How Certified Pro Advisors built a unified payables practice on BILL

When building an accounting firm around the idea that technology should drive efficiency, every tool in the stack has to earn its place. For Andrew Manning, Managing Director at Certified Pro Advisors, BILL Accounts Payable became the foundation of how his team manages payments for dozens of small and medium-sized businesses.

Certified Pro Advisors is an accounting and financial operations firm serving approximately 120 small to medium-sized businesses on a monthly basis. The firm is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, with additional team members based in Birmingham, Alabama, where Manning lives and where many of the firm's clients are located. 

Manning built the firm around a fixed-fee pricing model. This was a deliberate departure from the billable-hour tradition of public accounting. Under this structure, the team is incentivized to find operational efficiencies and build strong technology workflows. Clients, meanwhile, get the predictability of a flat rate regardless of how complex the work becomes.

For a firm with that philosophy, the right AP platform matters. As the business grew, so did the need for a system that felt reliable, flexible, and easy to roll out across many different client environments.

Problem: A patchwork of platforms and paper-bound clients

As Certified Pro Advisors grew, Manning assembled a technology stack that included multiple payment platforms to accommodate different client needs. That patchwork approach created friction across the firm, while a more fundamental set of challenges persisted on the client side.

Managing payables across competing platforms

For higher-volume clients who needed approval workflows and tighter controls, the firm used BILL. For lower-volume clients who just needed a way to send occasional payments without maintaining check stock, the team relied on a separate free platform.

The two-platform setup meant support staff sometimes had to log into both systems just to track down a single payment, unsure which one held the record they needed.

"If someone's got a payable question, they may log into both systems to try to find it," Manning says. "They check the wrong one, and clicks take time."

When that second platform changed ownership and began raising prices and reducing support quality, the fragmented approach became harder to justify. Manning knew the firm needed to consolidate onto a single tool.

Modernizing legacy client operations

Beyond the firm's own tooling decisions, Certified Pro Advisors still has clients who run their financial operations on paper. Desktop-only accounting software, printed checks, manual mailing are common setups among the small and medium-sized businesses the firm serves, and they create real operational risk. If a single person is responsible for cutting checks and that person is unavailable, payments stop.

Cloud-based tools are what make it possible for Certified Pro Advisors to serve clients without being physically on-site. Without those tools in place, the gap between what the firm can offer and what the client can support becomes difficult to bridge.

"Changing a payable system and process for a lot of businesses can probably feel like a pretty daunting task," Manning says.

That perception makes the problem self-reinforcing. Clients who need to modernize are often the most reluctant to start, which leaves them dependent on fragile, location-bound processes until something forces the issue.

Serving clients who are never at a desk

Construction is one of Certified Pro Advisors' largest verticals, and it comes with payables demands that most businesses don't face. Construction companies carry far more vendor credit accounts than a typical small business and have multiple people picking up materials in the field who aren't the ones handling payment. Invoices flow in from every direction, and they all need to be processed, coded to the right job, and approved.

"Our customers naturally have more credit accounts than your average business," Manning explains. "They have different material stores that they have to buy from, and they have different people going and picking things up who aren't going to be paying for those things."

The volume alone creates complexity. But the bigger challenge is that the people who need to approve payments (owners, project managers) are often on job sites. Any payables process that depends on someone being in an office doesn't work for these companies. 

Solution: One platform for every payable client

With the decision made to consolidate, Certified Pro Advisors went all in on BILL Accounts Payable. The transition leveraged the team's deep familiarity with the platform and turned what could have been a disruptive migration into a streamlined rollout. BILL stood out for a few reasons.

A systemized onboarding process

Manning's systems and onboarding director already knew BILL inside and out. Every setting, every configuration question, every step of the setup process. Rather than learning a new platform from scratch, the team could build on existing knowledge and move quickly. That made it simple for the team to create a standardized internal form covering the exact information needed to launch new BILL accounts efficiently.

"We knew exactly the questions that needed to be asked,” Manning says. “We created a form, sent it out to all the team, and had them fill it out so we could go ahead and create all of the BILL accounts."

The time the firm did not have to spend learning a new system was, in Manning's view, one of the most significant savings of the entire decision.

Flexible approval workflows for different client needs

BILL also gives Certified Pro Advisors the ability to match each client's approval process to their actual preferences. Some clients want to review and approve every individual bill. Others prefer a higher-level view.

"We want to approve the granular, every individual bill," Manning explains. "And then some of them we have set up to just be on the payment approval, where we schedule the payment and they're involved in the approval process. They can see the total amount we're paying that vendor, see that it's reasonable, and release it for payment."

For construction clients in particular, who are often in the field and away from a desk, the mobile app makes approval workflows practical rather than aspirational.

Vendor onboarding through the network

Connecting with vendors through the BILL network eliminates the need to contact each one individually for banking information. While the firm still reaches out to vendors who aren't in the network, every vendor who is already there represents time saved on setup.

"Onboarding vendors through the network saves time," Manning says. "Anybody who's in the network, we can just connect with. That eliminates a handful we don't have to chase down."

A same-day turnaround that proved the model

Recently, Manning received a call from a business owner he knew through an existing client relationship. The business had relied on a single accountant for 25 years, but that person had been injured and could no longer come into the office. The company was running on QuickBooks Desktop with no other systems, printing and mailing paper checks.

Manning met with the owner and the accountant expecting to discuss a payroll transition. During the meeting, the scope expanded to a full financial operations overhaul. That afternoon, Manning converted the company from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online, migrated payroll to Gusto, and set up BILL Accounts Payable. By the next morning, the test deposits  cleared and the business processed its first payment through BILL.

"We were fully up and running and processed a payment the next day," Manning says. "That was a huge win."

For the client, the win wasn’t just speed. It was continuity. Instead of relying on one person and one office-based, paper-heavy process, the business now had a cloud-based, mobile-friendly payable workflow that others could step into and manage if needed.

Results: A stronger foundation for scale

With all payable clients now on a single platform, Certified Pro Advisors eliminated the friction of managing payments across competing tools. The team now operates with a new level of confidence by pointing to several wins across their system:  

• A single payables platform across approximately 40 clients replaced a fragmented setup of multiple tools, removing the guesswork of tracking payments across systems
• Standardized onboarding through a repeatable form and deep platform familiarity allows the team to bring new clients onto BILL quickly and consistently
• Mobile approval workflows give construction clients and other on-the-go business owners the flexibility to review and release payments from the field
• More practical payment approvals for clients in the field 

The consolidation has produced time savings the team can feel, even if they're difficult to quantify. Support staff no longer toggle between platforms. The onboarding director moves through new client setups with practiced efficiency. And Manning's team can focus on solving client problems rather than troubleshooting payment tools.

The shift also reinforced something Manning values above all else in a payment platform: trust. Asked to describe BILL in one word:

"Part of me wants to say 'secure,'" Manning says. "But I always feel ‘comfortable’ in the BILL system knowing that it performs an action when I tell it what to do. That's very important when you're dealing with processing payments."

What’s next for Certified Pro Advisors

Manning describes his team as engineers who happen to do accounting. And they’re constantly looking for the next problem to solve. That mentality is shaping how Certified Pro Advisors plans to build on its BILL foundation.

The firm is actively exploring AI-driven automation across its day-to-day processes and building custom web applications to address client pain points that were previously out of reach due to API limitations.  

"We're utilizing AI for a lot of our day-to-day processes as well as building out our own web apps and systems," Manning says. "I have a long list of problems I was never able to solve through API limitations, and those things are now solvable. We're looking at new opportunities to create solutions either internally or for our clients, because we know their pain points and we know how to bridge the gap between their operations and the data they need to be successful."

The firm is also planning to use BILL for international payments, both for the newly onboarded client that has overseas vendors and for Certified Pro Advisors' own international payment needs.

For a firm that sees itself as part accounting partner, part operational engineer, BILL has become a key part of the infrastructure helping it deliver smarter, more scalable financial operations for clients.

_{*Based on Certified Pro Advisors’ experience using BILL as of May, 2026. Results are not guaranteed and may vary by business.}