Pay bills and collect invoices electronically, for free

A couple months back we announced our free bill pay feature: just ask your vendors to send their invoices to YourDomain@expensify.cash, and we'll convert their emailed PDF invoice into a fully-functional online Expensify invoice, submitted from them to you, 100% free.

Click here to speak with a human about bill pay now!

Reaction and uptake has been tremendous, and now we're announcing a huge new improvement to this and our invoicing feature:

Expensify bills and invoices can now be paid online, either for free by check or ACH, or by credit card for only a 2.9% merchant fee -- lower than Square, Quickbooks, or anyone else in the industry!

That means you can now collect online payments for any invoice you send, either for free using ACH, or for a crazy low transaction fee for credit cards. And because bills and invoices are two sides of the same coin, this means you can pay your vendors by credit card or ACH -- straight to their bank account -- using Expensify. And just like expense reports, we'll continuously synchronize with your general ledger to ensure it reflects the correct, current state of each invoice, bill, or expense report at all times.

Said another way, this means you can rest assured that the bill is well and truly paid -- on time -- while you remain in total control of the timing and cashflow of your bank account. Just connect Expensify to your business bank account to start paying bills and collecting invoice payments, online, for free!

So that was the main thing I wanted to announce, but I also wanted to answer a question we've received quite a bit: why are we giving away free invoicing and bill pay tools, when those are generally seen as very rich and profitable industries by themselves?

I'd love to say it's just because we're nice (even though I think we are). The real reason is that our design of invoicing and bill payment -- where each bill is someone else's invoice -- adds a whole new entry point into our "viral" business model. In short, whenever your accounts-payable department pays a bill, you put us in touch with the accounts-receivable departments of your vendors. And then when they adopt our bill pay system, their accounts-payable departments put us in touch with their vendors' accounts-receivable departments, and so on ad infinitum.

Granted, getting the world to adopt our invoicing / bill pay tools for free wouldn't do much for the business if that's all we did (which is precisely why companies that only do invoicing / bill pay can't give it away for free, like we can). But because we are a complete preaccounting platform that also does full blown expense management, travel booking, integrated corporate cards, and more -- every company that adopts one of our free tools is another company very likely to adopt one of our paid tools.

Long story short: most businesses take every dollar of profit they generate from a customer and plow it (and more) right back into advertising to acquire new customers. Instead, we skip the ad and just ask directly for new customers. This is a way more efficient transaction, and is a major reason why we are growing so fast -- with more customers than the rest of the expense management industry combined, and doing it profitably.

Anyway, that's just a bit of inside baseball to explain why we're doing what we're doing. But you needn't worry about any of that. Just send invoices to your clients, ask your vendors to email their invoices to YourDomain@expensify.cash, and we'll take care of the rest, for free!

-david (ask me anything at @dbarrett)

Founder and CEO of Expensify

PS: Omg, so many great contributors to Expensify.cash; don't forget to join the waitlist, and ask your developer friends to earn some cash today!