Bill used to be Bill.com, but despite the recent name change, it remains a major player in the online payment solutions arena. The company leans hard on automation and has worked over the years to streamline the processes behind many of these back office functions, which had typically been characterized by repetitive manual processes.
Founded in 2006, much of its earlier life had been focused on the realms of bill pay and bookkeeping. Since 2019, however, the company has been expanding into new arenas, such as payables, receivables and expense management. Supporting this move has been a series of acquisitions, including Divvy and Invoice2Go in 2021 and Finmark in 2022. This has enabled it to add new features such as Pay by Card and Invoice Financing.
Leveraging its large store of data, Bill was an early adopter of artificial intelligence technology and since then has been working to increase its AI capacities, particularly with regard to payments, having trained its models on literally millions of invoices.
Irana Wasti, chief product officer at Bill, discussed the company's recent activities as well as its plans for the future with Accounting Today.
How would you best describe what your company does?
Wasti: For accountants and their clients, cash flow is always top of mind. At Bill, we help them get cash in and out as fast, efficiently and securely as possible. In fact, more than 450,000 businesses rely on Bill to control their payables, receivables or spend and expense management, and more than 4.7 million network members have used Bill to pay or get paid.
Bill is a leader in financial automation software for small and midsize businesses.
We are automating the future of finance so businesses can thrive. As the exclusive provider of bill management for CPA.com since 2008, we integrate with leading accounting software packages, from QuickBooks, Xero, Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct and Microsoft Dynamics. Thousands of accounting firms use Bill to automate manual tasks and increase revenue, including more than 80 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms.
What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product?
Wasti: Bill is at the center of our customers' day-to-day financial operations. We enable process automation from the moment a bill is received, through syncing completed transactions with the accounting system, and to when a bill is paid. Customers use Bill to operate more efficiently and improve visibility of their cash flows. With Bill, our accounting customers can save 50% of their time on bill approval and payment for clients, and centrally manage all clients through our platform.
Bill was an early adopter of AI-powered technology, applying it to take the hassle out of accounts payable, accounts receivable and spend and expense management tracking to ensure that businesses are paid faster. We offer automatic payments, invoicing and control features that all sync together to improve insight into cash flow. This product innovation also helps accountants simplify their workflow with clients and accelerate their business.
What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?
Wasti: At Bill, we put our customers first in everything we do. To do this, we're always listening and looking for ways to improve our customer experience with new payments features and support experience.
We recently rolled out new payments features with
- Firms can enhance the client bill pay services by offering Pay By Card, a new Bill feature that lets them pay clients' vendors by a debit or credit card — even if they don't accept cards. Paying a vendor by card can give your client more time to settle the debt on their credit card account, freeing up cash. As a bonus, customers still get to earn credit card rewards on all transactions.
- Invoice Financing allows customers to get paid early for outstanding invoices, helping businesses have the money they need for their business to grow. Instead of waiting 30 days to get paid, customers can finance customer invoices and get money in as little as five to 10 minutes. For a 3% origination fee per invoice, they can receive advances on unpaid invoices. The process is fast and easy, and doesn't affect a customer's credit score.
We are also committed to giving our customers easier and faster access to support when, where and how they need it. In 2023, we've rolled
At Bill, we are empowered to help our customers to save time, get access to resources faster and more efficiently to focus on their business, and these updates do just that. We are continuously working on several other improvements to empower our accounting partners and customers to gain better control of their financial operations.
What is the most exciting new thing you're working on?
Wasti: We are excited about our ongoing work to develop AI capabilities that make our solutions easier to use, more automated and predicted. We were an early adopter of AI, applying it to our large data asset for reading invoices, enabling suppliers, detecting risks and managing documents.
Cutting time spent on bill creation can be a game-changer for accounting firms who want to maximize productivity. AI and automation can also help businesses reduce human error, ensuring higher accuracy of invoice data. Our AI has been trained on millions of invoices, and it will continue to become more intelligent and precise over time. The result is smooth AP automation from day one.
Bill AI drives some of the core capabilities of AP automation. The AI extracts invoice details from documents to populate fields within a bill, including vendor, due date, amount and invoice number. With data extraction, Bill customers report reducing time spent on bill pay by 50%. Our AI can also detect duplicate invoices and auto-split multi-page invoices into multiple bills.
For our accountants, we are excited to continue building out our centralized client management console so firms can support clients no matter what service they provide them. Accountants can have more visibility on reports and insights to better make sense of the data and provide better advice to clients.
What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different? Unique, even?
Wasti: There are a few things that set Bill apart. We've created and defined the category of financial automation for more than 17 years. We're delivering an innovative and comprehensive suite of products that are helping SMBs and accountants to thrive, and products that can grow with these businesses and firms. And we're trusted by hundreds of thousands of SMBs because we lead with our values and put customers first in everything we do. The Bill team is passionate, authentic, accountable, humble and fun — we live these values every day, and we think this shows up in how we serve our customers.
What is the biggest tech challenge facing accountants today?
Wasti: Technology, such as automation and AI, provide opportunities to think differently about how the accounting profession interacts with clients and how to get business done. A digital transformation in accounting has been underway for a few years. Financial automation software and technology is available, and new advances in AI and automation will only increase the power of these tools. But the adoption and efficient use of these solutions is still not as broad-based as it could be. As demand continues to increase for high-tech solutions, accountants will have more opportunities to demonstrate their value and increase effectiveness.
If you could telepathically transmit one (non-marketing or sales) sentence into the head of every accountant in the world, what would that sentence be?
Wasti: Financial automation technology is transforming the way SMBs do business and how accountants help their clients to succeed.
Bill at a glance:
Location: San Jose, California
Number of staff: 2,200+ (as of June 2022)
Number of offices: Bill is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in Houston, Texas, Draper, Utah, and Sydney, Australia
Number of customers: 450,000+
Network members: 4.7 million
Website info: www.bill.com
Number of accounting firms you work with: 80+ of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms partner with Bill, 6,000+ accounting firms in total
Integrations: Integrates with leading accounting software packages, from QuickBooks, Xero , Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct and Microsoft Dynamics.
Processing volume: $225 billion in total payment volume in fiscal year 2022.
This has been part of our regular Vendor Spotlight series. To see previous Vendor Spotlights,
