Bill.com: Worth It or Not?

0:25 Automating check and ACH payments

The first reason we like Bill.com is how it automates check and ACH payments.

Now, as a consumer you might hear the word check and say, what's that, I haven't had to write one of those in years. That's probably the case. But businesses still use checks for one of two reasons. The first reason is you will have vendors who just only want to work with paper. Think of your landlord. They want the check in the mail, they want to be able to cash and do all that stuff.

The second reason, which is more common, is vendors often don't want to incur the credit card fees that go along with receiving credit card payments, and so they'll request large bills be only payable by check, sometimes ACH.

In those cases that process is laborious. If you think about it, you've got to write the check, you've got to put in the envelope, [unclear] a stamp, address it, put it in the mail. And oh, don't forget you need to record that check in your accounting software. Believe it or not, that can easily add up to 20 or 30 minutes without much effort, and that's valuable time.

1:31

The way that Bill.com goes about automating check payments is as follows. The first thing you have to do is get the bill into Bill.com, and there's a variety of ways you can do that, and I'll go over those in a few minutes. But once in Bill.com you will have all the information around that bill put in. Some of that is automated, some of that can come from you. And then you'll go ahead and either have that check approved, or you can simply go straight to payment.

Now Bill.com will take care of the rest. You'll connect your bank account as part of the setup process, and they will go ahead and pull the money, cut the check, put it in the envelope, mail it, and you're done.

2:27

Oh, but as a bonus, you can keep track of that payment. You can see when it was sent as well as when it was cashed. So if you have some vendor that comes back and says, hey, where's my payment, you can look it up and say, actually you received and you cashed it on this day. Awesome.

The same thing goes for ACH payments. ACH is the electronic payment method that we use here in the United States, and it's a great way to transfer money. But a lot of vendors don't want to use ACH payments because they have to give you their bank account information. And so Bill.com will facilitate ACH payments by allowing you to put the bill into the system similarly to how you do it for check payments, but you have the option to invite your vendor to receive a payment, and then they can put in their bank information that's secured only to them, and you connect to them and thereby facilitate Bill.com to transfer the money. So it's a great way to process payments, whether they're electronically or by check, and all of this for very reasonable fees.

3:15 Getting bills into the system

Now the next reason we like Bill.com is for the ease of use. As I mentioned, you need to get the bill into Bill.com. Let me talk about how easy this is. This can be done one of three methods.

The first is, if you get a bill in your email, you can simply forward it to a custom email address specific to your Bill.com account. Bill.com will then put it in the inbox section, and you can queue it up for creating a bill.

The second method is by using your phone, where you could take a picture of a paper file, and again it will get uploaded to your inbox for processing.

The third method is if you have a file that you've either scanned, or you just have it through some other method, you can upload that file manually in the web portal.

Once in the inbox, Bill.com will use its intelligent virtual agent to process the data and input some of that information into the bill. You can put in what's missing, and some of that information can come through integration with accounting software, which I'll talk about a little bit later. So that information comes in, and as you get going using Bill.com, processing these bills can take seconds. You put that information in, then you can send it off for approval and payment, and all of that can be done on your phone as well as in your browser. So if you're out and about and you just need to approve and pay bills, you can do that from your phone.

4:41 Separation of duties and the three roles

The third reason we like Bill.com is how it separates the functions of accounting so that multiple people can work on a bill without compromising the security of the business. This is commonly known as separation of duties.

So let me talk about this. When you're a new business owner, you probably do it all. You have the checkbook, you get the bills, you pay the bills. It's all great. But over time your time becomes more valuable, you have more people involved. Perhaps it's an accountant, perhaps it's a bookkeeper, perhaps it's a neighbor, perhaps it's a wife. You bring people in, and this exposes your business to fraud.

Now if you think this doesn't happen, I'm gonna scare you for a minute. Go to Google News after this video and search for accountant or bookkeeper fraud, and be shocked at the results. It happens. So the first thing I would say is, do not turn over the checkbook to your accountant or bookkeeper or partner or whoever that you may not trust with all areas of your business, because once they have that ability to write checks, you know, the cat's out of the bag.

5:50

So what Bill.com does is it allows you to segment the operations, or segment the duties, of what goes on in processing a bill. They have some default roles.

The first is the clerk role, which allows you to create the bill. And so this could be an accountant or bookkeeper who's processing the bills, who's processing the email to which the bills are being sent, and making sure that those are all put into Bill.com, that they're coded up appropriately and ready for approval and payment.

The second role can be optional depending on your organization, and that's the approver role. The approver role in a smaller business could be the same person as the one who's paying. But as you get bigger you have team members that may understand better what the bills are and if they're legitimate. That individual might be the one who approves the bill before being paid. So they'll approve it and then send it to the person who actually has the control to pay, and that's the payer role. The payer role is somebody who has rights to transact on the bank.

And on each step of the process there is the ability to quickly review what's been done to ensure that it's valid, but still go about it in a quick and automated fashion. So as a business owner you go from having to do it all to simply reviewing and clicking a button.

7:03 QuickBooks integration and accounts receivable

The next reason we like Bill.com is its integration with accounting software. I'm gonna speak specifically to QuickBooks Online, which is the software we reference, but Bill.com integrates with a variety of accounting software including Xero and NetSuite.

In QuickBooks Online, Bill.com will sync across all of the key information, including your chart of accounts, your classes, your vendors, and your customers. And this is really helpful when you're going to process the bill, because all of that information is readily available. And vice versa, if you create it in Bill.com it'll get synced back across to QuickBooks Online so that you don't have to do double data entry.

This makes it a lot easier to do the accounting function of paying a bill while you are going through and actually paying the bill. The integration allows for a quick and easy sync. So as a best practice, we typically recommend once you move to Bill.com, just use it for all of your payments. The sync will take care of making sure all of that information that is in Bill.com comes across into QuickBooks Online, so you can operate there and have it be one place to do all of your work.

8:15

Now as a bonus, Bill.com also has an accounts receivable module which allows you to go ahead and invoice your customers and receive payments from them.

Many people will ask us, why would I use a Bill.com versus a QuickBooks or another tool for accounts receivable? Well, the first reason that we would give is the payment options. Bill.com has this ability to receive electronic ACH payments, so it facilitates a very secure way to have your information in there without exposing it to your vendors and vice versa. So you could put out a bill and give an option to be paid by ACH, and it makes it very easy.

The second reason is it also gives you the option to pay by credit card. Now there are many other solutions that allow you to receive payment by credit card, such as QuickBooks, but it's all in one place with Bill.com.

And finally, you have all the ability to sync that information back and forth and just have one place to do all of those receivables. So it's a nice option for some people who want to separate a lot of the core accounting work from the accounts receivable work.

9:22 Working with Bill.com as a company

Finally I want to talk about Bill.com as a company and what it's like to work with them.

Now from a support experience, it's been fantastic. You go in, you have a really great knowledge base to troubleshoot issues, and if you don't have issues you have a chat based support. Now it's not real-time on the phone, but it is still a great experience. For us, we're able to get our issues resolved almost all of the time. Only in a rare, rare case that we had to wait for them to do something and get back to us, and they're always fairly timely on responding. So we get issues resolved very quickly, very efficiently, and they're very friendly to work with.

As an accounting company we have a partner manager, and we've worked with a lot of other people on the business side, and I will say that I really like the people at Bill.com. They're easy to work with, they're helpful, they want to help us solve our customers' problems.

10:19 When Bill.com is not a fit

Finally, let me talk about where Bill.com might not be a good fit for your business.

The first thing you got to look at is how many checks you're writing a month. Now we typically will tell companies if they're writing three to five checks a month, that's a good place to consider Bill.com. Believe it or not, those few checks can be very expensive from the time it takes to do all of the work around those checks. Now for some people they're just like, even one check a month, I'm good. But usually three to five checks a month is a good transition point where the value of the automation is greater than the cost of using Bill.com. As you write more checks, that value goes up and up and up. We've had customers that have been writing dozens if not over a hundred checks a month, and the value is massive in that situation.

The second reason we recommend Bill.com is to provide those controls for organizations that are getting bigger and you need people to do different things around payments. So you need somebody to prepare the payment, others to approve, others to pay. Or somebody to prepare, and you approve and pay the bill. That's a very important reason to look at a solution like Bill.com.

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