The digital revolution in business banking has largely ignored one of its most fundamental functions: paying bills. While Irish SMEs have embraced online banking, mobile payments, and cloud accounting, the daily task of managing and paying bills remains archaic.
Revolut’s BillPay tool aims to change this, bringing a sophisticated “end-to-end accounts payable” function to business customers on a paid plan. It’s a great way to reduce error-prone manual data entry, plus it integrates really well with Xero.
What does Revolut BillPay do?
Once BillPay is set up, you and your team can stay on top of mundane processes such as extracting accounting and payment data, getting approvals, and syncing updated records. And as payments run through Revolut Business, you can pay suppliers in over 150 countries while benefitting from their built-in scheduling, spend controls, and error detection.
Right now, Revolut BillPay works with Xero, FreeAgent, and Quickbooks Online. The two-way sync with Xero means you can pull bills into Revolut automatically or forward them to your account by snapping a photo and emailing it to your unique email address.
Built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts the supplier information, payment details, and accounting info from your bill (including invoice dates, due dates, and line items). BillPay also remembers and stores categories and VAT rates for each supplier – just like Xero, it will get smarter over time and suggest entries for you.
Revolut can see the supplier bills that are outstanding in Xero and from the Revolut banking screen. Once a bill is in the system, you can review it and:
- Pay it right away
- Schedule it for a specific date (ideal for managing cash flow)
- Set it up as a recurring payment if it’s a regular thing
- Set payment limits (so if your electricity bill suddenly doubles, it won’t auto-pay until you’ve checked it)
For regular suppliers, there’s a nice feature where you can set payment rules. For example, always paying on the 14th of the month or always keeping a 30-day payment term. Once in place, bills from that supplier automatically follow your rules.
Revolut BillPay and Xero
When BillPay is connected to Xero, it automatically reconciles payments and updates your accounts. No more manual matching or typing in reference numbers. Each bill payment automatically syncs the correct supplier, category, and VAT rate. If you’re running multiple entities in Xero, it handles those separately too.
Apart from the time-saving this tool represents, you’ll also have a clear paper trail for your accountant and/or auditor, plus a single place to check a payment status when suppliers call asking about their money.
How much does Revolut BillPay cost?
BillPay is included in your Revolut Business subscription, with no extra fees per transaction. However, your usual Revolut transfer limits will still apply, so check those if you’re paying large supplier bills. As you’d expect from Revolut, it works for international suppliers too (often with better FX rates than traditional banks).
Get set up with Revolut BillPay
BillPay is a significant step beyond the app functionality offered by traditional Irish banks, with a degree of control and visibility they will struggle to match. Like any automated system, you should stay on top of your approved supplier list as well as payment rules and limits to ensure nothing unexpected happens.
I do like the integration, but I would prefer to action the payments in Xero (where I have the bills entered) rather than trusting they have come into Revolut correctly. However, it is so good to see one of the banks trying integrations so thanks for making the effort Revolut and let’s see how widely it gets used!
