Bill.com vs QuickBooks Online 2022 Comparison

Bill.com offers a convenient solution for businesses that process many billing transactions. Its automation features releases accounting staff from hours of data entry and ensures that all bills are accurate and legitimate through a series of approvals. Bill.com also has an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) that automatically captures invoice data and supplies them into necessary fields. You can also pay within Bill.com via international wire transfer, credit card, debit card, check, or ACH payments.

QuickBooks Online’s A/P features focuses more on general accounts payable functions like recording vendor information, entering bills, managing unpaid bills, and paying bills. When creating bills, you can select an account category, credit term, and due date, and assign it to a customer, project, or class. You can also print checks in QuickBooks Online if you prefer sending checks to vendors as payment.

The major advantage you can get with Bill.com is its automatic invoice capture. In QuickBooks Online, you must manually upload vendor invoices or scan it first using the QuickBooks receipt scanner.

If you process a lot of vendor invoices, manually uploading invoices will take up too much time. Moreover, Bill.com has a dedicated email address where vendors can send their invoices and IVA will automatically place it in Bill.com and start the bill for you. When you open the bill, you’ll see that some fields have been filled up using the optical character recognition (OCR) feature.

On the contrary, QuickBooks Online comes at an advantage if you and your accounting team can handle billings without the need for automation. Though QBO still needs some data entry and manual uploading of receipts, the OCR function of QBO can reduce the data entry burden so that you can focus on specific fields like inputting the credit term or applying vendor credits. However, Bill.com’s OCR features are still superior to QBO because it can read handwritten receipts.

Takeaway: Integrating your QBO account to Bill.com can save you hours of data entry and streamline your accounts payable processes. We highly recommend integrating with Bill.com unless there’s no need to streamline your A/P transactions due to low transaction volume related to billing.

Bill.com offers invoicing capabilities with automation features if you get the invoicing plan. However, Bill.com’s A/R functions are not as striking and impressive as other invoicing software. In terms of invoice processing, we like that invoice tracking is possible through invoice statuses. However, that would only work if the customer is also using Bill.com.

Another limitation in Bill.com is its invoice design. There is no way to incorporate company branding like logo and colors. Lastly, adding sales taxes in Bill.com depends on what accounting software or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system you use. Otherwise, you’ll have to create sales taxes manually.

In QuickBooks Online, you can modify invoice design and add your company logo. There are also templates you can choose from. The most useful features of QBO’s A/R management is its ability to view sales tax liability in detail, track sales tax collected, and pay sales taxes.

Takeaway: If we look at the individual A/R functions of QuickBooks Online and Bill.com, QBO is a clear winner. QBO outshines Bill.com in terms of A/R because of QBO’s extensive customization options and costing.

Both Bill.com and QuickBooks have intuitive user interfaces, but the latter is more complex with its features. If you’re considering one of the lower-priced levels of Bill.com, we recommend using it for A/P, especially if you have a large number of bills to pay and want to automate the process. This is also ideal for businesses with multiple decision-makers when it comes to approving payments. For any other accounting needs, QuickBooks is your best option.

Bill.com Ease of Use

While Bill.com does offer invoicing features, the A/R side of the software is lacking in function, especially compared to other software like Invoicera. The A/P feature excels when it comes to automating bill payments when you consider the software’s recently redesigned user interface, which allows users to save time and streamline their A/P. The To Do list is also helpful for calling out action items.

Below is a view of the Bill.com Dashboard for Corporate and Enterprise plans, which you will see when you log into the program. It shows the bills to pay, open invoices, bill approvals, payments in, and payments out. The smaller plans will show graphs pertaining to A/R or A/P.

View of Bill.com Dashboard

The interface of Bill.com is neat and organized. It’s suitable even for business owners without experience in invoicing and billing. The dashboard shows an overview of all your invoices and payables. You can also see the number of invoices awaiting approvals and the person in charge of approving.

QuickBooks Online Ease of Use

The QuickBooks Online Dashboard is easy to navigate and gives you access to your account balances, income and expense totals, and graphs that illustrate your cash flow during a specific time period. The interface is intuitive, especially with the left menu bar with tabs that navigate to each section.

View of QuickBooks Online dashboard

QuickBook Online’s dashboard shares a similar idea with Bill.com by using “kanban-style” card graphs. QBO’s dashboard is more comprehensive because it’s a complete accounting software. It shows your credit card charges and other movements in your bank accounts. You’ll also have a glance of profit and loss data and time tracking details as well.

With QuickBooks Online, you can either pay bills by printing checks or submit electronic payments using the online bill-paying feature. An image of the bill pay screen is below and for more information about how to pay bills in QuickBooks Online, check out our tutorial.

Takeaway: It is fairly simple to navigate both the QuickBooks Online and Bill.com dashboards, but QuickBooks’ is a bit more complex given its extensive features.

Because of its limited integrations, Bill.com is better served as an integration itself as it can be connected to several accounting software packages. QuickBooks integrates with more than 650 apps and also has two built-in integrations to streamline your payroll and time tracking.

Bill.com Integrations

Bill.com offers 10 integrations, and most of these integrations will connect your Bill.com profile to your accounting software, including QuickBooks Online,Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite. These integrations feature two-way synchronization, meaning you can enter A/P or A/R data in either program and it will automatically transfer to the other. However, not every integration is available with each plan. An application programming interface (API) is available for developers (Enterprise plan) only.

QuickBooks Online Integrations

QuickBooks Online integrates with more than 650 popular business apps, which can assist with other aspects of your business like customer relationship management (CRM) or ecommerce. Two built-in integrations can be accessed directly within the QuickBooks Online app, which are the payroll and timesheet functions. A summary of available integrations is below:

• QuickBooks Payroll: Pay and manage your team all in one place from directly within QuickBooks Online, with integrated payroll, taxes, human resources (HR), health benefits, workers’ compensation, and more.
• QuickBooks Time: The automated time tracking features available from within QuickBooks Online will simplify your payroll. Employees can track time from any location on any device, and time data syncs to your account in real time.

The Team and Corporate plans of Bill.com also integrate with QuickBooks Online. Here’s an example of other integrations for QuickBooks Online:

• A/R: Freedom Merchants, ARCollect, Invoiced, and Melio
• CRM: HubSpot, Method:CRM, and Insightly CRM
• Ecommerce: PayTraQer, Stripe by Connex, and Freedom Merchants
• Expenses: Expensify, Dext Prepare, Veryfi, and Greenback
• Inventory management: SOS Inventory, Katana, Magento, and Order Time
• Payroll: Gusto, RUN Powered by ADP, Wagepoint, and Justworks
• Time tracking: Time Tracker by eBillity, Timesheets.com, and Hour Timesheet

Takeaway: The integrations available with Bill.com versus QuickBooks Online reflect the different purposes of the software. Bill.com integrations focus on communicating A/P and A/R information with your general bookkeeping software. QBO integrations focus on managing your entire business from within QBO.

Both Bill.com and QuickBooks have robust mobile apps that assist with payables and receivables. But while the software may have the same basic features, such as the ability to create invoices and receive payments, Bill.com has the added benefit of workflow functionality with A/P like the ability to view an audit trail of bill approval and review notes from vendors and customers. You can also scan documents with your phone’s camera and process them into bills or send them to your inbox.

QuickBooks has a greater depth of features when it comes to A/R, such as the ability to not only send invoices but also estimates and sales receipts. Neither app allows you to track time, but you can also track expenses using location and class fields and reconcile bank transactions from connected bank accounts. QuickBooks also provides GPS mileage tracking and access to reporting tools, two features that Bill.com lacks.

Takeaway: Bill.com’s mobile app is extremely useful for approving bills. Even if you’re outside the office or traveling for a business trip, you can approve bills through your smartphone to keep the queue going.

Although QuickBooks encourages you to try other support avenues before requesting phone support, Bill.com does not offer phone support at all and instead requires that you submit a support inquiry, which will be answered via email. However, they both have other resources, such as a help center and knowledge base, which can be consulted for less urgent needs.

Bill.com Customer Service

It can sometimes be a challenge to find the answers that you’re looking for with Bill.com. Live support is available from 5am to 6pm PT, Monday through Friday. There is no phone support available. There are also a few other resources available:

• Support form: You can submit a support inquiry in the Message Center.
• Help center: There is a comprehensive help center available, with extensive how-to articles, getting started resources, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and announcements.
• Bill.com Resources: This page is a collection of webinars, case studies, white papers, and other Bill.com resources.
• YouTube videos: The YouTube channel features many customer testimonials and a few how-to videos.
• Bill.com blog: Updated frequently, the blog has everything you need to know about payments, going paperless, new integrations, and more.

QuickBooks Online Customer Service

QuickBooks has an extensive knowledge base that can be accessed from both within the program and on the website. Below is a summary of the available ways to access support:

• Telephone support: This is only available by completing a request on the website for QuickBooks to contact you.
• Email support: You can contact the support team by clicking on the “Contact us” button at the bottom of the help window.
• Messaging support: Live chat support is also available, although not 24/7.
• In-product help: Every time you open up a new feature, a step-by-step guide or video shows up, with the option to view more information.
• Searchable knowledge base: This includes how-to articles, webinars, tutorials, and FAQs
• User community: You can also post a question in the community forum, in which other users may be able to provide assistance.

Takeaway: Neither Bill.com nor QuickBooks Online has a direct phone support option, but you can receive a phone call from QuickBooks. They both have other useful resources, such as a searchable knowledge base, tutorials, and a user community, however Bill.com also lacks a chat support option.