Supercharging BILL.com with API Calls and AI

BILL.com solved accounts payable. It is the single best solution for interfacing with vendors and managing everything associated with invoices, 1099s, approvals, and payments. BILL is to AP what PLAID is to banking authentication. BILL's product market fit is such a perfect match that they've practically gained monopolistic control over the AP workflow. Yet despite all of BILL's awesomeness, there are ways to make it even more productive with API calls and AI. 

CREATE A NEW VENDOR WITH THE BILL API

The standard process for onboarding new vendors is to request a W9 before sending the first payment, set up the vendor in BILL, and then sync the vendor to Quickbooks Online. This entire process takes about 5 minutes if done manually, but what if I told you that it could be automated to zero?

Google Document AI has a processor that can parse data from a PDF and convert it into JSON. The JSON response could then be rolled into the body of the BILL API call to create a new vendor. This all happens without you needing to login into BILL.

CREATING A NEW INVOICE IN BILL WITH AN ATTACHMENT

BILL gives you an email forwarding address that automatically queues invoices for processing. For example, you’d get [email protected]. Once the PDF invoice has been sent to your BILL email, you’d need to log in to either manually type in the Vendor Name, Amount, Due Date, etc. or you can use BILL’s OCR technology to do it for you. The OCR technology will prepopulate the required fields along with the approvers and chart of accounts associated with the selected vendor. What if there was a way to automatically create and send the bill for approval upon receiving it from the vendor? This would eliminate the need to log in and manually push it through the pipeline.

To set this up, you’d need to use Google Document AI again, but this time you’d use the invoice parser. The processor will create a JSON object that can be fed into a BILL API post-call. Once the bill posts via the API, you’d use the bill’s unique id to attach the invoice for the approver to review. This all happens without you needing to log in.

Centralizing AP in BILL, including subscriptions on its DIVVY product, is a best practice because of the controllership and approval functionality that it provides. This allows an organization to have multiple eyes on every bill and expense before it gets paid. The only downside of this approach is that the accountant manning BILL would have to process and send every bill to the appropriate approver. Here is a screenshot showing how quickly invoices could pile up.

In the screenshot, the client has 152 invoices in the queue waiting to be pushed through the system for processing. If the BILL API was used as outlined above, the queue would be zero. 

MAKE PAYMENTS USING THE BILL API

Once the approver signs off on a bill, it goes back into the queue for a payer to pay. This step always seemed tedious to me. Why not just make the payment upon approval in accordance with the due date? Well, with the BILL API, it's totally doable.

The first step is to call a list of all approved bills. Then you can filter this list by the due date. One of the laws of cash flow management is to collect early and pay later. If a vendor gives you payment terms, you should use them to your advantage – don’t pay a net 30 bill in 10 days. Take the 30 days on principle. Once you have a filtered list, you can process payment using the API call.

Going from good to great with BILL comes down to automation. APIs and AI solutions, like Google Document AI, allow you to supercharge BILL so that you can do more with less. Reducing the amount of time that humans spend on automatable tasks is the mission of this newsletter. If you need help implementing any of the workflows mentioned in the article please reach out to SandboxBoy on Twitter.