Bilue brings finances in-house with Airwallex Bill Pay
Discover how Mobile & Cloud Consultancy Bilue partners with Airwallex to take control of their internal finances, streamlining both their corporate spending and accounts payable processes.
20% less accountancy costs
In-house accounts payables function brings costs down and increases control
Entire bill pay process in one place
Single place to capture invoice details, approve, and make payments.
Seamless Xero integration
Reconciliation is a breeze with real-time sync between existing systems
Bilue is a digital services consultancy with headquarters in Sydney, Melbourne, and Manila, who focus on helping Australian businesses, particularly in the financial services, government, and tourism sectors, reach their full potential in the digital space.
Industry
Professional Services
Location
Australia
Company size
50 - 100 employees
After being founded 13 years ago, the company now has a team of around 80 people offering a broad range of digitally awesome services across mobile, cloud, web, and new emerging technologies.
Bilue originally connected with Airwallex by playing a pivotal role in developing the Airwallex mobile app. Then, Bilue couldn’t see past the benefits of our products, and decided to bring us onboard to support them in streamlining and scaling their business.
After adopting Airwallex’s Borderless Cards for corporate spending, Bilue is now one of the first proud users of Airwallex’s Bill Pay, a revolutionary new 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 have benefited from Airwallex.
Borderless Cards for streamlined corporate spending
Using Airwallex Borderless Cards has changed the way Bilue manages their corporate spending in their global offices, simplifying the lives of their employees and making it easy for management to accurately see where their company funds are being spent.
“The first Airwallex product we adopted was their Borderless 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 conveniently manage their domestic and international supplier bills processes all in one place.
Prior to 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 can be customised by Bilue’s admins and once approved, both domestic and international bills can be automatically paid, ensuring suppliers are paid on time.
Joel Stehr
Bilue Chief Operating Officer
"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 have 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.”
Over 100,000 companies around the world trust Airwallex’s software and APIs to simplify their global payments and financial operations, unlock new opportunities, and grow without limits. If you’re looking to take your business to the next level, explore the Airwallex product suite today.
More stories from Airwallex customers
How ApprovalMax saved 3.5% on payment fees with Airwallex
Read ApprovalMax's story
“Companies like Airwallex alleviate the strain and burden of operating across borders. Business accounts with associated functions will be absolutely paramount to the success of companies wanting to expand to the UK or Australia and New Zealand.”
Read Paul Beare's story
How July's trust in Airwallex allowed them to focus on their business
Read July's story
See how our customers are finding Airwallex
"Airwallex have been a fantastic partner for Olsam Group as we grow our eCommerce brands to new channels and new markets. Their easy to use interface and integrations have been a joy for our finance team to use as we scale."
Sam Horbye
Co-Founder, Olsam
"For ME + EM, expanding into international markets such as the US has been our focus - and with Airwallex, we were able to use their local USD Global Account to collect from our Paypal US account, thereby allowing us to save 3% on each transaction. The process of working with Airwallex has been seamless - our suppliers get paid quickly, we have a dedicated Relationship Manager who has been really patient, helpful and quick to respond. I am keen to use their cards to pay for our ad spend in the near future to save further on our USD invoices."
Meera
Finance Manager, ME + EM
"We've had such a fantastic experience switching to Airwallex. Previously we were using a traditional bank to make all of our international transactions and they'd constantly lock us out of the account everytime we made a transfer, resulting in hours and hours of lost time on hold. Airwallex is secure, makes it super quick and simple to make and receive international payments."
Rupert
Managing Director, Perspective Pictures
“We used to pay Stripe between $5,000 and $10,000 a month in conversion fees because most of our customers pay in dollars. Now we funnel that money into our Airwallex US dollar account, we don’t have to pay commission. We’ve saved more than $100,000 so far this year”
Thomas Adams
Founder and CEO, Brandbassador
"We love Airwallex! It has considerably eased our invoicing and payments to contractors around the world. Sending and receiving money is much faster and cheaper than before."
Edle Tenden
Co-Founder, Mobile Transaction
“We are so glad that we have found Airwallex! There are no hidden charges, they are quick to respond to any queries and we had the smoothest transaction with amazing support from the team continually.”
Andreia Beja
Supply Chain Executive, Miss Patisserie
"Our water solutions company, Dropterra (go.dropterra.com) has partnered with Airwallex since inception and it has been the best banking and payment partner a company can think of. International transactions are easy, secure, and fast, the technology is incredible and their client service fantastic! We look forward to growing and deepening our relationship with Airwallex!"
Francois Schramek
Co-Founder, Dropterra