On 3rd June, we are releasing an improved version of our Bill pay workflow. This update will make paying suppliers more efficient by automating routine tasks.
We are making two main changes:
Centralising bills in a single Bills tab.
Introducing AI-assisted labelling to help you quickly spot which bills need payment and which don’t.
More details on both below.
Centralising bills
To give you greater visibility and clarity, instead of having two tabs with bills (Inbox and Ready to pay), we’ll now have a single tab called Bills.
To help you navigate this new tab and understand what’s ready for payment and what’s still awaiting review, we are introducing explicit statuses: Review and Pay.
Once a bill has been uploaded or sent to Apron (e.g. by email or WhatsApp), someone needs to review it and confirm that the appropriate details have been captured correctly (Review). Only then can the bill be paid (Pay).
To cater to the bookkeeping-first workflow and keep it as efficient as it is now, the Review stage will be skipped if the:
Bill was synced from Xero or QuickBooks.
Bill was published in the Bookkeeping section of Apron.
Such bills will not require review in Bill pay, and can be paid right away.
New AI-labelling
AI-labelling is a feature that automatically labels all bills to highlight what needs to be paid.
In order to reach its decision, our AI checks several factors, including whether a document is linked to a Direct Debit, a subscription paid by card, or is simply a receipt which does not require reimbursement.
To improve automation and control for you, we’re introducing the following updates:
Labels become more granular, giving you greater clarity. Instead of the previous labels of Payable and Not payable, we are introducing the following labels:
To Pay — Bills to pay in Apron.
Direct Debit — Bills which are paid by Direct Debit.
Subscription — Bills paid via card subscription or a linked card.
Paid — Bills paid outside of Apron.
Not Bill — Anything else which is not a bill (e.g. A receipt, or a non-payable document that was uploaded by mistake).
As we are centralising all bills into a single Bills tab, AI-labeling will now be applied to all bills (including ones pulled directly from Xero/QuickBooks, as well as any that were published in the Bookkeeping section of Apron). This means you’ll spend less time manually filtering in the existing Ready to pay tab (i.e. marking as Direct Debit, hiding, and so on).
Every uploaded bill or document will have one of these labels assigned automatically by our AI. You are able to change labels manually yourself.
If you have any further questions about these updates, please get in touch with the team via chat, or email [email protected]