25 new features aimed at accountants to help clients with bookkeeping.
Upstart Bill.com appears to be riding out the economic hurricane with a formula that helps growth-minded small business take advantage of the power of the SaaS cloud.
Here’s the latest news release from Bill.com
Palo Alto, CA – Bill.com Inc., a leader in on-demand accounts payable applications, is offering improved cash flow and paperless workflow capabilities, including tighter integration to back-end accounting systems from Intuit (QuickBooks) and Intacct, and a more intuitive user interface.
“2008 was a time of unprecedented challenge for businesses,†said René Lacerte, president and CEO at Bill.com. “Our goal with this new release is to continue to make a businesses’ financial operations simpler and more efficient so finance teams, accountants and bookkeepers, and business owners can focus less on bill management and payment and more on stabilizing and growing their businesses. Because we have deep expertise with the entire paperless bill management workflow and not just online payment, Bill.com can deliver far greater efficiencies than online bill payment from banks. â€
More than 25 major new features have been added to the Bill.com service since the last release. Among the key updates are:
Enhanced cash flow management – Several changes to Bill.com’s unique calendar view make it easier to optimize the timing of payments based on due dates and projected cash balances. Account book balances are now automatically updated from QuickBooks Desktop Versions or Intacct, so users can see accurate projected balances based on their outflows in Bill.com. Because of Bill.com’s ability to utilize the accounting system for book balances, cash flow management is easier and more accurate than approaches that rely on synchronizing cleared transactions from financial institutions.
New ability to schedule recurring bills – Bill.com users can now enter recurring bills and set preferences on accounts, amounts, approval workflows and frequency. Unlike recurring bill payment features offered by banks, Bill.com enables recurring bill approval workflows— better matching real-world bill payment processes by allowing financial professionals to review and potentially re-approve payments before they are made, and attaching digital images of bills to the recurring payments. If there are supporting documents to file with a bill (such as a bill image), users simply send those documents to their Inbox and attach them to the appropriate version of the recurring bill.
New inbox display – The Winter 2009 release builds on Bill.com’s expertise in paperless financial workflow with an enhanced document inbox that shows thumbnail images of documents with easily accessible links for next steps. This feature makes it easier for users to find, prioritize and process a particular document, especially if there are several in the user’s inbox or if scanner/email generated document names are hard to understand.
Automatic General Ledger journal entries – Many organizations and accountants are attracted to Bill.com because paperless bill management and payment needs to be fully integrated with an accounting system with transactions properly posted to the general ledger. The Winter 2009 release upgrades Bill.com’s award-winning integration capability and eliminates the need to credit/debit accounts within QuickBooks (Desktop and/or Hosted Desktop versions) or Intacct.
New accounting package Synchronization Assistant – Bill.com’s award-winning accounting system synchronization capability now includes a synchronization assistant that helps users resolve synchronization conflicts more easily.
Consolidated payments to a single vendor – Bill.com will now consolidate payments from a single Bill.com account to the same vendor on the same day onto one check, helping our customers “go greener†by minimizing paper printing and mailing while also saving them money by counting all consolidated payments as one transaction within Bill.com. The newly designed check voucher will include a summary table showing the invoice numbers and payment amounts to avoid confusion at the vendor when applying payments.
Receive a DVD of all documents, whenever they are needed – While a user’s documents are available anytime, anywhere and significant data backup and system continuity systems are in place, many customers want a way to store digitized documents offline or get year-end summaries. Bill.com now offers the ability to order a DVD containing all documents (or documents within a date range) that have been filed in Bill.com for a fee of $34.99 per request (fee includes standard shipping and handling). The DVD leverages the user interface design of Bill.com to provide easy access to both payment information and digital images.
Building on a Successful 2008
Bill.com’s Winter 2009 release follows a successful 2008 for Bill.com, during which the company grew its customer base and reached a number of key milestones, including: SAS70 Type II certification; launch of a partnership with CPA2Biz, a subsidiary of the AICPA to bring Bill.com to the accountant and bookkeeper professions; CEO René Lacerte was named a ‘person to watch’ by the publishers of Accounting Technology, Accounting Today and Practical Accountant; Intuit Gold Certification; and a Sleeter Group Awesome Add-on award for its tight integration to QuickBooks.
“Bill.com’s capabilities and customer base are growing significantly, which is a testament to the value businesses and accounting professionals receive when they make the entire bill management and payment process paperless using a low-cost web-based service,†said Jeff Schultz, vice president of marketing at Bill.com. “We look forward to helping businesses, accountants and bookkeepers save time and money on this critical business activity in 2009 and beyond.â€
