Bill.com Resource Center

The explainer video in the ‘What is Billl.com’ section at the top breaks down the accounts payable cycle in more detail. So we recommend you watch that.

Our team codes all invoice submission every Wednesday. Please make sure to send out the ‘vendor submission guidelines’ flow to all the vendors so they are emailing their invoices to the company Bill.com inbox.

Wednesday our team inputs all vendor bills.

Thursday management approves vendor bills (set a calendar reminder to login and approve!)

Friday the Punch team processes vendor bills that have been approved by senior management.

Senior management needs to login to Bill.com and click the ”approve’ column on the left hand side. This will then present a list of bills that are sitting in the cue to be approved. 

This is what we call an ‘off-cycle’ payment.

Our main recommendation is that you tell the vendor their invoice will be added to the cue for next week’s payment cycle. It will be processed when senior management approves it.

In this instance, if it was received on a Thursday, it would be keyed in on the next Wednesday per our normal cycle.

The more we train vendors to understand the cycle, the less pushback we’ll get and the smoother accounts payable will function.

If it is an important payment that needs to go out ASAP we recommend two things:

1) Reach out to us on Slack, there are some payments that are so urgent you should just send a wire from your bank.

Otherwise, we can input it into Bill.com and run it as an off-cycle. Please keep this to a minimum and only for urgent situations.

2) We train someone on the management team how to  process off-cycle payments in Bill.com. That way they can log in, key in the invoice, approve it and pay themselves. We’ve found some business owners prefer this.

Payment times vary depending on the vendors country & payment method.

Remember, the main goal of Bill.com is to streamline and ‘formalize’ the accounts payable process.

We want to start communicating to vendors that we now have a formal accounts payable process and that we will make sure we get their invoice added to this week’s ‘accounts payable cycle’.

In a perfect example, a vendor submits an invoice on a Tuesday, our team enters it on Wednesday, management approves it on Thursday and we process on Friday.

From the process point it’s usually around 2-5 business days to hit their bank account. If they are international it may take longer on their first payment.

Bill.com has been cutting payment times down drastically, so if they have questions, please they them to reach out to ap@punchfinancial.com

IMPORTANT: Please remember to keep holidays and the AP cycle in mind when you give a vendor guidelines for how long it will take.

It will take 2-5 business days from the Friday it is processed.

A W-9 is before we pay any United States vendor. Our AP team will reach out and request one when a vendor first submits an invoice if they don’t have one.

A W-8ben is for any international vendors, it protects us as the vendor is indicating they are a foreign entity and not required to pay taxes in the US.

There are technicalities around issuing 1099s and entity type, we have a standard rule we collect a W-9 or W-8BEN from EVERYONE. That way we are taking the most conservative position.

You can download a W-9  here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf

You can download a W-8ben here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw8ben.pdf

See the ‘Vendor Submission Guidelines’ process flow. It has everything they need.

Bill.com is a platform for independent contractors.  We must collect a W-9 and send them a 1099.

We are not remitting the employer portion of payroll taxes on these payments. The contractor is responsible per the IRS guidelines.

Terms like ‘Salary’, ‘Employee’, ‘Paycheck’, ‘Payroll’ are all related to W-2 Employees. Do not use these terms in any capacity when talking about independent contractors.

It is very important senior management draws a distinction between an employee and an independent contractor.

We will coach you and provide guidance, but when corresponding with contractors, please make sure you are always re-affirming their contractor status and that you are making ‘payments’ to them per their contract.

In an attempt to formalize your accounts payable process we implement very rigid controls.

Here are common reasons invoices are bounced back:

Duplicate invoice number

No W-9 on File

Invoice does not include email or address, etc

Invoice is not in PDF or .DocX

Duplicate invoice numbers leads to payments accidentally being paid twice. So we are very strict about this.

You finance alias/group will be CC’d by our AP team on all bounced back submissions.

Yes, a check payment is the default payment method in Billl.com until we either key in their banking information (international) or send them an on-boarding invite (US Based).

Checks can only be sent to locations in the US.

Please indicate that you’d like a vendor to be paid via check in the approval notes in Bill.com.

If we invite a US based contractor to Bill.com and they fail to fully complete their on-boarding by providing account/routing information, it will default to a check payment. We will usually hold the payment and send them a reminder as we know check payments are not preferred.