A better bottom line starts with fewer fees

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Your bill payment fees aren’t nice guys: QuickBooks now offers free standard ACH bill payments across every tier, no matter how many bills you process. Coupled with AI-powered capture, auto-reconciliation, and unlimited 1099 filing, that’s hours saved while protecting your bottom line.

Running a business means making decisions every day about where your time, attention, and money can have the greatest impact. You’re focused on serving customers, strengthening relationships, planning what’s next, and building something meaningful. But keeping business operations moving also comes with important financial responsibilities. From managing accounts payable to preparing 1099 forms, these administrative financial tasks can pull your attention away from those bigger-picture business priorities.

This can mean spending your valuable time jumping between multiple tools, cross-checking vendor information, reviewing payment methods and fees, keeping tabs on upcoming bills, and making sure everything is ready for the upcoming calendar year. Although these tasks are essential to running the business well, they don’t necessarily need to take up as much of your day as they do.

Many small businesses begin to accept this as the norm, toggling between a bank portal, an accounting platform, a folder of emailed PDFs, and another filled with spreadsheets that are one wrong formula away from a do-over. This can create bottlenecks, inconsistencies, and information silos.

And those are the pain points QuickBooks set out to solve. Bills, vendor records, 1099s, financial reports, and all other accounting documents should live in the same place. If it sounds simple, it’s because it is.

The cost behind the payment

Transaction fees can start as a small but manageable challenge. However, when bill payments are spread across various methods, that often means separate fees —from ACH payments through a bank portal, to wire fees, and check-processing charges. Individually, they look insignificant, but if you add up a year of weekly bill runs, it’s likely to negatively impact your bottom line. A dollar here, $50 there, another $100 over there—you don’t have to be a math wizard to add up all this money lost to fees. And you don’t have to be a regular wizard to find a solution.

A simpler way to pay

Business owners, meet a solution. Standard ACH bill payments are now free inside QuickBooks on every tier, for both new and existing customers. And no matter how many bills you process each month, there’s no additional cost for standard ACH bill payments, so you can keep payments moving without watching transaction fees add up.

And fee-free payments are even better when the workflow around them is fast. So here’s how it works: A vendor emails an invoice or invoices. Instead of downloading them, renaming them, uploading them somewhere, and manually typing line items into a form, those invoices go straight to a dedicated bills inbox. Next, AI reads them, extracting vendor names, payment amounts, due dates, and line-item details, then builds ready-to-review bills. Bill Pay AI automatically creates vendor records for 99.7% of new suppliers identified from AI-ingested bills.¹ All you, as the business owner, have to do is review them, save them, and pay them.

Just ask Alexa Norlin, founder of Normal Ice Cream: her entire bill pay routine, categorizing and matching expenses, now clocks in at about one hour every Monday with QuickBooks Bill Pay. That’s the difference, she says, between working in the business and working on the business. More of those freed-up hours go to her staff, which she ranks as a top priority. Roughly one hour on a Monday—that’s the whole chore.

When it’s time to pay, you have the flexibility to choose what works best for your business. It could be Monday or any other day. Make a payment instantly², schedule it for a later date, or even set up a recurring autopay schedule. Once it’s sent, the payment syncs to your books in real time and reconciles automatically.³

QuickBooks Bill Pay can even provide visibility into paper check payments. You can see when a check is mailed and received, and view an image of the deposited check, all in one place. That added visibility makes it easier to stay on top of payments without adding another manual step to the process. And speaking of skipping manual steps, you can even bulk upload your invoices rather than one at a time.

Speed, of course, means nothing if money moves without oversight. QuickBooks has built-in approval workflows that you can configure yourself through the roles and permissions features.⁴ You can route bills to specific people based on department or dollar threshold, designate who needs to sign off before payments get released, and maintain an audit trail so nothing slips through unchecked. You can also restrict access to the books themselves. This control structure can scale as your business does, allowing your focus to remain on business growth rather than the administrative financial work.

Get ahead of January

1099 preparation doesn’t have to start when tax season does. QuickBooks also tracks which vendors may need a 1099 throughout the year, so when January arrives, you can see qualifying vendors in one view. Unlimited e-filing is included⁵ with Bill Pay Premium and Elite, along with printing and mailing, with no per-form charges or upgrades needed.

That visibility extends beyond tax preparation. AP aging reports and cash flow projections update in real time, helping you understand upcoming obligations and available cash before committing to new spending. With a clearer view of what’s ahead, you have more information to guide decisions about where and when to put your money to work.

Multitool versus multiple tools

Most businesses run bill pay across multiple tools: a bank portal for payments, accounting software for the books, email for invoice storage, maybe a shared drive for vendor records. QuickBooks collapses all of that into one environment. Vendors enter their own payment details through an invite link, cutting down on data-entry mistakes.

At Nootka Saunas, that’s not hypothetical. Cofounder Kris Harris routes roughly 60 vendor payments a month through QuickBooks. Some bills arrive as emailed PDFs or even photos sent on mobile. Vendors missing payment details get flagged directly within QuickBooks so they can be addressed right then and there. Once Kris’s team validates the service, he clicks “approve,” and the transfer fires quickly from the connected bank account. Kris’s founding advice to other business owners is simple: Get the books in order on day one, because bill pay scales with you.

And reconciliation happens automatically. Reports live alongside the transactions they describe. The savings compound in two directions: you save on paying per-transaction fees on standard ACH payments, and you recover the hours spent shuttling between multiple tools.

Of course, it sometimes seems easier to stay the course with your established AP process because switching feels harder. The math, however, says otherwise. A company processing 30 bills a month at $0.26–0.50 per ACH transaction is spending anywhere between $94 and $180 annually just on payment fees, in addition to the labor hours spent on manual reconciliation, vendor onboarding, and tax prep. Free standard ACH payments remove the fee element. AI-powered bill capture removes the data entry obstacle. Auto-reconciliation removes the spreadsheet vigil. And unlimited 1099 filing turns the January filled with paperwork into a January that feels relatively effortless.

See what’s ahead

The biggest win won’t be what you can spend less time or money on, but what you can see more clearly. You can access your records from anywhere, anytime. And with AP aging reports and cash flow projections updating in real time, you’ll have greater visibility into upcoming obligations and available cash. This context can help inform decisions across the business, from when to make a purchase to when it may be the right time to invest in inventory, hiring, or growth. And with no transaction fees for standard ACH bill payments, more of your money stays where it can support the business.

The pros from accounting firm UHY, which specializes in small- and mid-size business and serves more than 50k clients across 30 offices, have watched traditional AR/AP eat their clients’ margins through manual entry, errors, and cash flow guesswork. With QuickBooks Bill Pay in the mix, UHY’s client accounting team gets continuous bank reconciliation and a true forecasted cash balance, either daily or weekly. The best part: it shifts accountants from data entry to anomaly detection and strategy, positioning them as trusted advisors rather than bookkeepers. Their verdict: a big win for clients and the internal team alike.

Ultimately, managing payments and 1099s should make it easier to run your business, not add complexity to it. By bringing payments, financial insights, and key workflows together in QuickBooks, you can spend less time managing the mechanics of your finances and more time making informed decisions about what comes next. So if you’re wondering who to move into the future with, the question is: Why shouldn’t it be QuickBooks?

Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. For details about our money transmission licenses, or for Texas customers with complaints about our service, please visit intuit.com/legal/licenses/payment-licenses.

QuickBooks Bill Pay: Subject to eligibility criteria, credit, and approval prior to first payment. Subscription to QuickBooks Online required. Bill Pay is included with QuickBooks Online when purchased directly from QuickBooks.com or QuickBooks Sales. Not available in U.S. territories or outside the U.S.

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