Bill.com Raises $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments

Bill.com has closed an $8.5 million funding round led by August Capital, with previous investors DCM and Emergence Capital also participating in the round. As part of the deal, August Capital’s David Hornik will be joining Bill.com’s board. Bill.com has now raised a total of $17 million.

Bill.com looks to help businesses streamline the convoluted processes that are often involved in paying bills at large companies. Unlike your typical personal bill payments, which simply require hopping onto your bank’s website and transferring funds, large busineses typically have fairly complex approval processes in place before a bill gets paid: various managers have to sign off on the bills, and then they have to get sent to the finance department that handles the actual payments. Even worse, most businesses still use inefficient paper documents throughout the process.

Bill.com takes the process digital. To use it, you fax your bills to a specified phone number (any bills that come in digitally can simply be Emailed into the service). Bill.com automatically scans the document, and lets you Email it to anyone who needs to sign off on the bill before it is paid (mangers click a special link to indicate they approve). Once everyone has signed off, the finance department can use Bill.com’s payment system to make the actual transactions. The service uses OCR to archive all documents for later searching. And while the service caters in part directly to businesses, Bill.com also appeals to accounting firms, as it can streamline the way they process their clients’ bills.

Bill.com charges a base fee of $24.99 a month for one user, with each additional user running $9.99 (there’s also a small fee associated with each check payment). It’s hard to gauge just how much money companies are saving in terms of time saved using the system, but VP Marketing Jeff Schultz says that companies are reporting upwards of 50% deductions in the amount of time taken to pay bills.

Bill.com was founded by René Lacerte, an entrepreneur who has proven he knows what he’s doing in this space — he previously founded online payroll service PayCycle, which was just acquired last month by Intuit for $170 million.