As a finance professional, your work is fundamental to the company or clients you serve––and keeping AP and AR running smoothly can be challenging.
In fact, you may have found new obstacles emerging in recent years as work and industry trends shift. Our 2023 State of Finance Automation report surveyed 750 SMB financial decision-makers in US businesses with 50-500 employees and found that:
- Remote work has introduced new difficulties in financial management.
- There’s a talent crunch––many SMBs struggle to find qualified finance professionals.
- Finance professionals report being overworked and tasked with more strategic and analytical functions. They’re being given broader decision-making responsibilities that require more technical expertise.
To help you continue to do your best work (and maintain your sanity), we want to ensure you know about all the tools available to you. 80% of respondents in our report agreed that automation is vital to managing day-to-day financials and meeting strategic goals––and there may be more ways BILL can support you and your team.
Here are five ways to maximize the benefit of your BILL account so you can spend less time on routine tasks, get more business insights, and have more tools to manage cash flow.
1. Know that you have tons of control and flexibility when it comes to payments
Control and flexibility are essential to AP. Different vendors have different payment requirements and you may need to adjust how you pay to manage cash flow or expedite rush payments.
Here are a few ways we help you avoid headaches, cater to vendor needs, and overall simplify the way you manage your day-to-day operations:
- Manage all AP (domestic and international) all in one place. Pay by check, ACH, credit card, or virtual card. No matter how you pay, all your information is stored in BILL, making it easy to track and manage.
Work with international vendors? Use the same system to easily pay vendors in 130 countries via international wire. Enjoy the bonus of avoiding intermediary bank fees by paying in the local currency.
For vendors you work with regularly or recurring bills in general, save time by using auto-pay.
- Avoid cash flow issues by leveraging pay by card. Process your card and send your vendor an ACH payment or check. Maximize your card rewards, get more flexibility when needed, and pay vendors by card even if they don’t typically accept that option.
- Want to make faster payments? More from paper checks to ePayments. You can also use Pay Faster to get checks and ePayments to vendors quickly and reliably.
BILL balance is another tool that can help when you need to send a payment quickly. It enables you to store money in your BILL account and then send ePayments to vendors as soon as overnight with no unexpected delays or additional fees.
2. Use the BILL network to pay vendors quickly and securely
The BILL network supports you and your time by enabling you to pay your vendors digitally and avoid the hassles that come with paper checks or having to enter sensitive bank information.
- Connect easily. Our network has over 4 million vendors and counting. Just enter their name and zip code, and voila! Can't find a vendor? Invite them with just a few clicks.
- Save time. Vendors manage their own contact and payment info, so you don’t have to.
- Build vendor trust. Vendors get automatic updates through the network, which is a win-win. They’ll get more visibility into cash flow and you can spend less time answering questions about payment status.
- Increase security. Business email compromise is the leading cause of payments fraud, costing US businesses billions of dollars. Paying over the BILL network provides greater protection for you and your vendors to pay safely and keep your information secure.
3. Set up and customize your user roles
If you're expanding or working on your rollout of BILL within your company, take advantage of preset user roles. You can also adapt and customize roles to meet your unique needs.
- Administrator. Oversee your company’s use of BILL and access all features and functions. Approve bills, authorize and schedule payments, manage user access, and set up and run the sync.
- Accountant. Enter bills and sync with the accounting system. Manage the payables process–including scheduling payments and running the sync––without access to paying bills.
- Clerk. Give permission to only enter bills.
- Approver. Review and approve bills and credits before authorizing them to be paid.
- Payer. Pay bills and record payments. A payer does not have access to approve bills and can only pay up to the approved amount, so there is a clear separation of duties on your team.
- Auditor (view only). Provide access to all account and transaction information in your BILL without allowing the user to edit or make approvals.
- Custom user role. Want a little more flexibility in user roles for you and your team? Manage role permissions and make custom roles if necessary.
4. Create custom approval policies for you and your team
BILL allows you to make custom approval policies that automatically apply to bills that meet certain conditions. These help you maintain separation of duties and reduce potential fraud by allowing you to control which bills need approval, by whom, and when, based on business need.
Here’s how to set up this tool and how it helps you save time on approvals and fine-tune permissions without compromising control.
- Create and customize your policies. Ensure transactions are authorized and approved by the correct person or team and are consistent with business objectives. Create advanced rules in seconds using an expanded set of approval routing criteria like vendor, location, department, GL account, and more.
- Set up routing. Combine multiple policies to route bills along complex approval paths intelligently. Name them for easy identification and use drag-and-drop functionality to reorder rules when needed.
- Implement the approvals into your workflows. Intelligently route bills along complex approval paths and reduce the overall time to approve a bill.
5. Quick-click time savers
Last–– but definitely not least––don’t miss out on these quick-click time savers that can help you stay on top of your financial processes.
- Mobile snap to pay. Pay vendors more easily with a bit of AI magic. With Snap to Pay, you just take a photo of your invoice (even a handwritten one) and BILL will auto-extract the details. Then, you can schedule your vendor payment with a few taps on your phone.
- Click-to-capture. Tired of entering data manually? Try using click and capture instead. You’ll save time and cut down on data entry errors.
- Clear sync errors in bulk. While you want to take care when addressing sync errors, there may be times when you’ve already resolved the issue in your accounting system and wish to clear out the sync errors flagged in BILL.
- Resync a record. Accidentally delete a record? Resync is here to rescue you so you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Get the most out of your BILL account
We know you’ve got a lot on your plate, so we want to ensure you know all the tools and features available to streamline your financial processes. By taking advantage of payment option flexibility, the network, custom approval policies, PO matching, and more, we hope to maximize the value of BILL to your team.
Log into your BILL account to check out these features and more. Want help getting started with any of them? Head to our help center to get support via live chat and phone.
