How BILL brings financial automation comfort for Vermont Flannel

Vermont Flannel is “dedicated to world comfort,” crafting high-quality, US-made flannel clothing that keeps its customers warm and fashionable. And it’s on a mission to become your favorite flannel. After doubling its retail footprint to ten stores across Vermont and Maine, the accounting team was really feeling the heat.

When CFO Colin King and CEO Joe Van Deman joined the company, they found a rapidly expanding business running on a manual financial operations engine. The team was printing, signing, and mailing checks to hundreds of vendors, and critical payment data lived in physical files and folders, making it challenging to answer a simple question: Did we pay that invoice?

“We've got a couple hundred vendors that we're dealing with on a regular basis,” King says. With invoices from flannel producers, equipment repair providers, and landlords for retail stores and production facilities, “It was a lot to manage.”

Simultaneously, the retail and production teams were bogged down by a "petty cash nightmare." To buy basic supplies like toilet paper or sewing needles, managers had to request a check from headquarters, cash it at a bank, make the purchase, and manually reconcile the change and receipts.

"From an accounting standpoint, that’s just a black hole," says King. "There wasn’t a good record of where the money actually went. We just had little sheets of paper where everybody would write the amounts they had spent."That hole stood in stark contrast to the company's vision, strategy, and internal culture. That's why Vermont Flannel decided to automate its financial operations with BILL.

A flexible AP system built to support even the most complex vendor network

Vermont Flannel works with hundreds of vendors from small, local contractors to international fabric suppliers and each one sends invoices differently. “Our vendors have varying levels of sophistication,” says King. “Some will text us a photo of an invoice and expect a check in the mail. Others have a BILL account and enter everything directly.”

To support that mix, Vermont Flannel needed a platform that could meet vendors where they are. Whether that meant mailing a printed check or processing international wires while still integrating cleanly with their accounting system.

Vermont Flannel also migrated their accounting software from QuickBooks to NetSuite, so they needed their accounts payable to sync without requiring double entry. And some corporate employees work remotely, so they needed the ability to manage their finances virtually.

From files and folders to everything on one platform with BILL

“We had a pretty large list of features that we needed, and there really wasn't anything else at the right price point like BILL that would pull in everything under one roof,” King says.

Tracking everything and knowing which invoices had or hadn’t been paid was a challenge because the company didn't have a central digital repository for all of its documents. With BILL, the team can keep the entire vendor history in one place and see instantly whether a given invoice has been paid. “Before BILL, we just had everything related to payments in files and folders,” recalls King. “We would have to call vendors to figure out if we had paid them already. It was painful.”

Automated AP and two-way sync between BILL and Netsuite helps shift focus

With BILL in place, AP went from an hours-long, full-day process down to a point where they can review and knock out their daily AP in 15 minutes. With the block and tackle aspects of AP and expense management out of the way, the accounting team now has time to craft a budget and do other strategic work that will impact the business’s bottom line. 

“With BILL, we can knock out accounting on a regular basis, so we can actually do bigger ticket things that'll move the needle,” says King.

The company also values the fact that BILL has approval workflows and a dedicated inbox for invoices to further streamline the process.

“We are pretty religious cash flow trackers,” King says. “Before BILL, we had to manually tally up the invoices to anticipate what was coming on the horizon. Now, it is very, very clear what the next six weeks to 90 days are going to look like in terms of AP.”

Even better, the information from BILL funnels back into NetSuite in real time so that the CFO can instantly see P&L and other metrics. “BILL and NetSuite speak to each other and reconcile everything. The visibility has been a huge improvement,” King says.

Automation streamlines their financial workflows

Vermont Flannel also found a lot of value in BILL’s recurring invoice feature. Some vendors don't actually send invoices; they just expect payment on a monthly basis. “Small landlords are a great example of that,” King says. “They just expect a rent check.”

The recurring feature from BILL ensures that bills are paid, even if there's no invoice. 

“We can customize payment schedules that recur into perpetuity, or just repeat them for a couple of months,” says King. “BILL gives us a lot of flexibility to streamline recurring payments.  Now, it is very clear what the next six weeks to 90 days are going to look like."  

And BILL’s AI saves the team a lot of time. “The autopopulate feature saves us from having to fill in invoice fields. It checks one more task off the list for our staff to have to remember,” King says. “That’s important for us, because we have vendors who still mail paper invoices that you can’t simply upload, they have to be manually entered.”

Vermont Flannel also uses BILL 1099 Filing to process 1099 forms for contractors. Mike Buttimer, Controller says, 

"BILL has the strongest AP workflow of any system that I've used. It allows us to let the system do its job in the background while we focus on other areas of the business. 1099 season can be a daunting process but BILL makes that process extremely easy."

Going digital with expense management

A major source of Vermont Flannel’s operational spending comes from its ten brick-and-mortar stores. Before BILL, if a store needed something as simple as seasonal décor, headquarters would write a check to the store. An employee would cash it, make the purchase, and return any leftover money—along with a stack of paper receipts.

It was slow, messy, and nearly impossible to track.

To make expense management cleaner, faster, and more cost-efficient, Vermont Flannel adopted BILL Spend & Expense. Each store received a BILL Divvy Card powered by Visa* for routine purchases, and office staff were also issued cards for travel and project-related expenses, like scouting new store locations. In total, the company now uses dozens of BILL Divvy Cards, eliminating petty cash entirely.

For Steven Lonnemann, Director of Retail, managing ten stores and up to 100 seasonal employees required agility, not paperwork. BILL Spend & Expense empowers store managers to make necessary purchases instantly on their BILL Divvy Cards, removing the bottleneck of calling headquarters for approvals.

"If I could describe BILL in one word, it would be 'easy.' In the past, expenses could take up to an hour or two every couple of weeks. Now, it happens in less than just a couple of minutes. That time goes back to our stores so managers can focus on customers."

Michelle Vincent, Director of Merchandising and Inventory, agrees: “BILL Spend & Expense is the best expense tracking system I have ever used. It makes assigning spend to categories fun and easy. I've used a few very tedious systems in my past and it took hours to finish an expense report. I would dread the deadline every time. But with BILL, the way it prompts you to categorize as you go and take a quick photo of a receipt allows you to complete your expense report on the fly.” She travels frequently to scout locations and manage inventory. She viewed the old receipt-hoarding process as a creativity killer.

"Previously, my wallet looked like George Costanza’s with all the receipts. Now, I get the notification on my phone, click right in, categorize the expense, take the image, and it's done. I need a clean slate so I can be creative and move forward. BILL helps me get those expenses off my plate.”

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What’s next for Vermont Flannel?

The ten brick-and-mortar retail stores in New England have done well for the company, so they're looking to expand in the coming years. They also plan to test a few pop-up locations. “Flannels are a really seasonal business, so we sell a lot in that fourth quarter. If we can find good pop-up locations during that fall-to-winter timeframe, that's really appealing to us,” King says.

As their business expands into pop-ups and beyond, BILL Accounts Payable and BILL Spend & Expense will keep making financial operations more comfortable for King and his team, so they can spend less time on expenses and payables, and making the world a more cozier place.

_{*BILL does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. Customers should consult their own tax, legal, and accounting advisors.}

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