BILL (Bill.com) Review: Features, Pricing & Alternatives

The Fit Small Business mission is to deliver the best answers to people’s small business questions. Hence, we spend hours researching and testing so that we develop editorial reviews that can help our audience. For this article, we used a rubric that scored software against a set of criteria that we expect to see in an accounts payable platform.

All approved bills will go to the Bills section. There, you’ll see a list of bills approved, including details like due dates, balance due, payment status, and payment amount.

Bills Section

Through BILL, you pay vendors in various ways. You can perform e-payments, Vendor Direct for larger billers, international wire transfers across 130 currencies, and check payments. The Vendor Direct program is for billers who prefer credit card payments, and you can set it up without enrolling or paying additional fees.

In the upper right corner, you set the date to bulk pay bills. After you’ve set the date, the process date of all check bills will adjust automatically, based on the payment date. You can also partially pay bills by modifying the amount under the Payment Amount column. Once you’re set, click Review & Pay to proceed to the Remittance screen.

It also has pay-by-card features that allow you to pay Vendor Direct vendors with a credit card whether they accept card payments or not. BILL processes the payment with your credit card provider and then sends the payment to your vendor via ACH ePayment, check, or Vendor Direct virtual card, depending on your vendor payment setup. You can use any US credit or debit card.

Remittance Screen

In the Remittance screen, you’ll have the chance to review payment details like mailing address and email address. You can also add notes in the memo up to 80 characters. When you enter something in the memo field, the same will appear in the memo line of the check. Once bills have been submitted for payment, all transactions will transfer to the Payments Out screen.

Payments Out Screen

You can still manage payments in the Payments Out screen. If payments have been processed but not yet deposited, you can click Void under the Actions column to cancel the payment. However, if payments are still scheduled or pending approval, you can cancel them by clicking Cancel Payment.

BILL has a mobile app that you can use to capture receipts and approve bills on the go. With it, users can process bills from vendors, and approvers can review submitted bills. Approvers can swipe right to approve bills and swipe left to reject them.

BILL’s invoicing and basic A/R features are free in the A/P subscription. However, the free invoicing in the A/P subscription excludes unlimited data storage for invoices, automatic sync with accounting software, and recurring invoices. If you need these features, you should subscribe to the Team plan.

The platform has decent invoicing features, such as the ability to choose from different templates and upload your logo to reflect your brand. You can also customize the invoice fields based on your unique needs.

You can track the status of the invoice from within the BILL app. However, if the customer doesn’t have a BILL account, there’s no way of tracking the invoice electronically. You can instead reach out to the payor to ask about the status. If the customer processes your invoice through BILL but doesn’t pay using BILL, the invoice status will be marked as Paid Outside of BILL. You need to record payment manually to close the invoice.

When you receive a bill from a vendor, BILL captures important information like the due date, invoice number, invoice date, and amount due from the PDF or scanned vendor invoice automatically. In the image below, you’ll see some fields completed for you automatically.

Creating a Bill

BILL has an outstanding optical character recognition (OCR) feature powered by its artificial intelligence (AI). It only takes a maximum of 30 seconds for BILL to read a PDF document and capture essential information.

You can also set up a future-dated bill payment instead of having all payments processed on the next business day by default. You can pay vendors from the bill itself, the Bills page, or even without a bill. To pay without a bill, select Payments from the left navigation menu bar, click on Pay a vendor, and provide the information required, such as the payment amount and the processing date.

Receiving bills and sending invoices via email can be a problem without proper segregation of documents. On BILL, you’ll be provided with a specific email address where you can send invoices to customers and receive bills from vendors. In the image below, you’ll see the email address where all bills and invoices are forwarded. Once forwarded, you’ll get a notification in the BILL inbox.

BILL Inbox

1. Forwarding address: Your vendors can email their invoices to this forwarding address from BILL. Instead of giving them a traditional email address and manually exporting vendor invoices, this address automatically fetches all invoices and brings them to the platform. You can also customize the forwarding address to insert your company name.
2. Inbox: Vendor invoices or files sent to the forwarding address will appear in this inbox. BILL extracts useful information like vendor name, due date, and amount due for a quick reference automatically. If you click an item, the full invoice will appear on the right.

Once you receive a bill, BILL’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) will capture key billing information like vendor name, vendor’s invoice number, due date, and amount due. However, the A/P clerk can still fill in other fields like purchase order (PO) number or payment terms.

You can also manage other kinds of documents on the platform. IVA can read handwritten invoices and capture important information like vendor name and amount due. BILL can also detect duplicate invoices by checking the invoice numbers and then linking out to the original invoice.

In case of multiple bills in one PDF file, BILL will split them into three files automatically whenever the system detects different vendor names. With the unlimited storage feature, you can also bring in other document types, like W-9s, contracts, and agreements. Moreover, you can assign documents to vendors for easier access.

For example, you can attach a W-9 to a vendor while it’s being stored in a particular folder. In this way, you can access all W-9 forms easily in the W-9 folder or access a specific W-9 by going to the vendor profile.

BILL learns from your past transactions. Whenever you receive a bill from a vendor, the system codifies the bill automatically by suggesting accounts affected by the transaction. In our image below, BILL suggested that the bill from Snyder Uniform Supply be chargeable to specific expense accounts.

Account Codification

BILL also automates the assignment of approvers through Bill Approval Policies. If you think that you need to manually assign approvers per invoice, you can let BILL do the majority of the work for you through Bill Approval Policies.

You can set logical arguments and criteria when creating policies; BILL can assign approvers for you automatically if the transaction matches the criteria. You can also create multiple approval policies to help reduce the data entry time in every transaction:

• Approval workflows: After the approver is assigned automatically, they will see the billing on a dedicated page for approvers only. In the approver’s dashboard, they’ll see the invoice number, vendor, account affected, due date, invoice date, and billed amount. On the far right of the screen, they can immediately approve the bill by simply clicking Approve.

Approver’s Dashboard

The approver can also batch-approve or manually approve bills one by one. They can click the item to view all the details about the transaction. In the image below, we can see all the details pertaining to the transaction including the actual vendor invoice. On the approver’s end, invoice details are view-only. They cannot edit it to correct mistakes or change the information.

Viewing Invoice Details on the Approver’s End

If the approver finds a problem, they can return it to the submitter for revision. When denying or rejecting bills and vendor credits, the approver must select a reason for rejection. These reasons include:

• Duplicate bill
• Data entry error
• Incorrect approver
• Other (the approver must specify)

Once the approver is satisfied with the bill or the bill has been rerouted to another person, the approver can approve the bill. After clicking Approve, BILL will generate a timestamp and generate a virtual signature after approval. Once done, the bill cannot be edited or deleted to preserve the integrity of accounting records.

BILL has an auditor access feature that gives your company’s auditor easy access to documents without going through you. Just like the approver’s page, the auditors will have a special login page where they can pull up any invoice or record from your account.

When changes are made to transactions, every change will appear in the audit trail. You can view the audit trail per transaction.

Audit Trail

The audit trail shows who edited the transaction, when it was edited, what field was affected, and what changes occurred. Having an audit trail helps in improving your business’s internal control and prevents employees from performing fraudulent acts.

Businesses use BILL to streamline their A/P and A/R processes. It offers different ways to pay bills and accept payments from your customers.

No, BILL charges a monthly fee per user plus small transaction fees. For electronic payments, BILL charges 49 cents per transaction.

BILL charges a monthly fee per user plus small transaction fees.

You should get the Team or Corporate plan for accounting software integration. BILL won’t charge an additional fee for integration, but make sure that you have existing subscriptions with your chosen accounting software.