Before cash flow management software, there was FedEx founder Fred Smith draining the last $5,000 from FedEx's corporate checking account, flying to Vegas, and staking everything at the blackjack table in the hopes of winning enough to cover the company's upcoming bills. Smith’s casino foray ended up netting $27,000– just enough to pay a $24,000 jet fuel invoice coming due and keep FedEx's lights on for another week. 

Half a century later, FedEx's story still captures the dilemma that businesses face in matching cash in with cash out. Working capital pressure has driven business liquidity to historic lows, with 55% of U.S. B2B invoices paid past due and 45% of small business owners regularly skipping their own paychecks to meet other day-to-day obligations.

These days, fintech has automated every step of the working capital– making flights to Vegas largely obsolete for business leaders– but getting a unified view of a business’s financials still requires stitching together data from a dozen different point solutions.

In the race to build an integrated "CFO Command Center", platforms like BILL, an intelligent financial operations platform for businesses, are taking an early lead by going beyond one-sided views of a business's financials to offer end-to-end procurement networks that consolidate purchasing, spend, and revenues onto a single platform. By centralizing both sides of the cash-in/cash-out equation on these platforms, businesses can gain a holistic, real-time understanding of their working capital positions and manage their cash accordingly.

The hidden cost of cash-conversion gaps

A major challenge for businesses is incurring costs today while customers prefer to pay... well, sometime. Suppliers in the US wait an average of 43 days to collect on invoices, and 64% report chronic delays. In that time, a perfectly profitable business waiting on outstanding receivables loses the ability to reinvest those funds, and can even go under if suppliers demand that bills be paid any sooner.

Cash flow mismatches may not be immediately obvious to a business. CFOs must make real-time decisions based on forecasted future cash flow, but it could take weeks to reconcile bank payments across the firm’s AR/AP systems, accounting ledger, and ERP– and God-knows-how-much longer if there's an error or dispute that needs to be resolved with the counterparty.

As BILL’s Founder and CEO, René Lacerte, will attest: “In an uncertain environment, control and visibility of cash flow is not only key to efficiency– it’s one of the most powerful levers a business has to be more resilient. Legacy spreadsheets and disparate tools are costing American businesses time, money and opportunity.”

Will B2B networks unlock the unified CFO stack?

BILL launched in 2006 as a consolidated bill payment platform, and has since expanded into spend management, invoicing, and cash flow forecasting. Most recently, BILL unveiled a new suite of tools including BILL Procurement, BILL Multi-Entity, an API platform, and mass payments in a move to give growing businesses real-time visibility and full control of their finances.

What's special about these releases is that instead of piping information through disparate systems, BILL is closing the cash-conversion loop by becoming the end-to-end network that B2B transactions are orchestrated on. Bringing buyers and suppliers in BILL’s network into a single procurement workflow allows businesses to collaboratively manage invoices, approvals, and payments– creating one source of truth ledger between counterparties (reducing disputes and fraud), seamlessly syncing with ERPs, hard-wiring context into every payment (no more chasing down documents for reconciliation), and unlocking instant insight on invoice approvals and payment initiation.

Having a real-time understanding of liquidity positions within BILL, in turn, allows businesses to optimize their treasury allocations, discount receivables to accelerate cash inflows, and finance expenses– all from within a centralized BILL interface. 

“BILL is the only technology partner delivering more control, more value and more innovation SMBs need and deserve,” Lacerte continues. “Our expansion into procurement reinforces how BILL is driving innovation and setting new standards for helping businesses and accountants to manage and control their cash flow, eliminate ‘busy work’, and make strategic decisions that drive long-term growth and success."

Consolidating multiple cash flow tools into a single system can save SMBs 20 hours of work a week. In line with this upside, recent releases like Ramp Procurement, Mercury Invoicing, and Brex for Zip all seek to expand cash flow management capabilities within these platforms.

Given where these different fintechs sit in the FinOps stack today, who is best-positioned to become businesses’ all-in-one CFO suite?

A new era in cash flow management tools

Fintechs that began with a single product (spend management, factoring, banking…) are naturally moving into adjacent components of the financial management stack. Going forward, the race to become the unified CFO Command Center won’t just be about centralizing more of these point solutions internally; it will demand native, real-time understanding across multi-entity businesses and between the financial operating systems of the companies they transact with.

BILL starts where others end. By unifying invoicing and procurement, BILL enables businesses to co-author transactions and execute payments within a shared workflow– without having to hop between their respective spend management, procurement, invoicing, payment, and accounting tools.

Notably, several factors put BILL in a unique position to facilitate these flows end-to-end:

• Breadth: Networks unlock flywheel growth. Existing buyer-supplier networks will scale organically as existing customers bring more vendors and customers onto their platform. Businesses using BILL, for example, can transact with one of the other 7.1 million members in the BILL network without having to re-onboard vendors or pass PDFs between disjointed systems.
• Depth: Native features flow into a single ledger. Reconciling invoices, procurement orders, expenses, and payments across different systems is a days-long task for any business; international coverage and multi-entity controls will be especially crucial to supporting scaling businesses.
• Distribution: Context can originate anywhere. APIs and third-party integrations allow for data to be entered once– in an accounting platform, checkout experience, Slack, email…– and hook into the appropriate objects without dual entries or reconciliations. 
• Intelligence: AI becomes a CFO’s copilot. Platforms with the strongest data moats will best be able to automate three-way matches, auto-route internal approvals, flag duplicate bills, surface financing options, and recommend actions to improve working capital in real-time.

Takeaways: Why networks win

Businesses have way more cash flow tools at their disposal than they did when Fred Smith was jetting to Vegas with the last of FedEx’s $5,000 reserves in 1973. FinOps innovators have automated much of the working capital management process, but point solutions can only surface insight on so much of a business’s full financial health. BILL, a platform that now supports payment volumes on the order of ~1% of US GDP, is a case study on the position that end-to-end orchestrators are in to build the first truly-integrated CFO stacks.

BILL was an early pioneer in business bill pay; its latest release now makes BILL the first company to offer procurement alongside AP, AR, Spend & Expense and Insights & Forecasting. By facilitating both sides of a B2B transaction and enabling businesses to collaborate within its network, BILL creates a native source of truth that enables holistic cash flow forecasting and instant decisioning around working capital allocations, financing, discounts, and net terms adjustments. API integrations further BILL’s integration with every other facet of businesses’ financial ecosystems. As the platform continues to expand, support for multi-entity organizations and mass payments are crucial for businesses managing increasingly complex financial flows– altogether, marking the final step in helping customers close the cash conversion cycle.    

BILL’s Procurement, Multi-Entity AP, mass payment and API platform suite are available for demo! Visit the product page to see how the full BILL suite empowers companies ranging from fast growing start-ups to established and expanding companies to manage cash flow end-to-end, grow business, and win.

Learn more about BILL's new innovations and request a demo here.