Bills 2.0

Bill.com Video Wins 2009 Telly Award!

One of our introductory videos produced last year by Compass Rose Media just received a 2009 Telly Award!!!

If you haven't already seen it check out the video on our Youtube channel.

Congrats to Compass Rose and the Bill.com team that worked on it!

P.S. That really is Bill.com CEO Rene Lacerte's voice on the video!

Cool new features coming this weekend!

We are releasing several new powerful capabilities this weekend! Here is a sneak peak of a few major features. More information to follow with the official release notes once the upgrade is complete!

• Payables customers can now invite vendors to the Bill.com Payment Network, thus enabling ePayments without having to ask vendors for their bank information
• We have enhanced payment timing information when paying bills and viewing payment status
• You can now pay bills from multiple bank accounts
• QuickBooks Desktop and Hosted users can now use Job Costing features

We know you will be as excited about these new features as we are! Stay tuned for more information.

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!

New features released this weekend!

We added several new features this weekend! In addition to lots of smaller improvements that you will notice, the bigger changes include:

New Setup Wizard

Have you completed all of the steps to fully benefit from Bill.com? Interested in speeding up client account set up?

A new setup page will guide you through all of these steps more clearly than before, and help you complete the remaining steps. And, you will be able to easily access the setup wizard and all company setup information from a new Setup tab.

Improved Paperless Bill Management

We have made several improvements to managing bills to help streamline the process and reduce clicks.

• You can now alter the page order of bills. Specifically, this means that if you add supporting documentation to bills you can now control where they reside in the print order.
• We have added a "jump to page" feature that allows you to go to a bill page without scrolling one page at a time.

New reports improve integration with other accounting systems

We have added several new reports to help export and import data into other financial packages:

• Thomson Reuters Write-Up CS Report. A vendor-specific report that allows you to export bill and payment data for import into Write-Up CS. Soon, Write-Up CS users will be able to import Bill.com data through the Accountants Gateway.
• Comma-Separated Reports for other packages. You can now export Bill.com data in a general CSV format using the following reports:
  • Cash Basis Summary
  • Cash Basis Detail
  • Accrual Basis Summary
  • Accrual Basis Detail

As always, let us know what you think of these changes!

The Bill.com Team

Exciting Award from CPA Technology Advisor!

We are pleased to announce that Bill.com was a recipient of a 2009 Tax and Accounting Innovation Award from CPA Technology Advisor. In their recent article honoring the winners, Darren Root, Executive Editor said:

“The CPA Technology Advisor's annual Tax & Accounting Technology Innovation Awards are the pinnacle of achievement for technology vendors serving the profession,” says M. Darren Root, CPA.CITP, executive editor. “This year’s winners and honorable mentions rose to the top of the nominations because they do more than just provide workable solutions. Through ingenuity and fresh approaches to providing solutions, they are front and center in helping accountants energize their deliverables through product, service and training.”

And, Scott Cytron wrote:

Bill.com — Bill.com (www.bill.com)
Bill.com is a paperless, collaborative bill management and payment service designed to digitize and file all client financial documents, allow collaboration with clients via a web-based interface that supports various accounting services, and manage client cash flow and payment timing more effectively.

“Bill.com is the only bill management solution that weaves accounts payables, document management, collaboration and payments together in a simple, affordable service,” says René Lacerte, CEO and founder. “We have a proprietary two-way synch with QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online and Intacct that complements the GL software and allows accountants to offer sophisticated services while giving clients a simple user interface.”

Using Bill.com, Lacerte says accountants and their clients can now pay bills quickly and easily, while performing other tasks such as tax preparation and write-up more efficiently, all through improved collaboration, better record keeping and better controls.
“Ultimately, we want to see bill presentment and payment for small and mid-size businesses go 100 percent paperless,” he says.

“To that end, we are working on developing a shared network of large and small vendors so that our customers will be able pay anyone electronically and improve communication between vendors and customers. Our ePayment capability was recently released, and very soon any business will be able to register on our payment network so they can more easily accept payment directly into a bank account, avoiding trips to the bank to deposit checks or paying credit card merchant fees.”

Bill.com is SAS-70 Type II Certified and is offered to the accounting profession in partnership with CPA2Biz, a subsidiary of the AICPA. Bill.com offers discounted pricing for accountant clients, centralized client billing, custom client-facing branding, and an accountant dash-board that provides a consolidated view of all clients’ activities.

Thanks to everyone in the accounting community that have given us so much feedback and support to continue to improve the service. We look forward to offering many more innovations to come!!!

Exciting new features available immediately!

Introducing Bill.com ePayments. Now pay anyone electronically!

Bill.com ePayments allow you to pay vendors electronically (via ACH) rather than with paper checks when you make a payment via Bill.com. Here is how it works:

• Simply match your vendors in Bill.com in a directory of over 4000 of the largest billers (financial institutions, utilities, government agencies, etc.) to enable all future payments to those vendors to be made electronically
• For your vendors who are not in our directory, you can add bank account and routing information to their contact information in Bill.com (this information is encrypted and safe)
• When Bill.com makes payments to any vendor that you set up for ePayments, we will pay them via ACH (electronic deposit). When we pay vendors in our directory the funds are automatically posted to your account with that vendor (you must enter an account number during setup to pay these vendors). For other vendors who are not in our directory we notify them of payments via email.

Advantages of using Bill.com ePayments include:

• Lower transaction fees. Each ePayment costs just 49¢. That's half the cost of paying via a Bill.com check!
• Faster payments. ePayments will be posted to your vendor's bank accounts faster than check payments, so you do not have to schedule as much lead time for processing
• Pay any vendor or individual electronically. Bill.com allows you to make ePayments to anyone electronically — large vendors, small vendors, employees, and other individuals — fully integrated with your bill workflow and accounting system and at low cost
• Guaranteed payment arrival date. Bill.com will display the date that each ePayment will appear in you vendor's bank account. Unlike check payments that can be affected by the mail system, these payments will post on or before the date listed
• Help save the environment. No paper, planes, or mail trucks will be used when making your payments.

When you pay via Bill.com the system will show you the expected payment arrival date

Payment timing is based on many factors. With this new release, when scheduling a payment via Bill.com the system displays the number of business days from the process date to expect arrival of the payment. This will help you when deciding on a process date to maximize cash flow on a bill-by-bill basis.

Increased efficiency (and fewer clicks) for bill payers!

We have made several improvements to the bill payment page to help streamline the process and reduce clicks.

• On the "Pay Bills" page we now show you any notes added to a bill by simply scrolling over a link. Now you can see approver's comments without opening the bill itself!
• When you hover the vendor name on the bill list you will see the check payment address or ePayment information without needing to click on the link
• Bill.com will now alert you if the approved amount of a bill you are paying is less than the bill amount
• For each bill, you will see expected arrival timeframe based on payment type

What's in a name? "Online Payments" are now called "Bill.com Payments"

With the introduction of ePayments, we have made a small change in terminology so there is no confusion between the concept of "online payments" and "ePayments".

• On the "Pay Bills" page, what we used to call "Pay Online" is now "Pay via Bill.com". By selecting this option, Bill.com will make the payment for you. Funds will be withdrawn from your bank account on the Process Date and Bill.com will send it by check or ePayment to your vendor.
• "Record Offline Payments" is now "Record as Paid". You can record payments made by credit card, checks you already wrote, or checks you will print in your accounting system.  You will be prompted on the next page about the details of this payment that you are taking care of outside Bill.com.

When viewing payment types within the system, including audit trails, you will now see payment type "Bill.com" instead of "Online". This indicates that Bill.com made the payment for you either by check or ePayment.

More flexibility in sending documents to the Inbox

Receiving invoices from vendors in the body of an email and not an attachment? Want to just email yourself a message to pay someone and store it as an invoice? It's now easy to do both.

You can now process invoices sent inline in the email without needing to create a separate attachment. Just write (or forward) an email with payment amount and instructions, access it in the inbox, and create a bill to be paid. In addition, you can now easily view the original email message associated with any document sent to the Inbox by clicking the "View email" link on top of the thumbnail.

We have also improved our document display capabilities in the inbox, with support for:

• Adobe PDF (pdf | version 5.0 or later
• Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx | version 97 or later)
• Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt | version 97 - 2003)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls or .xlsx | version 97 or later)
• Images (.jpg or .png or .gif)
• Emails in plain text format or text files

Improved Payment Confirmation

It is now easier to know the status of your payments. On the "Remittance Info" column on the Payments History page, you can see if the check was cleared or the ePayment was sent.

• When you click on a payment, you will see more detail on the payment as well as a cleared check image if applicable
• For ePayments there is no cleared check image, but you will see details on when the payment was made

We hope you like these new features. As always,please contact us with feedback!

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! :-)