Melio’s efficiency-boosting features: A comprehensive guide for SMBs

The ROI of saving time

As the owner of a small or medium-sized business (SMB), you often don’t have a team and you have to be everything at once: your company’s bookkeeper, social media manager, marketing expert, and customer service representative. All of which takes time. And a lot of it. Imagine what you could achieve if you were able to reclaim some time from working on these tasks. 

Saving a few minutes on each task every week can add up to hours each month, freeing you to focus on your craft—or even enjoy some free time. 

The concept of ROI (Return on Investment) serves as a crucial measure in assessing the effectiveness of a particular investment, whether it involves money, time, or any other resource. This metric enables comparisons between different investments, shedding light on their worth and impact.

To calculate ROI, you divide the benefit gained from the investment by its cost. When tasks are completed more efficiently, maintaining the benefit while reducing the cost, the return on each task improves.

ROI = benefit gained from investment / cost 

This surplus time can be allocated to strategic business growth, exploring avenues to enhance revenue. It also offers an opportunity to strengthen relationships with customers and vendors, potentially leading to increased sales and more favorable deals. Thus, each saved hour can significantly influence the overall profitability of your business.

An efficient back office is key to SMB Success

One of the easiest ways to save time is by using digital tools to manage your back-office tasks. Using accounting software to manage your books and an online bill pay solution to manage vendor payments can save you several hours each month, which can be tremendous. 

Cloud-based accounting software allows detailed tracking and instant analysis of financial transactions. It saves time by reducing manual errors as it captures information directly from the source (for example your bank account or bill pay tool). It also prevents data loss due to missing documents. 

Many business owners still manage their accounts payable (AP) manually. This includes bringing stacks of papers (such as invoices) to the proper desks. Waiting days or even weeks for the right people to sign off on these papers. It can be tedious and highly inefficient. 

AP software makes it possible to streamline the entire approval process. In addition, saving time on actually paying vendors, no need to handwrite checks, and doing everything in a few clicks—all of that helps keep the AP process seamless, speeds up payment processing, and improves business relationships.

Do multiple actions at once

Except for those in the accounting and bookkeeping field, most SMBs don’t find themselves dealing with outgoing payments on a daily basis. Although this might seem inconsequential, our brains aren’t wired for swift transitions between various tasks. Each shift in focus often consumes a significant amount of time, and for small business owners, time is a precious and limited resource.

To streamline this process, it’s beneficial to organize specific days, such as the first and 15th of each month, dedicated solely to handling all outgoing payments at once.

However, managing multiple invoices can become a repetitive task. But with Melio, you can select multiple bills and pay them at once, in a few clicks. You can also mark bills as paid, approve or decline, and delete multiple bills at once. All you have to do is select the bills you want to work on, and continue to schedule or any other action. That way, you can do all your monthly bills in one short sitting.

Combine bills to the same vendor

Combined payment is a capability that simplifies the process of paying multiple bills to the same vendor. This allows you to select multiple bills intended for a single vendor and pay them all together in a unified transaction. Essentially, your vendor will receive a solitary ACH transfer or a single check encompassing all the bills you’ve combined. Similarly, on your end, these merged bills will display and be accounted for as a singular transaction.

How will this save you time? When you handle numerous small bills from the same vendor through a single payment you can, again, minimize the time you spend on each separate bill. 

Simply select the unpaid bills associated with the same vendor for which you want to schedule a payment. By default, unpaid bills are automatically grouped into a single payment for convenience. For a more comprehensive guide, refer to the complete help center article.

Set up recurring payments

If you’re dealing with recurring payments, such as rent or lease expenses which repeat every month, you probably don’t want to deal with them every single time. But there’s actually a fast way to handle them. Set up automatic payments to vendors you pay the same amount regularly to ensure you never miss a payment. This is once a year or quarter and it’ll save you a lot of time and give you peace of mind.

Create approval workflows

Approval workflows are predefined rules dictating the approval of payments by someone other than the business owner. In simpler terms, these rules govern who within the company needs to review and authorize payments, serving as a structured process for handling invoices.

Business owners can tailor payment approval workflows to balance efficiency and control. These workflows determine who reviews payments, the amounts requiring approval, and the trigger for approval actions—such as invoice addition or readiness for payment.

When deciding on your payment approval workflow, first you need to answer these three questions: 

• Who? Decide on who should be involved in the process. It can be an office manager, the person in charge of purchasing, your in-house bookkeeper, or an external accountant. 
• How much? What amounts will I allow each person to approve?
• When? What type of action will trigger the approval workflow? When an invoice is added or when it’s ready to be paid?
• Not all payments have to go through the same process. You can decide, for example, that certain purchases (like supplies) will go through your warehouse manager, and office purchases will go through your office manager. 

Approval workflows is another tool that allows business owners to streamline their bill payment processes.

Easily upload bills

Transitioning from manual payments to online bill management is crucial for accurate and prompt invoice handling. But often, you receive your invoices manually, and uploading them one by one to Melio is time-consuming. But there are multiple faster ways to upload bills automatically. 

1. Scan bills with the Melio app: You can scan paper invoices with the Melio app. The bill details will be taken from the scanned image and you’ll need to fill in any details that are missing. 
2. Upload multiple bill documents at once: If your invoices are already saved on your computer, you can upload them to Melio. When choosing to upload a bill from a file, you can multi-select as many bills as you need, and the details will appear. 
3. Sync with accounting software: When you sync with QuickBooks Online, Xero, or other accounting software that works with Melio, every invoice you upload there, will be automatically updated in Melio. 
4. Email invoices to Melio: You can get invoices sent directly to your Pay inbox. Melio scans and automatically adds your bill for you to review and pay.

All of these methods allow users to save valuable time on manually uploading bills and invoices, plus reduce the chances for errors which can save you a lot of back and forth.

Pay without a bill

In the world of SMBs, the standard process for handling your AP involves receiving an invoice, adding it to your accounting software, syncing it with your bill pay tool, and then making the payment.

But what if your vendor wants to attach a receipt to your delivery, and will send the supply only after you pay. Or what if there’s a pile of bills on your desk and your vendor is on the phone, asking you to pay now. Luckily, you don’t have to add a bill or invoice to pay a vendor through Melio. Enter the amount owed, and pay. Easily pay without a bill on your phone or desktop.