Bilue brings finances in-house with Airwallex Bill Pay

After adopting Airwallex’s Corporate Cards for spending, Bilue became one of the first proud users of Airwallex’s Bill Pay, a revolutionary product that enables businesses to pay, manage, and reconcile their domestic and international bills in a single place.

We chatted with Joel Stehr, Bilue’s Chief Operating Officer, to see how Bilue has benefited from Airwallex. 

Powerful cards for streamlined corporate spending

Using Airwallex Corporate Cards has changed the way Bilue manages spending in their global offices, simplifying the lives of their employees and making it easy for management to accurately see where their company's funds are being spent. 

“The first Airwallex product we adopted was their cards for managing all our corporate spending and recurring payments in multiple currencies,” says COO Joel. “The transparency and visibility the cards have provided for us on our spending has been important, as historically this has been vague.”

“We use them to make transactions and track and capture receipts, which has had a major positive advantage when it comes to how quickly we can close our finances at the end of each month. Our accountants are happy, as they don’t have to run around chasing things, and it’s improved the way we report and made it easier come tax time. Additionally, the multi-currency functionality of the cards makes them an effective way to pay for our international expenses in foreign currencies.”

Bringing things in-house with Bill Pay

As soon as Bill Pay became available, Bilue jumped on board and extended their partnership with Airwallex. The revolutionary bill management platform has enabled Bilue to bring its accounting needs in-house and save approximately 20% in related costs along the way.

Airwallex’s Bill Pay offering has given Bilue the ability to easily manage their domestic and international supplier bills processes all in one place.

Before Airwallex, Bilue was using multiple providers for separate tasks, including one tool to capture invoice details, a separate tool for getting approvals, and another tool to make payments. Now Bilue can manage all of these accounts payable workflows within Airwallex. ‌Employees can upload their invoices and details are extracted using AI and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Approvals are tracked with multi-layer approvals that Bilue’s admins can customise and once approved, both domestic and international bills can be automatically paid, ensuring suppliers are paid on time. 

Joel Stehr

Chief Operating Officer of Bilue

"Airwallex Bill Pay has given us better control over our finances, and has helped us roll up important strategic budgeting and forecasting capabilities. It’s also improved our relationship with our suppliers, because we now never miss a beat with paying them on time."

Using Airwallex’s integration with Xero, all transactions are synced – Blue’s finance team can easily view invoice and payment details alongside each other without having to switch between systems, speeding up the reconciliation process each month.

“We’re a small organisation, but we’ve grown fairly substantially over the last couple of years. Using Airwallex has enabled us to gain a level of independence through in-house capabilities to take on things that were previously outsourced – such as accounts payable.”

Seamless adoption and integration

Joel says that if he could summarise the experience of adopting and integrating Airwallex, it would be “super simple and super easy.” 

“I come from an enterprise applications background where onboarding new applications can be difficult. With Airwallex, this was chalk and cheese, as we were able to easily issue cards, get our expense management set up, organise approvals, and get Bill Pay up and running – all within a few days.”

Why choose Airwallex?

Having worked with Airwallex as a supplier before when building our app, Bilue knew we had a great story and a strong reputation in helping businesses reach their full financial potential. 

“We actually originally started on a path with one of Airwallex’s competitors, but this didn’t last long for a variety of reasons,” says Joel. 

“Our decision process with choosing Airwallex was based around the relationship we had at the time and knowing they were an amazing team. We had a great level of comfort that they were a reputable organisation with high standards around their information security, which was a big ticket item for us.”

“While we have a small team, Airwallex has enabled us to easily provide transparency and visibility to our stakeholders, which has also boosted our efficiency. We now have clean, simple, easy processes."

“The Airwallex team will also reach out to us when they’re developing additional features to input on how they may be useful for us, which I really appreciate.”

Having a good understanding of Airwallex’s suite of products has helped Bilue assess where they could save money by bringing things in-house, says Joel. 

“Fostering our relationship with Airwallex has helped us connect with a team who know the problems we’re experiencing as a business and are able to genuinely assist us with remedying these issues. It’s great, helpful support that’s made us think “okay, we’re not alone in this, and there are people and platforms who can help us improve.”

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is factual information only and is not intended to imply any recommendation or opinion about a financial product.