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Great for A/P, but A/R weak. Stellar support.
Updated September 25, 2014

Great for A/P, but A/R weak. Stellar support.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Solo

Overall Satisfaction with Bill.com

We use Bill.com for two things:

  • Accounts payable -- across the company we input all invoices into Bill.com (or have them sent to an email address that forwards to our Bill.com inbox). From there our (outsourced) accounting service enters the invoice information, encodes the vendors (or adds them) which is all synced with Quickbooks Online. Then we're able to route the invoices for approval by the appropriate persons within our company, schedule payment, etc.
  • Expense reports -- we have all our employees setup as 'vendors' within Bill.com and have them send expense reports to the same email inbox. This makes routing / approving /paying expense reports very simple (although we do have to explain to people who are also approvers/bill.com users that they'll be both a 'user' and a 'vendor')
As a 10 person company (and I've used it at a ~130 person company), this allows us to dedicate nearly zero time and money to dealing with payables. It's a huge return on a very modest expense.
  • Bill.com is a very inexpensive solution for paperless accounts payable
  • It syncs seamlessly with quickbooks online in both directions (you can add vendors in Bill.com at time of first invoice for instance)
  • Bill.com has good workflow / approval routing capability, which is both simple to use and is extremely helpful for distributed teams like ours.
  • The accounts receivable function was weak (as of late 2011)
  • Onboarding employees as vendors (for direct deposit reimbursement of expenses) can be a bit odd to explain. Bill.com should probably have a special case concept of a "employee vendor" and change the language and terminology in the interface. That said it's possible that we are using it for an unintended use case (expense reimbursement processing) but it works well enough.
  • There are a few nits I'd pick with the interface, such as adding multiple pages from the inbox to a single bill, and I'd like easier quick searching of the payables pipeline (an interactive single-step filter by type-ahead by vendor). None of these are showstoppers though.
  • The return was less time spent dealing with paper, the ability for AP clerk(s) to code and enter invoices remotely, less time wasted by employees tracking down "where is my expense report" -- and the investment was minimal.
Bill.com had just been implemented when I joined the company where I first used it. I never saw a need to look at anything else. In my current role, I turned to Bill.com again and had it up and running within a few hours.
Bill.com provides an excellent platform for small (and/or growing) businesses who want a paperless invoice and workflow process that is simple to setup and administer. Our outside accounting firm as begun recommending it to their clients as well after seeing how much time and effort it saves.

Using Bill.com

12 - 
  • Senior Management (all functions) -- for approvals of larger invoices and subordinate expense reports
  • Finance -- from coding invoices to the general ledger to triggering payment to vendors and employees
  • Line employees (all functions) -- for submitting expense reports or invoices for approval and payment, and tracking their progress through the process.
We required no full-time support.
  • Accounts Payable (including employee Expense Reports)
  • Workflow routing for approval
  • Payment processing
  • We use it to process employee expense reports which probably isn't that innovative but it does feel like a bit of an edge case. There are probably better solutions (Expensify?) for expense reports in particular but we won't need to consider adding another system to the mix until we grow much larger as a company.
  • We might use it for the receivables functions in the future. When I last looked at them a year or two ago the capability here was very early and rather weak, but it's probably worth a look again in the future.
  • It also appears from a recent user survey (April 2014) that Bill.com may be considering adding payables / receivables financing from directly within the platform via 3rd party underwriters which could be useful to many customers.
Great features and great support at a great price.

Evaluating Bill.com and Competitors

Previously the company had been using only Quickbooks for Accounts Payable.

Bill.com Implementation

Bill.com Training

  • Self-taught
I'd recommend that you either get instruction from someone experienced (for syncing chart of accounts & transactions with the GL for instance), or use whatever training is available from Bill.com to make sure you set it up properly and get the most out of the system.

Bill.com Support

Any time we had a question or issue the online help system worked flawlessly. You could always get a live person in under a minute or two and they always seemed extremely knowledgeable about the product and were quick and helpful in resolving any issues or questions. Whenever we had to call them on the phone (to cancel a check, setup new administrators in the system [bank security related], etc), they were easy to reach and extremely helpful. I think Bill.com's service is up there among the best I've seen, across both online and telephone channels.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - I don't think premium support was offered -- but their support was superior.
We ran into a snag when attempting to automatically validate ownership of the bank account we were associating with Bill.com. The automatically generated questions didn't seem to have any correct answers for me (and were probably related to a departed founder of the company). As a result the system locked us out of that function but via the online help feature they were able to quickly resolve the problem. I also had questions about a few features in the early days after we were implemented, and via online chat someone always seemed to be available, knowledgeable, and resolved my question(s) very quickly. Basically any time I've had an issue or question they have been as good or better than any vendor I've worked with.

Using Bill.com

It was mostly very usable, but onboarding a vendor / employee for direct electronic payment was sometimes tricky. Mostly it was simple and easy though.

Bill.com Reliability

The only time Bill.com was ever "unavailable" was then the Sync to Quickbooks function failed. That happened a time or two but was usually quickly remedied. I'm not sure if that's an issue with newer online versions of Quickbooks Enterprise -- at the time we were using a remotely hosted Quickbooks instance accessed via terminal server (vs a cloud offering like Bill.com is)

Integrating Bill.com

For the Quickbooks online accounting system we use currently, it's drop dead simple. We haven't done any custom integration work with the Bill.com platform for any other reasons though.
  • Quickbooks Enterprise (at a prior company)
  • Quickbooks Online (at my current company)
Data synchronization bi-directionally of the financial data (invoices entered / approved / posted / paid) and meta-data (chart of accounts from the General Ledger)

The integration with Quickbooks Online is simple and seamless and was trivially simple to get going. The integration with Quickbooks Enterprise previously required a manual push-button sync which was a bit painful given that we had to remote desktop into the hosted quickbooks instance and use a desktop icon that *mostly* worked but occasionally had issues syncing. That's probably an obsolete way of doing things anymore... with Quickbooks Online it's drop dead simple.

Relationship with Bill.com

I don't believe we negotiated at all. The pricing was very standard, reasonable, and inexpensive.