BILL (Bill.com) Review

BILL, still widely known as Bill.com, is the largest US accounts-payable and accounts-receivable payments platform for small and mid-sized businesses: 479,300 businesses, $98 billion of payment volume in the quarter to June 2026 and $1.65 billion of annual revenue, run from San Jose by founder René Lacerte since 2006 and listed on the NYSE since 2019. It charges per user — $49, $65 or $89 a month on the Essentials, Team and Corporate plans, custom for Enterprise — plus per-payment fees that it publishes in full: 59¢ per ACH, $1.99 per mailed cheque, free virtual-card and foreign-currency wires, 2.9% to pay or be paid by card, and 1% (minimum $9.99, maximum $100) to send money instantly. Its Spend & Expense card product, the former Divvy, is free. Licensed as a money transmitter in all 50 states, it is a serious, regulated piece of infrastructure; it is also a subscription business with a complicated fee table, uneven support and a stream of complaints about payments held in transit.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using BILL (Bill.com)’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

What it is

BILL — the company renamed itself from Bill.com on 11 October 2022, but the domain and most people's vocabulary kept the old name — is an accounts-payable and accounts-receivable platform for small and mid-sized businesses. You forward or upload supplier invoices, the software codes them, routes them for approval and pays them by ACH, virtual card, cheque, card or wire; you send invoices to customers and collect by ACH or card; and a corporate-card product handles employee spend. It sits between the accounting system and the bank, and it is by a distance the largest such platform in the United States: 479,300 businesses, $98 billion of payment volume and 37 million transactions in the quarter to 30 June 2026, 9.2 million members on its payment network and fiscal 2026 revenue of $1.653 billion.

René Lacerte founded the company in 2006, having previously founded PayCycle, the online payroll service Intuit bought in 2009, and having spent five years at Intuit before that. Bill.com, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in April 2006; BILL Holdings, Inc. was formed in 2018 as the listed parent and went public on the NYSE in 2019. In June 2021 it completed the purchase of the spend-management company Divvy for about $2.5 billion in stock and cash — now BILL Spend & Expense — and the invoicing app Invoice2go for about $625 million. Headquarters are at 6220 America Center Drive in San Jose. Lacerte remains chief executive. In February 2026, after pressure from the activist investors Starboard Value, Elliott and Barington, Bloomberg reported that Hellman & Friedman was in talks to take the company private; as of the fiscal fourth-quarter results on 19 August 2026 no agreement had been announced and the company was buying back its own shares.

Pricing

There are two layers. The first is the subscription, priced per user per month: Essentials at $49 gives bill entry, approval workflows, ACH, virtual-card and card payments, a centralised inbox, W-9 collection, AI invoice coding and manual CSV accounting import; Team at $65 adds automatic two-way sync with QuickBooks Online, Pro and Premier and Xero, custom user roles and the receivables features — professional invoices, reminders, ACH and card acceptance, auto-charge; Corporate at $89, which BILL flags as most popular, adds custom approval policies, procurement with purchase orders and two-way matching, unlimited free purchase requesters and discounts for approver-only seats; Enterprise is custom and adds QuickBooks Enterprise, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Dynamics, Acumatica and Rillet, single sign-on, dual control, multi-entity and API access. Spend & Expense is free. Accounting firms buy wholesale at $49 a month with 10–20% volume discounts.

The second layer is per payment, and BILL publishes it in full. Funding from a bank account or BILL balance: 59¢ per ACH, $1.99 per mailed cheque, free for a virtual card or a foreign-currency wire or local transfer (the exchange rate is disclosed at the time), $19.99 for a USD wire abroad, 1% with a $9.99 minimum and $100 maximum for an instant payment, $11.99 for same-day ACH scheduled by 10:00 am Pacific or next-day by 6:00 pm, and $14.99, $19.99 or $24.99 for three-day, two-day or overnight cheques. Funding with a credit or debit card — which lets you pay a cheque-only vendor on a card — costs 2.9% on top of whichever delivery the vendor receives. On the receiving side it is 59¢ per ACH, 2.9% per card payment, 1–1.49% (minimum $1) for an instant transfer and $1.99 per mailed invoice. Exception fees: $50 for an ACH that fails after the receiver has been paid, $25 to re-debit after a failed funding, $25 to void a cheque. 1099 e-filing is $2.99 each, or $1.99 through the accountant console.

The per-payment prices are fair — a cent above Melio on ACH, identical on card — and the transparency is genuine. The cost that surprises people is the seat pricing. A three-person finance function on Corporate pays $267 a month, $3,204 a year, before it moves a dollar, and adding an approver on Essentials or Team is another full seat. That is the trade: BILL's workflow depth is real and it is priced like software, not like a payment rail. For a business that mainly wants cheap ACH, a bank's bill pay or Melio's free tier does the same job for less.

Payments in transit and holds

BILL is not a bank. It is a money transmitter, licensed as Bill.com, LLC in all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands under NMLS ID 1007645, with further NMLS-registered lending subsidiaries for Spend & Expense, a Canadian entity registered with FINTRAC and a UK service provided by the FCA-regulated e-money institution Modulr FS Limited. In practice that means the money for every payment leaves your account on the process date and sits with BILL until it is delivered — four banking days for a standard ACH, about two once an account is accelerated, minutes for an instant payment. That float, and the right of a regulated transmitter to hold funds under review, is where the complaints come from. The most recent Trustpilot reviews as of September 2026 describe roughly $40,000 held for a month after an account was closed, a payment promised by end of day that was subject to undisclosed eligibility rules, and an interface the reviewer found hard to use. None of this is unusual for a transmitter; what is specific to BILL is the size of the sums, since its customers pay real supplier invoices, and the difficulty of reaching someone who can explain a hold.

Products

Accounts Payable is the core: an inbox that captures invoices by email or upload, AI coding, approval routing with configurable policies, payment by every method listed above, vendor onboarding with W-9 collection, 1099 filing and sync back to the ledger. Accounts Receivable handles invoicing, reminders, auto-charge and payment collection by ACH or card, with the option to pass card fees to the customer. Spend & Expense, the former Divvy, issues physical and virtual cards on a BILL credit line advertised at $1,000 to $5 million subject to approval, with budgets, controls, receipt capture and reimbursements; it is free because BILL earns interchange. Pay By Card converts a card payment into whatever a supplier accepts. International payments go by wire or local transfer from US, Canadian and UK accounts. The accountant console lets a firm run all of this for many clients from one screen, which is why so many small businesses arrive at BILL through their bookkeeper rather than by choosing it.

Reputation

The numbers need reading carefully. Trustpilot showed a 1.7 TrustScore over 1,659 reviews in September 2026, but the distribution was 43% five-star, 10% four, and 41% one-star — a polarised base on which Trustpilot's recency weighting lands on the recent, negative tail. BILL's profile is claimed and paid, it replies to 13% of negative reviews, and Trustpilot notes it has no recent history of asking for reviews, which tends to depress a score. The Better Business Bureau grades the company A+ without accreditation and lists 188 complaints closed in the last three years, the themes being delayed or held payments, double charges and refunds, and a help centre that is hard to navigate. Against a customer base of 479,300 businesses that is a low complaint rate, and the company disclosed no legal proceedings at all in its 10-Q for the quarter to 31 March 2026. The fair reading is that most customers are satisfied and a minority have a bad time when something goes wrong, and that BILL's support does not do enough to convert the second group.

Our verdict

For a small or mid-sized business with a real accounts-payable process, BILL is the default choice for good reasons: it does the most, it integrates with everything, its network takes the friction out of paying and getting paid, its per-payment fees are published and fair, and it is a regulated, audited public company rather than a start-up holding your float. The costs are the seat-based subscription, which can make it the most expensive option for a small team, and a support organisation that is not sized for the moments when a payment is held. We grade it B: the best product in its category, marked down for price and for how it handles the cases that go wrong.