With the growth of conscious consumption and overall awareness of the impact of purchasing decisions on the environment, Mercari is a hit among young adults and parents looking for a safe way to declutter their homes. The highly-rated consumer selling app has over 45 million downloads in the U.S. with over 150,000 new items listed every day.
With this incredible growth, Mercari needed a back office capable of keeping up with demand. The accounting process at the marketplace startup was stuck in the nineties, with lengthy approval cycles and manual check writing for over 150 bills per month.
Intelligent and user-friendly BILL saves the day
That is, until Staff Accountant Sandra Ha stepped in. After just one month on the job, she’d had enough of the inefficient bill pay and approvals process. Sandra had used BILL for many years at a previous company and knew that Mercari would benefit from the AI-enabled business payments platform. She approached her CFO and received the green light to present several alternatives. The finance team unanimously selected BILL thanks to the user-friendly interface and BILL Artificial Intelligence, which automatically captures and enters all of the required data from incoming invoices, kicking off the bill creation process as soon as the invoice hits the inbox.
Scaling to meet increasing demand
“BILL automates simple, mundane tasks like coding, date stamps and classification, enabling our team to focus on the more important and strategic tasks,” said Sandra. “Our CFO was thrilled to learn that using BILL has saved us so much time and has enabled us to scale without needing to add a full-time employee in a tight labor market.”
“Switching to BILL was night and day,” continued Sandra. “Mercari went from paper invoices and manual checks with lengthy approval cycles to emailed invoices and checks, streamlining our back office and making the AP process efficient. And thanks to BILL, all of our AP documents are now captured automatically and digitally stored in one place. With the ability to add auditor profiles, our bookkeepers can directly access the data they need, when they need it.”
International payments, traveling employees and so much more…
Another feature that benefits the Mercari finance team is the mobile app which allows approvers to get business done when they are on the road. With offices in Palo Alto, Portland and Cambridge, traveling employees don’t slow down the finance team anymore. The company recently started using BILL International Payments to pay vendors in Singapore and Japan.
What’s next for the hot startup? Mercari is continuing to work hard to make selling easier than buying. With the recent launch of “Pack and Ship” through its partnership with UPS, where certified packing experts package sellers’ items and ship them, Mercari is leading the way in innovative shipping options in the marketplace space.
