BILL Review: The Secret to Stress-Free Financial Operations

If you’re part of a finance team juggling accounts payable, receivable, expense management, and cash flow processes, you know the drill.

It’s a mess of manual work, endless paperwork, and constant firefighting.

Lost invoices, late payments, reconciliation headaches, and lack of cash visibility are just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s stressful, inefficient, and exactly the kind of soul-crushing you didn’t sign up for.

But what if there was a way to streamline all these financial operations into one automated platform?

Enter BILL—the cloud-based financial management solution that promises to be the all-in-one answer to your back-office woes.

Keep reading—this review pulls no punches.

Quick Key Takeaways

BILL is a cloud-based financial management platform that automates and streamlines accounts payable, accounts receivable, expense management, and cash flow processes.

It integrates with accounting software (QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite), providing centralized document management, cash flow optimization, and robust approval controls.

While the initial setup has a learning curve, BILL offers scalability and security compliance.

Key features include:

• Accounts Payable Automation: Captures bills, routes approvals, schedules payments (ACH, check, etc.)
• Accounts Receivable Management: Creates invoices, enables online payments, and tracks receivables.
• Expense Management: Captures receipts, approval workflows, and ACH reimbursements.
• Cash Flow Management: Real-time visibility, cash forecasting, scenario analysis.

Pricing: $45-$79 per user/month for AP & AR (Enterprise pricing available). BILL’s Spend & Expense is 100% free to use, for both businesses and accountants.

Pros: Automation efficiency, cash flow visibility, approval controls, accounting integration.

Cons: Learning curve, limited mobile functionality.

Request a BILL demo and evaluate if it’s the right fit for streamlining your financial operations.

What is BILL?

BILL is a cloud-based financial operations platform to help small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) streamline and automate their back-office processes.

It serves as a central hub for managing accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), expense management, and cash flow management.

BILL automates tedious tasks like data entry, approval workflows, and payment processing.

It captures bills from vendors, routes them for approval, and executes payments via ACH, check, or virtual card.

For receivables, BILL creates and sends invoices to customers, tracks payments, and integrates with online payment gateways.

BILL also streamlines expense reporting by allowing employees to submit expenses and receipts digitally, with automated approval workflows and ACH/check reimbursements.

Perhaps the biggest draw is BILL’s seamless integration with popular accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite.

This sync ensures financial data flows between the systems, eliminating double data entry and enabling a unified view of the company’s financials.

What we like about BILL

• Automation and efficiency gains: BILL helps businesses save significant time and boost productivity by automating manual, paper-based processes.
• Centralized document management: Having all financial documents and workflows in one cloud-based hub with BILL improves organization and visibility.
• Improved cash flow management: With BILL’s real-time cash position tracking, forecasting tools, and faster payment cycles, you can optimize cash flow and make more informed financial decisions.
• Robust approval controls: BILL offers customizable approval policies and user permissions, giving you better control over spending and ensuring compliance.
• Seamless accounting integrations: The native sync with popular accounting platforms eliminates double data entry and provides a unified view of the company’s financial data.
• Scalability: BILL’s comprehensive feature set can scale with a growing business, making it a future-proof solution for SMBs.

What we don’t like about BILL

• Initial setup and learning curve: Implementing BILL requires an upfront time investment for setup, configuration, and training of members on the new system.
• Limited mobile functionality: BILL has a mobile app, but its functionality is more limited compared to the web version, which could be inconvenient for on-the-go peeps.

With that out of the way, let’s dive inches deeper into BILL’s capabilities.

Get started with BILL →

Accounts Payable Automation: Goodbye Manual Work

BILL digitizes your entire accounts payable workflow—from invoice capture to approval routing and payment processing.

BILL’s intelligent data capture automatically digitizes invoices, extracting critical details like vendor info, amounts, and due dates.

But that’s just the start.

BILL lets you tailor approval workflows to match your unique business rules. Invoices route automatically for the right approvals.

Once approved, BILL offers flexible payment options—ACH, check, credit card, and international wires—letting you pay vendors quickly and effortlessly.

Throughout the process, you gain real-time visibility into your payables and cash outflows. BILL integrates natively with accounting systems like QuickBooks and Xero, ensuring accurate, up-to-date financials without duplicate data entry.

By automating accounts payable end-to-end, BILL eliminates up to 50% of the manual workload.

Accounts Receivable Management: Get Paid Faster

BILL’s powerful Accounts Receivable (AR) capabilities automate and streamline your entire AR process, so you can kiss those headaches goodbye and get paid faster.

Creating and sending invoices is a breeze with BILL.

Choose from a range of professional, customizable templates that reflect your brand. Fill in the details like payment terms, due dates, and line items—BILL does the rest.

Invoices are automatically numbered for easy tracking, and you can send them via email or opt for traditional mail delivery through BILL. Set up recurring invoices for repeat customers, and schedule one-time invoices for specific send dates.

Once invoices are out, BILL makes it easy for customers to pay you.

Clients can submit payments via ACH transfer or credit card, with funds deposited directly into their bank account.

BILL automatically updates invoice balances as payments come in, ensuring your books stay accurate. You can even set up auto-charge for recurring customers, putting AR on autopilot.

BILL also provides complete visibility into the status of each invoice, allowing you to quickly identify and follow up on outstanding receivables.

Automated payment reminders nudge customers to pay on time, while robust filtering lets you sort invoices by status for efficient AR management.

Expense Management With BILL

With BILL Spend & Expense, employees can easily capture receipts and submit expenses from their mobile devices.

Expenses are automatically categorized and routed through customizable approval workflows based on your company’s policies.

Managers gain real-time visibility into employee spending for better budget tracking and control.

BILL offers corporate cards (both physical and virtual) with customizable spending limits.

Each employee can be issued their own BILL corporate card linked to proactive spending controls, empowering them while enabling administrators to manage spending effectively.

Virtual cards provide enhanced security by generating unique 16-digit numbers for each vendor, preventing unauthorized access to your real card details.

You can also earn uncapped rewards points on every dollar spent, redeemable for cash back, gift cards, statement credits, or travel perks through BILL’s partnership with TravelPerk.

Point multipliers apply to categories like restaurants, hotels, and software subscriptions.

To facilitate budget management, BILL allows you to create custom budgets with spending limits, policies, and controls tailored to your needs.

Spend controls, such as merchant restrictions and approval workflows, can be applied to specific budgets. Real-time transaction tracking and centralized dashboards enable proactive oversight over expenditures.

Additionally, BILL provides a credit line feature, offering flexible business credit from $500 to $5 million.

Applying is streamlined and can be done online within seconds, with flexible underwriting options ensuring a credit line aligned with your business needs.

The credit line scales as your business grows, and you can request increases directly from your dashboard.

Once expenses are approved, reimbursements to employees can be quickly processed via free ACH.

Other key expense management capabilities include mileage tracking, per diem functionality, automatic receipt matching, and more.

Cash Flow Management: Real-Time Visibility and Control

With Cash Flow Forecasting, BILL provides a real-time view of your cash position, complete with intuitive dashboards showcasing key metrics like cash inflows, outflows, net cash flow, and cash balance.

These dashboards sync directly with your QuickBooks Online data, ensuring you’re always working with up-to-date financial information.

But the real power lies in BILL’s predictive capabilities.

By analyzing your historical accounting data, it generates cash flow forecasts up to 13 months into the future.

Cash Flow Forecasting also enables you to track your business’s performance by comparing budgeted cash flow against actual cash flow.

You can drill down into specific accounts, like payroll, accounts payable, rent, and taxes, to understand their impact on your cash flow.

What if you’re considering a major business move, like hiring a new employee or taking on a new project?

BILL’s scenario analysis capabilities allow you to model the potential cash flow implications of these decisions before pulling the trigger.

This powerful “what-if” analysis ensures you’re never caught off guard by unforeseen cash flow challenges.

Customization is key to BILL’s Cash Flow Forecasting.

You can tailor the dashboards to align with your fiscal year, choosing monthly, quarterly, or annual views.

Additionally, you can create custom charts to visualize specific data points, such as utilities or customer acquisition costs, and view the associated line items.

How Does BILL Integrate With Other Apps?

BILL offers seamless integrations with a wide range of popular business applications.

These integrations enable automated data syncing between systems, improving efficiency and reducing manual efforts.

Accounting Software Integrations

BILL provides direct, bi-directional sync with leading accounting software platforms such as QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, Xero, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

This integration ensures invoice, payment, and transaction data stays aligned across BILL and your accounting system without duplicate data entry.

For accounting systems without direct integration, you can leverage CSV templates to import and export data.

Payment Processing Integrations

To facilitate electronic payments, BILL integrates with multiple payment gateways and processors.

This includes Stripe for credit card processing, PayPal for accepting online payments, Transferwise for international wire transfers, and Plaid for verifying bank accounts and enabling ACH payments.

Other Key Integrations

BILL also integrates with other popular tools like Salesforce, Box, Slack, etc.

BILL’s Mobile Apps

BILL also comes with mobile apps for both Android and iOS to manage your financial operations on the go.

And there are separate apps for both AP & AR:

And Spend & Expense:

The apps have a clean and intuitive user interface, making it simple for you to navigate and perform tasks.

The BILL mobile apps enable you to streamline accounts payable, receivable, and expense processes from anywhere.

With real-time visibility, approval workflows, and payment capabilities, the apps enhance productivity and financial control.

What About Security?

You’re entrusting BILL with your company’s sensitive financial data—security better be a top priority, right?

Well, you can breathe easy.

BILL takes a multi-layered approach to security and compliance, with robust measures in place to protect your information every step of the way.

Let’s start with data protection.

All customer data is encrypted both at rest and during transfer using industry-leading encryption protocols.

But security isn’t just about data—it’s about controlling access too.

BILL enforces strict password policies, multi-factor authentication, and automatic logout after periods of inactivity.

Role-based access controls and separation of duties ensure that only authorized individuals can view or modify specific data.

Speaking of authorization, BILL undergoes annual audits to maintain SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance from the AICPA.

They’re also HIPAA compliant for healthcare organizations handling sensitive patient data, and PCI DSS Level 1 compliant for secure credit card processing.

In short, BILL takes a comprehensive, “security-first” approach to safeguarding your financial operations and data.

BILL Pricing

BILL offers flexible, scalable pricing plans to suit businesses of all sizes. Let’s break down their pricing:

For businesses, BILL has four primary plans:

1. Essentials: This plan starts at $45 per user/month. It allows you to manually import and export CSV files to your accounting software. You can enter bills, automate approval workflows, and pay vendors via ACH, virtual card, credit card, and more. The plan also lets you create invoices, send payment reminders, and get paid via ACH and credit cards.

2. Team: Priced at $55 per user/month, the Team plan includes automatic two-way sync with QuickBooks Online, Pro/Premier, and Xero accounting software. It includes all Essentials features, plus custom approval policies and user roles.

3. Corporate: For $79 per user/month, the Corporate plan combines the accounts payable and accounts receivable features of the Essentials and Team plans. It also offers unlimited document storage, custom user roles, and approval policies.

4. Enterprise: BILL’s Enterprise solution offers custom pricing for larger organizations. It includes all Corporate features, plus single sign-on (SSO), dual control, multi-entity accounting, API access, and premium support.

BILL’s Spend & Expense is 100% free to use, for both businesses and accountants.

For accounting firms, BILL offers:

• AP & AR Partner Program at $49 per month

• Spend & Expense Partner Program for free

Sidenotes:

• Transaction fees apply, including a 2.9% fee for credit card payments.

• Free trials and special nonprofit pricing are available.

• BILL offers a free Spend & Expense plan for managing employee expenses and corporate cards.

Get started with BILL →

Final Statements

I get it—dealing with financial ops is nobody’s idea of a good time.

The tedious busywork, constant back-and-forth, and lack of visibility are enough to drive anyone insane.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be that way.

BILL is the all-in-one solution that can completely transform how you manage your financial workflows.

And it’s about more than just saving time.

With BILL, you get true control and transparency into your financial operations. Customizable approval policies, real-time cash visibility, seamless accounting integrations—it’s all there.

So look, if you’re ready to finally experience stress-free financial operations, I say go for it.

Request a BILL demo and see if it’s the right fit.