Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today's special episode of In the Know, we’ll be diving deep into QuickBooks Bill Pay with ProAdvisor, trainer, and firm leader Carla Caldwell. Carla will walk you through setting up, choosing a plan, roles and permissions, scheduling payments, and more.
Hey ProAdvisors, I'm Jaclyn, and you're watching In the Know. It's the show designed to keep you in the know on the most exciting updates to QuickBooks Online. So without further ado, let me invite Carla to lead you through bill pay training. Carla, welcome.
Carla Caldwell: Thanks for having me, Jaclyn. I'm so excited to be talking about Bill Pay today. We have so many details to cover, so we're just going to dive in and make sure we cover all that there is to talk about.
The whole idea of QuickBooks Bill Pay is that clients can streamline their AP process by paying their bills right within QuickBooks Online, so every time we go in to schedule a payment, we'll be able to choose the method we want to pay it. If we want to pay by check or ACH, either one of those will be available and eligible. QuickBooks Bill Pay clients can even choose to have a faster ACH payment if they want to get it there potentially as early as the next business day—excluding weekends and bank holidays, of course. Otherwise it usually takes about three days.
Another benefit of QuickBooks Bill Pay is that it's a lot simpler to set up the vendors. If the vendor you're paying isn't already a QuickBooks Online customer, then you or the client can actually invite those vendors to be part of the QuickBooks Business Network where they can add their own payment information so that payments can happen right away. We did this with a client recently and they were paid within a few days; they were so excited about how easy the process was. So I definitely encourage you to check it out. I usually like to tell my vendors that an email invitation is coming, and to expect an email when the payment has been scheduled. They know it's coming. There is a lot of communication around what's going to be happening, so this is a great benefit to the vendors and our clients because we are working with them to do this.
Who can use QuickBooks Bill Pay? Well, QuickBooks Bill Pay is available to clients using QuickBooks Online. Now, this is where it gets a little bit interesting because it reminds me a little bit about QuickBooks Payments, where we're receiving money from customers. There is an application process for our clients we can initiate through QuickBooks Online Accountant or obviously our clients can, but we want to do this similar to the way we do it in QuickBooks Payments. We let the client accept and actually sign up because they are saying yes to an agreement with QuickBooks about this whole subscription they're doing. It is a monthly base subscription model where they can choose from three different subscription plans. There's going to be a basic, premium and elite subscription plan.
We're going to talk about those here in just a second and we'll talk about the costs associated with that. Now, if you have accountant-billed clients you would like to set up with QuickBooks Bill pay, you can do that and you offer your preferred pricing and ProAdvisor-preferred pricing for those accountant-billed clients as well. This is such a game changer for them because now we are able to do this on behalf of our clients. Our clients are able to do this and there's full visibility without us having to go in and log into bank accounts, having them print checks, mess up checks, or whatever the thing is with all of that. This one-stop solution is incredibly helpful and efficient for our clients, and really allows transparency in what's going on because now we can see all of that information. I'll show you what I mean here in just a second.
When QuickBooks Bill Pay first launched, it was only available for clients or only available for clients who were paying for their QuickBooks online subscription directly. So over the past few months, we have seen this open up for everybody that is on accountant-billed subscriptions. It is really fantastic to be able to do this with our clients. So if you're going to be paying for your client’s subscription, you can begin to set this up right now through QuickBooks Online Accountant. Simply go to settings, go to your subscriptions and billing, and then account and billed subscriptions from there. On the list, you go to the client actions column on the far right side and then select to add bill pay. It'll walk you through that. It will send an email to the client so that they can enter in their information and apply for Bill Pay. Once that's all been done, then they're going to check their email address and have that information to be able to finish out the application process.
Today, you cannot add a client-billed customer into a ProAdvisor preferred pricing option. Technically right now, read into that as you may, it is only available for accountant-billed clients. So in other words, we would be paying on behalf of our clients. However, we can recommend a QuickBooks Bill Pay plan to them. Again, you're going to be able to see the different subscriptions, and you can see them on the screen here on this slide.
What they're going to see are the three different plans, and choose whichever one makes sense for them. Of course, they could start out with the free one, that basic plan, and then realize, you know what, we are using this more because we love it. We want to move on up. Or like one of our clients, they might just put us on the top one because we're going to start paying our bills here and let's just get it going. So that's exactly what they did as well. Now, once the process is complete and the client's QuickBooks Bill Pay account is approved, you, as the ProAdvisor, are going to receive an email notifying you that your client is now subscribed. So again, just a little bit of a different process there. So that's why we wanted to make sure you understood what was going to be happening there.
For customers who are going to pay for their own QuickBooks Online subscription directly, they can also apply for QuickBooks Bill Pay either from within the bills tab in the expense center or when they create a new bill. You know, when they go in and say they want to schedule it, that's when it's going to pop up and allow them to walk through that process. So again, save and schedule the payment, and then they're going to be able to fill that out. So either from Bill Pay, they can say they want to start using QuickBooks Bill Pay, or when they schedule a payment, it's going to ask them for that and they'll fill out the information at that time. Once they have done the application, they will receive an email that tells them whether they've been approved.
The three plans are basic, premium, and elite. The basic plan is a $0 subscription and they will get five free ACH payments per month. If they go over that by one or two, it's only $0.50 per ACH after that. They also can have automated bill creation and auto matching of transactions. So let me see what that is. That means that when the payment goes out, it goes out. And when it comes through the bank feed because it has cleared the bank, it's going to automatically be matched. It’s kind of like what you remember seeing over on QuickBooks Payments. QuickBooks is really automating these processes for us.
The premium plan is the mid-tier bill pay plan, and it's only $15 a month with up to 40 free ACH payments included. Beyond that, it's $0.50. Here, we're starting to see some additional benefits to this, where you start having unlimited 1099 e-filing, automated bill creation, and, of course, still have automatic transactions.
The top tier plan is the elite plan. There are no fees for ACH payments, so we definitely would want to use those, right? That's how our team would be, with unlimited 1099 e-filing auto match transactions. Here we have role-based permissions. If you're on QuickBooks Essentials or higher, it's not available to our simple Start customers who are using the elite plan.
Now for every plan, there are some additional fees for checks, faster ACH, and all those types of things. Lots of little fine print here. You'll be able to get to this as well. And of course, I'm sure there's going to be links where you can go in and dive in deep a little bit on that as well. So check out those pricing on that for the details. But the whole idea here is that there are three plans—the most basic one with very few checks all the way through the top tier where we have unlimited ACH. And then, of course, we get our 1099s and have role-based permissions for that. For those clients that are doing lots of bill pay, that totally makes sense, but really is a plan for just about everybody.
Now let's take a look at a few of the other features in a little bit more detail. When the client is all signed up, they can go in if they're using the Bill Pay Elite subscription. There are some bills specific roles for their team. These roles allow the clients to set permissions and control on who can create, edit, approve, and pay bills, which is super important because we're going to be sending money out of an organization. We need to make sure we know exactly who's doing what.
So we have the first one, which is a bill approver. They can approve bills, but they're not able to pay them or take any other actions related to the bills. Their whole job is just to approve the bill. I love that. We also have the bill clerk who is able to add, edit, and view the vendors, add bills, and mark them paid; sometimes they get paid other ways than just through Bill Pay in case they have to hand write a check in an emergency or whatever the case is. But they can't approve or pay the bills through QuickBooks Bill Pay. And then we also have the bill payer. They're the ones who view and pay bills, and can edit vendor information, but they can't take any other action related to bills.
All of these roles are available to clients [in any version up to] QuickBooks Online Advanced, where you get to have these custom roles specific to Bill Pay. We have other training that kind of dives into the details of all the fun things you can do in QuickBooks Online Advanced, so I highly recommend you check it out. More and more of our clients are starting to have more sophisticated needs and you should check that out for that.
Now, as we are looking at bills that are being paid through QuickBooks Bill Pay, whether you're an accountant or a client, you'll need to go into the QuickBooks Online file to do that, of course. And when you go in, there's going to be two options. You can find the required bill by going to expenses, the expense area, and then to bills. And then you're going to see that there's now an unpaid tab. From the action column, you can schedule the payment, and then walk through the process.
The other option is when you're in a bill and save it, there's going to be a save and schedule payment option. And then, of course, you can go ahead and launch that as well. So the first thing you're going to do when you get ready to pay a bill through QuickBooks Bill Pay is decide where the money is going to come out of. What account is it going to be? Now, typically, you're going to fill this out one time and not going to have to do it again, so just be mindful of that. You're going to select the bank account that's connected and the QuickBooks Online account as well. Once that's been done—I just did one literally earlier today—you don't have to select that anymore. It knows, but you just do it that one time at the beginning. Now you have the option, which I really like, is that next time I could pay out of a different account; that's a possibility as well.
In the next section, you're going to choose whether to pay a bill by ACH transfer or paper check. If you select ACH, then you would confirm that all the information needed is there. If you have the information, then you can enter it in. Or, of course, as we said before, you could request that from a vendor. Once that information is there, you're going to select the date that the money will be withdrawn from the client's account, which will go on to getting paid and sending that over to the client through ACH.
If you notice that the payment will be arriving late, there are some customers who are eligible and have the option to select a faster ACH payment for a fee. This will allow that payment to be scheduled as early as the next business day, of course. Holidays and weekends are excluded, and usually takes about a day. One thing I really like is that Bill Pay is very communicative about what's happening, so if you want to have a vendor connected through the QuickBooks Business Network, Bill Pay will deliver their payment directly to their preferred bank account, which is really pretty awesome. I've actually seen this with a few vendors and customers.
If you select a paper check as the payment method instead of the ACH, then you, of course, need to make sure that the postal address details and all of that stuff are in there. You'll even be able to put in a special memo at the bottom. You'll still select the withdrawal date for the amount that's going to be taken, and then you select next and away it goes. And it's going to work just beautifully. Now, when the payment is going out by check, remember, it takes a little bit longer than ACH payments, but it tells you that and it even tells you an estimated date of arrival for that check to get there.
Now that it has been scheduled, it's going to send an email to the vendor saying, hey. payment is on its way. In fact, this happened the other day. The vendor was actually on a board for one of our nonprofits. He emailed and said, “Hey, I think we missed one of the bills.” And sure enough, I forgot to check one. And so, boom, all of that was resolved very quickly and we were able to take care of it. This is really great because he got an email right away the same day, even though it wasn't expected for a few more days. Again, the communication piece I think is just so critical to make sure our vendors know what's going on.
It's also possible that you can pay multiple vendors at one time. You select those and schedule payments for multiple ones at the same time. You'll see the same kind of information there about how it's going to pay them, whether it's ACH or by check, and the withdrawal date. All of those types of things are all going to be listed and really make it easy for you to review and schedule those payments.
Then the question becomes, what do I do about tracking all of that? Right? We've sent the payments. How do we know everything is going like it's supposed to? Well, you're going to see that you can track the status of bill payments. So this screen right here is actually showing you what it looks like in the expenses center. When we go under bills, remember I said we could go where it says unpaid. So now we're going to go to the tab, just to the right of that that says paid. This is going to show you a list of payments that have gone out. But for those that have been done through the QuickBooks Bill Pay, you're going to see another special option where we're going to be able to look at all of those.
That's where we're going now. Here, you can see all the bills that they've paid. And again, if you go to that action column in the far right, you can show those payments in a bit more detail. It's going to show you the date, amount, which account it came out of, and the payment method. Of course, this time it's, you know, QuickBooks Bill Pay, but if you go into that in a little bit further detail, you're going to be able to see a lot more information as well. So for each one of those, you're going to see the status of what's going on there. And as I said, when we go into the details, we get back to that same screen we saw just a few minutes ago when we scheduled it, which shows me all the details.
Why this is important for us to look at is because if there's a reason we need to cancel a payment, you're going to see that there's an option right there that tells you up until this date and time, you can cancel that payment. It has not been sent yet. So it gives you a little bit of time after you've scheduled it—and then you're like, wait, oops, I had a problem. You have time to fix things, right? So that's always really encouraging that it gives you just kind of a minute there if you need to go in and cancel. Of course, you confirm that you're planning to cancel it and then you get confirmation. And then it's really the same procedure, whether ACH or check, and you just kind of walk through that if there is an issue with canceling.
I will just say, you know, Jaclyn, when all of this was launched and I got to see how easy this was to stay in one system and bill pay, it made such a difference in how we were able to relate to our clients and really get things done for them. In fact, literally just today, as I was just telling you before, I just did a whole bunch of payments for a client. We were able to let them know, and he can immediately go right into QuickBooks Online and see what's going on there. So there's full transparency in everything that's happening. And I really, really like that as we're working with our clients with a tool like this right inside of QuickBooks Online.
Jaclyn Anku: Well, I love hearing that this tool helps you. It helps you help your clients, saves everyone time, and increases that transparency you mentioned. Carla, thank you so much for this incredible training and for really diving deep into Bill Pay. And thank you for watching this episode. I'm Jaclyn, the host of In the Know and Leader of ProAdvisor training and certification. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. We'll see you next time.
Meet the ProAdvisors
ProAdvisor Carla Caldwell: Founder, Candella Accounting
