Introducing Rippling Bill Pay

TL;DR

With Rippling Bill Pay, you can… 

• Have a single place to automatically create bills, route them for approval, and schedule payments, delivering faster, more reliable payments.
• Get a unified view of spend across payroll, expenses, corporate cards, and bills, enabling better cost control and more informed decision-making.

Rippling Bill Pay is part of the Rippling Spend Management suite of products which, unlike any other solution on the market, provides both a unified view and granular control of spend across payroll, expenses, corporate cards, and bills.  

How is this possible? We’re so glad you asked. 

Rippling captures the relationships between your people, processes, and systems—and evolves as they do. 

Rippling’s proprietary data model captures critical employee information (role details, systems permissions, work location, reporting structures, and more), then ties this employee data to relevant Rippling products and third-party apps. Our role-based permission system allows you to automatically give any employee access to specific Rippling products, individual services within products, and 500+ third-party apps, based on any custom set of criteria. 

For Spend Management, this means you can automatically issue a corporate card to a newly-hired salesperson, direct bill and expense approvals to specific individuals based on vendor and price, manage visibility into overall spending data based on group and level, and more.

Why is paying your bills so painful today?

While, for many companies, bills are the largest spending category outside of payroll, the tools and practices used to ingest, process, and pay bills are clunky and complicated.

Problem #1: Paying bills is manual and tedious

Paying bills is a hassle. If you get invoices by email, you’ll need to check them against corresponding purchase orders for accuracy, categorize them against your list of accounts, allocate them across departments, route them to the correct approvers in the correct sequence, and update each tool and system once payment confirmation is received. Phew! Don’t forget about optimizing payment schedules to maintain maximum liquidity, and if you’re a global company, executing payments in multiple currencies across geographies.

Maybe your existing solution makes one of these steps easier. But no other solution allows you to fully automate the entire bill paying process from end to end. As a result, you spend hours upon hours of extra work every single week and inevitably introduce errors along the way.

Problem #2: There’s always a lag

While you’re in the middle of manually inputting and cross-referencing bill details into multiple siloed systems, none of your company’s vital spending information is correct because it’s not current. The lack of real-time visibility has serious implications. Answering questions in real time like: Can we update our forecast with next month's billing amounts? and What measures are in place to detect and prevent fraud or duplicate payments? is exceedingly difficult, as is answering ad-hoc questions that come up from your CEO. Every question turns into a full-fledged investigation to get a simple answer.  

Problem #3: You get whiplash from multiple spend management systems

One trend in back office business systems over the past decade has been to build a custom stack of individual finance solutions tailored to your business. Each system comes with its own configurations, nomenclature, and user-flows—not to mention learning curve. 

As a Finance practitioner, you want to extract maximum value from the software. With disjointed tools that often can’t talk to each other, navigating and operating between systems is a dizzying experience. You must race to pay vendors, answer questions from your team and your execs, and work on strategic initiatives. But it’s near impossible to uplevel performance when your systems are different and distant. 

It’s time to close the books on these problems. 

Pay bills on time in less time

Easily and instantly create bills

Rippling simplifies the bill creation process, allowing you to upload invoices directly. Using AI, Rippling automatically captures bill details (invoice date, due date, amount, vendor name, addresses, etc.), streamlining data entry and reducing manual effort. 

You can provide vendors with a unique Rippling email address to submit invoices, eliminating the need for manual steps. You can also use Rippling’s Vendor Portal so they can keep payment and tax details up-to-date, helping you ensure accurate and timely payments.

Route and manage bills for on-time, accurate payment and record-keeping

With Rippling, you can efficiently route and manage bills to ensure on-time payment and accurate record-keeping. You can: 

• Configure Rippling's policy engine to route bills to the appropriate approver. 
• Easily review bills based on due date, days past due, and pending approval within the approval flow. 
• Schedule future payments using your preferred payment method, including as ACH, wires, or checks, while ensuring accurate GL coding and categorization for seamless integration with your accounting system.

By automating approval workflows, Rippling accelerates bill processing so you and your team can close the books faster. Rippling empowers Finance teams by freeing up time to work on strategic projects and drive organizational success.

Keep costs under control with a unified view across your bills, expenses, and payroll

Rippling Spend Management provides a comprehensive view of your company's spend by managing all outflows, such as payroll, corporate cards, expenses, and bills. You can build reports to track and analyze spending patterns more effectively, enabling better cost control and informed decision-making. 

Because Rippling connects with your company’s HR data, you can slice spend by employee attributes like department, location, level, or individual, providing deeper insights into spending behaviors or kickstarting targeted cost-saving initiatives.

Pay vendors around the world—morning, noon, and night

With Rippling, you can seamlessly pay vendors and contractors across international borders and in their local currency, ensuring smooth transactions regardless of location. 

By facilitating simultaneous payment and recording of bills, Rippling eliminates the need for manual reconciliation, saving time and reducing errors. Whether you're paying vendors in Bratislava or Berlin, Rippling provides a streamlined and efficient solution for international payments.

Simplify vendor management with a dedicated channel 

Rippling offers a secure portal for vendors to manage payment details effortlessly. Easily invite vendors to share their information during onboarding or when you first receive a bill from them. The user-friendly interface makes it simple for vendors to interact with your business, ensuring smooth communication and collaboration. By providing vendors with a secure and intuitive platform, Rippling enhances efficiency and transparency in the billing process, fostering relationships with suppliers and contractors.

Connecting all business systems makes each individual system stronger

The fundamental idea underpinning Rippling is that employee data is critical across all parts of the business, not just HR. Despite that, businesses often struggle to maintain current and correct employee data across various disconnected systems. 

Rippling provides companies and employees with a centralized platform to manage all HR, IT, and Finance back office operations. Updates to any one area will be automatically reflected across all relevant systems, bringing profound implications for Bill Pay customers.

Rippling Bill Pay doesn’t just allow Finance teams to consolidate, automate, and control all spend in one place. It provides an entry point to a more comprehensive spend management solution that integrates vital finance data with the rest of the organization’s business systems.

If you’re a customer, you can get started here.

If you’re not a Rippling customer yet, you can request a demo here.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.