions for businesses, today announced that it has further strengthened its executive team with the addition of Julie Lubetkin as vice president of the accountant channel. Lubetkin brings deep customer insight to Bill.com, where she will help the company nurture and expand this vital part of its rapidly growing business.

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Pioneer in Outsourced Accounting Explains How You Can Escape Financial Minutiae, Reclaim Time for Big Ideas

PALO ALTO, CALIF.— April 29, 2013 — Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash flow management solutions for businesses, today announced that it will discuss how to clear your desk of financial minutiae so you can clear your mind for big ideas in a free webinar, “How I Swore Off Chasing Paper and Got Back to Chasing My Dreams,” on Thursday May 2nd, at 11 a.m. PT. Replay is available now by clicking here.

The webinar will feature Tom Boyle of Boyle CPA, a leader in outsourced accounting. When Boyle decided to start his own CPA business, he  wasn’t just leaving behind a successful career at two of the nation’s largest accounting firms. He implemented steps to move away from the manual, time-consuming, paper-based processes that keep so many CEOs and CFOs mired in the weeds. And he has continued to chase his dreams by recently becoming a franchise owner.

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By Lisa Lang, SVP Marketing

Whenever you can’t find something, it’s always in the last place you look. So why not just look there first? We’re serious, by the way. When a business isn’t growing in spite of your best efforts, it’s often because of something you don’t see yet. Often that something is hiding in plain sight. Take filing cabinets for example.

If you’re searching for the reason a business hasn’t grown the way it should, filing cabinets are probably the last thing you’d peg as the culprit. But they’re not as innocent as they appear. The presence of filing cabinets is often one of the main indications that a behind-the-times business is still letting manual, paper-based processes slow everything down.
Meanwhile, a new generation of tech-savvy founders, owners, finance leaders and executives has been using game-changing technology to replace time-consuming paper processes with fast, efficient cloud-based systems everywhere in their businesses.

These “No Check” CEOs have freed themselves and their traveling employees to manage their companies from wherever they need to be, with instant, real-time access to their business and financial data from anywhere, 24 hours a day.
Many never use paper checks, because they send electronic payments instead. Their staffs never waste time printing invoices or stuffing envelopes, or spending money on supplies and postage because they invoice and process bills electronically. And because they also get paid electronically, you never see a pile of checks sitting on a desk waiting to be deposited – customer payments go straight into their accounts.

Some “No Check” CEOs don’t even have any filing cabinets at all in their businesses. They’ve found it’s much simpler and more efficient to scan all documents to a cloud-based system and shred the paper.
And because eliminating the paper also eliminates the need to be near the filing cabinets, they’re no longer tied down for long hours at their desks. They never have to come in during a long holiday weekend to search for a missing contract. Any document they need is always instantly accessible from anywhere they need to be, via laptop, tablet or smart phone.

Replacing paper with cloud-based technologies frees their time, makes all their employees more productive, speeds their responsiveness to competition, improves their customer service, drives down their costs, and provides them with unprecedented visibility into business performance.

All of which will change the way you look at filing cabinets forever, don’t you agree? All filing cabinets do is take up a lot of room, mostly to store old papers no one will ever need again. And they’re heavy. Even without the paper inside them, they’re heavy. Like massive anchors, chaining you to your office – and perhaps even preventing your business from taking flight.

Interested in becoming a “No Check” CEO yourself? It’s as simple as moving your manual, paper-based business processes out of the filing cabinets and into the cloud, via services such as Bill.com.

By Christina Del Villar, Senior Director Marketing

When Barry Yarkoni and his cardiologist partner founded Vinomis in 2009, they knew two things for sure. First, they had a potentially life-saving breakthrough product. Second, neither was about to move their home base. One was happy in Los Angeles, the other in Pittsburgh. For some new ventures, this could have posed an impassible barrier, but with Yarkoni’s 35+ years in high-tech marketing, he knew there must be a solution to overcome the distance between them. Read more.

Their breakthrough product packed the life extension properties of more than 100 bottles of red wine into a single nutritional tablet. “We knew we had the closest thing to a Fountain of Youth,” says Yarkoni. The product’s anti-aging, energy-enhancing properties had already been demonstrated in medical research at Harvard and other leading universities.

All they had to do now was figure out how to build a successful enterprise while remaining on opposite coasts. “With all the advances in online technology,” Yarkoni thought, “there must be a way to keep all our finances and documents in one secure place online, so we can  see all the bills, payments, and everything else, no matter where we are.”

One quick Google search later, he had his answer, thanks to the breakthrough insight of another entrepreneur – this one based in Palo Alto. Two years earlier, René Lacerte had founded Bill.com, an online service with everything Yarkoni wanted and more, based on Lacerte’s  own personal experience growing new businesses.

Lacerte’s game-changing technology let Vinomis perform online bill payment, e-invoicing and document management through one easy, cloud-based system with secure, 24/7 access from any computer, tablet or smartphone.

Four years later, Vinomis is thriving, now expanding distribution via radio in top markets. All with none of the hassles, and none of the massive paper pile-up, you expect with conventional business processes from the last century.

“I’m beyond a ‘No Check’ CEO,” says Yarkoni. “I’m a ‘No Filing Cabinet CEO.’ We don’t even have one filing cabinet, because anything paper that comes in, we scan into Bill.com and then either throw it away or shred it."

“Everything?” we ask, somewhat incredulously.

“Everything,” Yarkoni insists. “Every bill, legal document, contract, correspondence, corporate record, vendor statements, board meeting notes – anything that’s important goes into Bill.com.
“Now I can be sitting anywhere with my laptop, and it’s like I’m in my office. I won’t even use anything that doesn’t integrate with Bill.com.”

Interested in going paperless? We’re presenting a free webinar on the topic with Barry Yarkoni as the featured speaker, May 22, 2013. Click here to find out more.