First Steps Financial cuts AP processing time 50% with BILL

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“We're not going to waste time entering bills when we could use that time to help business owners.”

Before he was an accountant, Marc Chianese was a Navy sonar technician. In that world, precision isn't a goal—it’s a survival requirement. One missed signal or misread data point can change everything.

Today, Marc brings that same tactical rigor to First Steps Financial, a 12-person fractional accounting firm serving 70 high-growth clients. Marc calls the firm a "fractional peace-of-mind department," and for businesses generating up to $25M in revenue, that peace of mind is the ultimate product.

But you can’t provide peace of mind when you’re buried in a mountain of manual data entry. When First Steps Financial adopted BILL Accounts Payable, the team cut its bill processing time by 50%, freeing up capacity for the higher-value advisory work that actually moves the needle for clients.

The challenge: Line-by-line corrections across 70 clients

Before BILL, entering a bill at First Steps Financial started the same way every time: send an invoice into the system, then go line by line to find everything the optical character recognition (OCR) got wrong.

"In the system we had before BILL, the OCR was not good," Chianese says. "It ended up being a lot of manual entry. That cost us a lot of time."

Staff would go through every line to add entries, correct fields, and verify amounts the system misread. For a firm managing accounts payable across dozens of clients, those corrections added up fast. Every hour spent double-checking data entry was an hour not spent on forecasting, budgeting, or helping a client negotiate better vendor terms.

"We never sell accuracy, because that's a given," Chianese explains. "As an accountant, being right doesn't make you special. What we sell is peace of mind." And the team needed more hours in the day to deliver it.

For the clients themselves, fragmented payment processes were compounding the problem. Some businesses had vendors on auto-draw from their bank accounts, with every payment hitting at once. "They were running into cash flow issues," Chianese says. "Everything was taken out on the 15th of the month, or the first of the month. As you scale operations into the millions, you can't give up control for convenience. You just can't."

The solution: Zero OCR errors, zero learning curve

First Steps Financial moved its accounts payable to BILL, and the difference was night and day.

"I've seen a massive improvement in the past year," Chianese says. "The OCR has gotten so much better. I don't think I've run into a single mistake in the past few months."

That accuracy has fundamentally changed how the team spends its time. Now, data entry is as simple as forwarding invoices to each client's BILL inbox. The system reads each invoice and enters the data automatically, the staff review and approve in moments, and the system applies custom rules to route each invoice to the right approver.

Instead of overseeing a machine, the staff gets to spend their time making a real difference for each client, from negotiating early payment discounts to planning ahead for tax season.

On the client side, the approval experience has been frictionless. "No one has ever come to us asking how to use BILL," Chianese says. "Everything just works. It's super user-friendly."

The results: About 50% less time on AP for First Steps, all of those hours back for their clients

The efficiency gains have reshaped how First Steps Financial operates across its entire client base.

About 50% time savings on every bill processed.* "We get about half the time back from bill pay because we're not typing almost anything in," Chianese says. The savings are consistent across the firm's client roster, turning what was once the most tedious part of the job into one of the fastest.

Zero OCR errors. BILL's invoice reading has dramatically reduced the time spent on manual review. Under their previous system, every bill required hands-on correction. "We would have to go through every single line, probably add some lines, change things, because it didn't read things right," Chianese recalls. "With BILL, the data comes in clean."

Zero client support burden. Not a single client of First Steps has needed help navigating the approval platform. That means no training calls, no how-to guides, no added overhead for the First Steps team.

Proactive financial advising. With clearer visibility into each client's payables, Chianese's team can spot patterns and make strategic recommendations that were impossible before. "BILL gives us a better touch on our clients' business," he explains. "If they have a bunch of bills coming due on the first of every month, we can say, 'Hey, can you go negotiate terms for this so we can move the date a little bit?' Better discounts, smoother cash flow. That's real value."

When asked to describe BILL in one word, Chianese doesn't hesitate: "Smart."

Looking ahead: "We should not be doing anything manually."

First Steps Financial continues to grow and onboard new clients to BILL. During Chianese's two years at the firm, several clients have made the switch, typically once their monthly bill volume crosses $50,000.

"Once you get past a certain point in your bills, you can't manage it all on your own," Chianese says. "Then we're going to use BILL."

It's the same ethos that carries through everything at First Steps: find the friction, eliminate it, and redirect that time toward work that matters—from custom commission-tracking tools to a real-time pricing app for prospective clients.

"We should not be doing anything manually," Chianese says. "Make it so it can happen automatically. With BILL, managing AP is low-hanging fruit. We're not going to waste time on that when we could use that time to help business owners with something they're working on."

^{*Based on First Steps FInancial's experience using BILL as of April, 2026. Results are not guaranteed and may vary by business.}

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