Eva Koziel

Manager of Accounting Services

As small business owners continue to look for ways to cut costs in response to pressures from economic uncertainty such as rising interest rates, employee retention and inflation, one solution may be Accounts Payable (AP) automation. AP automation once reserved for larger companies has now found its home in many medium to small sized companies.  

Is your company still manually recording vendor invoices, printing, and mailing checks?  You will want to read our case study below to see how AP automation helped one of our clients. It may be a good fit for you too. 

Small to mid-size businesses are now able to automate AP through apps such as BILL.com which also integrates with leading accounting software solutions such as QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Xero and Netsuite.

We recently assisted a midsized client who had a dedicated employee that spent 30 hours a week manually recording vendor invoices, printing out checks, stapling checks to invoices, handing them over to owners to review and sign, mailing payments and then dealing with all the paper documents. If this does not sound exhausting enough, to add to the complexity some vendors were set up on auto pay, which required the employee to take additional steps to manage cash flow. Sound familiar? 

When we first proposed Bill.com to our client, they expressed valid concerns such as security issues with electronic payments, how would Bill.com handle vendors who only accept paper checks, subscription costs, etc. We scheduled a meeting with both our client and a Bill.com representative where the client was able to not only view a demo, but also address their concerns and questions. Needless to say, the client was on board and eager to begin.

From there, we provided our client with a detailed timeline of events which included steps they needed to take to prepare for Bill.com setup within their QBO file such as vendor cleanup, determination of approval levels, etc, scheduled integration and implementation training. This process took two weeks. 

Bill.com has transformed the way our client processes invoices. All vendor invoices are sent to the company’s centralized inbox in BILL.com, so that it goes through the automated approval process. The owner who lives out of state approves bills that are to be paid, using his mobile app!! BILL.com automatically sends the team email reminders about upcoming or overdue bills and lets them pull up payment statuses and view invoices in just a few clicks. No more frantically tracking down invoices. 

BILL.com’s two-way sync with QuickBooks Online provides a seamless integration which minimizes the need for double data entry in both systems and the risk of error that could occur. The AP employee now only spends about 2-3 hours weekly with AP, or 30 minutes a day. Allowing our client to better utilize the employee’s time on other projects. The Bill.com integration took less than 1 month from the initial call to full implementation. 

If you are interested in learning more about AP automation for your company, please contact the experts at Cray Kaiser at (630) 953-4900 to schedule a consultation.