The Account Payables Series: (Part5) Summary and Recommendations

Summary

If you've been following along with this series, we've been on a journey talking about the problems faced by business owners and partners in the account payables space, particularly with the inefficiencies of payments and involvement of multiple systems.

The solutions highlighted and discussed in this series have been game changers to the account payables flow through streamlining and optimisation that gives back the precious time that would have otherwise been used to manually inputting and validating financial data, worrying that an incorrectly entered bank account number could cause the next payment catastrophe.

Account Payables much like any form of accounting can end up becoming a monster if we let it. And so having players like Sage, Crezco, Telleroo, Nook (+many more) streamline and automate what's fairly manual is exciting, particularly when we see the innovation of embedded payments allowing customers to pay for things with their online banking from within an accounting system.

I know this is a nerdy thing to get excited over, but its cool when you realise the impact that something like this has to a business owner/accountant that don't typically want to do this because of such a deep time-sink that requires such attention to detail.

Products like these do cost money per month, but if you can gain back 1-2 days a month for spending ￡20-40 a month; that's probably money well spent in optimising admin and reducing stress.

Recommendations

You've heard my view points on how each of these players charge for their product and whether it's good value for money given the price and all the features they encompass. So taking that moment, I wanted to call out a few of these solutions and provide some opinions based on years of experience in this space from a product perspective.

Best value for money - Nook

If you asked me a few months ago, I would have said Comma (or maybe Crezco) is the best value account payables solution having reverted back to an unlimited payments for ￡22 a month. However since Nook has changed their pricing model from a tiered system to an unlimited payments model charging ￡20 per company; which is a simple pricing model that I can get onboard with.

But it doesn't stop there with just Bill payments. The additional features including international payments, payroll payments for employee salaries, managing bills, workflow approval flows and confirmation of payee all from within this solution is really what makes it stand out, as it helps its users maximise the value they get from product in payment volume; but also ensuring that Account Payables is done right.

Most interesting - Pleo

What makes Pleo, the most interesting in this space is that Account Payables isn't their main business, but they've been able to implement a solution that leverages the existing capabilities from their expense management such as approval flows, international payments and accounting software integrations.

This itself is clever because its leveraging the e-wallet; which is probably already being used by its customer base but also has the potential to make their overall proposition more sticky and potentially able to provide more insights having that additional data from both expenses and invoices.

Additionally, see them adapting and adjusting their pricing to include more invoices (see Figure 1); showing how serious they are about offering account payables atop of expense management definitely makes them one to watch closely in my opinion.

Notable mentions

Whilst we covered most of the accounting and agnostic account payable providers; there are a few worthy mentions that might also be of interest that I didn't have a chance to cover in this series.

• Wise Business - Bills - Wise has an integration with Quickbooks which allows the bills to be pulled from Quickbooks into Wise where the bills can be selected and paid from within the business account. If you're already a customer with them and paying for invoices with Wise then it's probably sensible to use given the low FX rates that they're touted for.
• Airwallex Bill Pay - Similar to the Wise solution which integrates with an accounting software for reconciliation but with the addition of bill approval flows. Again, great if you're an Airwallex user already, and can manage invoices and payments from here as an alternative.
• Apron - A new solution that offers open banking and manual bank transfer capabilities where customers may not be using a bank that has open banking enabled. Powered by Plaid which originally supported Dext Pay. Very slick looking based on the demo on their site; however the pricing is a little bit complex given they price up overage for payroll and supplier payments differently (Which is a little odd).
• Modulr - A payments infrastructure company focused in the SMB space providing the underlying payments capability for Sage, Brightpay (Payroll) and even Quickbooks Business account (which has been in beta since 2021). The most recent news is of their account payables integration with Xero; which I believe is finally Live?!?!?! ?? - Either way I'd be excited to see more from them as things progress

The Future of Account Payables.

The innovation in this past 5 years in this space has been significant. As time goes on maybe we'll see the end of BACS/CSV files being used for supplier payments and instead more business owners and accountants adopting these solutions for payments.

For the UK market, I do believe that Open Banking in this space will remain very prominent given how bank transfers are embedded into our UK payments culture. The question of how this space will evolve is an interesting one. Knowing how all these players have only popped up over the last 5 years with the level customer focus within their products, I'd be aptly watching to see how much deeper their integrations go beyond payments and perhaps even offering the business insights that involve becoming the masters of business data.