How BELAY scaled to over 3,000 clients with BILL

In 2012, Charleston-based Accountfully—now part of BELAY—set out to do something audacious: build a fully remote, tech-forward accounting practice to serve growing businesses anywhere. 

Cloud accounting was still new, and most of the nonprofits and faith-based organizations Accountfully served were using paper checks, desktop software, and filing cabinets. But Accountfully’s leadership believed there was a better way for their firm’s clients. “We weren't just chasing efficiency, we wanted to serve churches and nonprofits. But those organizations have mission-centric budgets. To keep our prices in their range, we needed to redesign our accounting service from the ground up, says Brad Ebenhoeh, Director of Sales at the firm.

By 2013, the firm had built a modern tech stack: BILL for payables and receivables, QuickBooks Online for the ledger, and Fathom for reporting. That decision proved pivotal. As Brad Ebenhoeh, now Director of Sales at BELAY, puts it, the firm’s business model “would not have existed the way I created it without BILL.”

A new chapter: Accountfully joins BELAY

BELAY had built its own reputation on operational excellence in virtual assistants and with outsourced accounting. When Accountfully joined BELAY in 2025, the cultural fit was immediate. Today, the combined team is 200 people strong, fully remote, and supporting over 3,000 clients nationwide.

BILL helped amplify BELAY and Accountfully’s commitment to clarity and trust across internal operations and client-facing operations. The same platform that powered client accounts payable (AP) now supported BELAY’s own AR and AP, includingrecurring invoicing, automated drafts, and predictable cash flow with minimal overhead.

The vision: A scaled AP operations workflow

The goal for BELAY isn’t just to digitize old processes. It is to redesign them so that each step is faster, clearer, and more secure. That means creating a single flow for invoices, approvals, and payments. And having one source of truth that synced cleanly to the ledger for clients. BILL became the backbone of that flow.

Clients of the firm experience a simple, reliable AP process that include:

1. Capture: Bills arrive at a dedicated inbox
2. Digitize & code: AI-assisted entry accelerates clean data capture
3. Approve: Role-based routing on desktop or mobile for project managers and department heads
4. Pay: ACH by default, with checks and other methods when needed
5. Sync: Two-way integration with QuickBooks Online keeps the GL current

This single flow replaced multiple systems and handoffs. It also changed behavior. During onboarding, clients who once insisted on doing everything in the bank saw how one-time entry and a single pay step could cut a 15–20 minute process down to roughly a minute without losing oversight.

For the firm, it means consistent standard operating procedures that could be deployed across accounts, along with audit trails and permissions that scaled to any team size. Ebenhoeh coined the phrase that defines their system as “controlled efficiency.” 

This pairing of speed with solid guardrails allows the firm to take on more work without adding headcount at the same pace. The firm expanded nationally with the industry they serve, leaning into inventory-heavy consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands while continuing to serve mission-driven nonprofit organizations.

Accountant Console enables speed and scale
At firm scale, access control becomes its own kind of chaos when handling thousands of clients. BELAY uses BILL’s Accountant Console to add and remove users, assign roles, and standardize shared inboxes for approval and audit notifications. The result is clean financial operations without manual logins to each client file.

Along the way, AI quietly increased the speed and accuracy of bill capture and coding. What started years ago as basic OCR has matured into reliable automation that gets the details right including invoice numbers, terms, likely GL accounts, and approvers so firm employees can spend time on judgment, not data entry.

Preventative controls to manage a growing client base

As BELAY grew, so did the risk profile of its clients. Fraud attempts, particularly spoofed emails to change bank details, are a common reality for modern back offices. 

With BILL, BELAY strengthened governance that includes:

• Tighter security for banking details: With vendor self-service, team members no longer key in sensitive information
• Dual control: Separate the people who set up or edit details from those who approve payments
• Approval thresholds: Escalate high-dollar items (e.g., $50K+) automatically
• Always audit-ready: Every approval and change is visible for review

For BELAY’s nonprofit clients, those payment trails map cleanly to bylaws and audit requirements. Reviewers can confirm that the right people approved the right bills at the right amounts.

Paying contractors at scale

BELAY’s assistant solutions and financial solutions rely on a distributed workforce. Paying a large volume of 1099 contractors used to mean overhead, spreadsheets, and follow-ups. With BILL, contractors set up their own profiles and bank accounts, approvals run in clear workflows, and payments move digitally. 

The result is a predictable timeline without adding administrative roles. Leadership could manage invoicing and cash operations in “a couple hours each week,” avoiding the need to staff a separate team.

International payments are part of the story, too, especially for CPG brands sourcing overseas. BILL’s cross-border capabilities, including Local Transfer options, help vendors get paid faster while reducing the back-and-forth that typically drags down international wires. 

Spend & Expense: Closing the books faster

As clients grow, purchasing tends to move from a single corporate card to many. Without structure, the month-end close falls apart: missing receipts, unclear coding, and late reconciliations. BELAY uses BILL Spend & Expense to give budget owners autonomy with built-in limits and controls:

• Department or role-based budgets that cap spend at the source
• Receipt and memo requirements that drive clean coding
• Automatic sync to QuickBooks Online, which accelerates reconciliations

When transactions are captured and coded weekly, month-end credit card reconciliation becomes a quick confirm instead of a forensic exercise. BELAY clients using both AP and Spend & Expense consistently see faster, cleaner closes with fewer “who knows what this expense is” threads.

“BILL helped us build what we call ‘controlled efficiency.’ We can move fast, stay compliant, and deliver consistent service, even as we grow. It’s the foundation of how we scale as a firm.”

BELAY, today and beyond

Ebenhoeh’s guidance to other firms is straightforward: pick a modern platform that does more than pay bills. The benefits of controls, integrations, spend management, and centralized firm administration can compound, especially when the team can master one system deeply. Standardize the stack, train once, and scale confidently.

Or, in his two-word summary: “controlled efficiency.”

The firm that set out to be modern before “modern accounting” was a category now runs on a system designed for scale and a platform that turns control into a growth enabler. That’s the story of BELAY and BILL: a decade of building trust at speed.