ACH payments dominate the accounts payable departments, Bill.com shows

Through the survey used to prepare the Rise of Modern Business Payments report, more than 460 accounting professionals weighed in on how they pay bills for their companies and clients.

The survey uncovered that 73% of respondents use ACH payments and online banking to pay bills for clients, over 50% reported that they no longer use handwritten checks, and paper checks (both handwritten and computer-printed) ranked at the top of the list for methods of payment used less in 2018 compared to 2017. 6% of respondents stated that they do not use any form of digital payments to pay bills for clients.

In addition, 3% of respondents declared that they use virtual credit cards more often than in 2017 to pay their own bills, and 7% said their use of virtual cards remains the same as in 2017. Likewise, 1% used cryptocurrency more in 2018 to pay the bills, and 2% said they have maintained the same frequency of usage for cryptocurrency compared to 2017.

Respondents ranked the three main reasons they prefer digital bill payment as the increased speed of processing and reconciling payments (70%), the ease of working with an all-digital system (69%), and the ability to handle digital payments anytime, anywhere (68%).

The report also shows that nearly half of the respondents’ clients work with vendors overseas and their international payment challenges include high banks fees for international payments, payments taking too long to make, and difficulties calculating conversion rates.