Doing Business Bill Payment with Bill.com Verses With Your Bank

The majority of consumer bill payments are now made online. That is not the case for the bills you pay for your business. Most business bill payment is still made the old fashioned way: Printing, signing and mailing checks. Once that is done you have to follow up on whether your vendor received payment and reconcile with your accounting system.

If you are an SMB and thinking about doing electronic payments for your business using your online banking system, here are 5 questions you should ask yourself first:

1. How will you access everything you need when you are making payment decisions?

If you are like most businesses you need to refer to past payments, contracts, notes and lots of other information before authorizing each payment. Where does this information reside for your business today? When you are making online payments will you have to access other systems or make trips to the filing cabinet to get answers? If so, how much time does that take?

2. Is it easy to manage cash flow while making payments?

Most banking systems will only show your current balance without reflecting outstanding past payments, future payments and payroll. When you schedule payments you'll need to make sure you'll have enough cash to cover those payments or else fees could add up. How easy is it for you to access that information today? If this is a requirement for your business you should look for a system that integrates cash management and banking.

3. Do you need to provide multiple people in your company access to the bill pay process?

Unless you are a very small business you may need help managing the books either with additional staff or an outside accountant or bookkeeper. Does your banking system give you the controls to allow multi-user access or are you left doing manual work because your staff can't? You'll need to decide if you have the time to spare.

4. How much time are you willing to spend repeating yourself?

If you make a lot of payments or pay a lot of vendors you'll end up doing a lot of duplicate data entry between your banking and accounting systems. This is especially true if your vendors change their remittance addresses often. You should make an honest assessment of how much time it will take to manage this process and whether it is worth it. We've spoken to businesses who pay hundreds of dollars a month in late fees due to mistakes so it can add up!

5. Are electronic payments with your bank really going to be free?

At home, the majority of our payments are made to large vendors (banks, utilities, etc.). They are done electronically (not by check) and they are free. At work you will want to pay SMBs, individuals, and employees electronically to save yourself hassle, ensure payments are received on time, avoid vendor follow up, improve reconciliation, and eliminate mailing errors. Those payments are usually not free from your bank. Make sure you are clear on who you want to pay electronically and what it will cost from your bank.

Bill.com addresses the needs of the entire business bill payment process

Yes, your bank can help you make a payment. But Bill.com can optimize your entire process of paying and managing bills. You get:

• An easy way to digitize bills and manage paperless workflow between financial and non-financial participants in your bill payment process
• The ability to pay large and small vendors, as well as employees and other individuals, via ePayments rather than paper checks from Bill.com. Select from a directory of over 4,000 vendors in our database or securely add bank account and routing information to any vendor profile.
• A complete audit trail of bill and payment approvals and activities
• A financial filing cabinet that allows you 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. Your bank will only sync cleared transactions and leave it to you to manually update your accounting system with all other accounting information.
• Fraud protection against check manipulation with no additional fees (Positive Pay)
• Unlimited retention of cleared check images online (no additional fees to get image CDs)
• Easy access to payment evidence that might be required during audits (cleared check images are even printed attached to approved bills)