Pay and get paid with Bill.com

Over the past few months, I’ve heard a lot about online payment system Bill.com. It’s loved by accounting Partners and small business owners alike because it’s such a good tool for managing the payments side of the accounting equation.

Paying and getting paid

Bill.com streamlines and automates the process of paying suppliers and getting paid by customers. Like Xero, it integrates with your bank, so when you want to pay a supplier, you can put the bill into Bill.com and the payment automatically comes out of your bank account.

When you want to invoice a customer, you can send the invoice through Bill.com, and your customer is directed to a special payment page with your branding. Then they just need to make their payment and it goes directly into your bank account – saving you the resources of building or purchasing different payment systems for the variety of different ways people like to pay their bills (credit card, paypal, etc).

Boosting productivity

The result is a huge productivity boost for small business owners. When you don’t have to spend time writing checks or making online payments, you can spend that time working in your business rather than on it.  And by making it easier for your customers to pay you, you effectively encourage them to pay you faster.

Putting payments in context

Where Xero helps you turn your business processes into financial data, Bill.com helps you automate the key processes of paying bills and getting paid. So by combining the two, you can create a situation where you pay bills with a click of a button with Bill.com, then reconcile them and put them into context with Xero – again, with the click of a button.

You can combine Xero with Bill.com by importing your Bill.com invoices into Xero as bills and invoices. Then, when the payments arrive in your bank account, it’s just a matter of matching the payments to those invoices in your bank reconciliation screen.  Here’s a basic run-down of how to do it:

1. Import your Xero chart of accounts into Bill.com
2. Enter your payable invoices into Bill.com using your Xero chart of accounts for the invoice details
3. Export the unpaid invoice details out of Bill.com and import them into Xero
4. Mark imported invoices as paid
5. Reconcile payments in Xero

We’ve also put together a more-detailed version of these instructions in the Help Centre Check it out. And if you have any thoughts on using Xero and Bill.com, we’d love to hear them in the comments.