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Airwallex Bill Pay, now available with Xero

May 21, 2024

This article originated from the Xero blog. The XU Hub is an independent news and media platform - for Xero users, by Xero users. Any content, imagery and associated links below are directly from Xero and not produced by the XU Hub.
You can find the original post here:
https://blog.xero.com/product-updates/airwallex-bill-pay-now-available-with-xero/

This guest blog was written by the team at app partner, Airwallex.

Airwallex is excited to announce the release of its new Airwallex Bill Pay solution, taking hours out of paying invoices and automating the entire process in one place. With Airwallex Bill Pay, you can manage each step of paying a bill within the Airwallex platform, from uploading and importing invoices to approving and sending the payment, saving your finance team hours of manual work. Airwallex’s no-code integration with Xero means your teams can automate reconciliation and close the books faster each month.

Close your books faster with automated accounting integrations

Connect your Airwallex account to Xero so you can import approved bills from Xero directly into Airwallex for payment. All bill approvals and payment data are regularly synced to your Xero account to speed up your monthly reconciliation process. Leverage automatic two-way sync functionality to ensure all payments are correctly reflected in Airwallex and Xero, significantly reducing the risk of accidental overpayment.

Paying bills today is a manual, time-consuming process for millions of businesses

In speaking with customers, Airwallex learned that there are three key challenges you face when it comes to your accounts payable process.

Fragmented workflows: There might be multiple tools a finance team must leverage – for invoices, approvals, and payments (domestic & international). All these workflows require time (and dollars) for teams to maintain.

Manual, error-prone processes: On top of that, keeping track of relevant information, approvals, and payments is a manual mess, leading to errors. Finance teams often use spreadsheets separately to get some level of visibility, exposing the business to costly human errors.

More hours spent on paying international vendors: Processing bills from international suppliers presents even more challenges. Traditional methods lack support for international payments, forcing manual workflows and extra work.

Speeding up your entire accounts payable process

Helping businesses like yours to reduce these inefficiencies significantly means you can focus more of your time on running your business and serving your customers. Using Airwallex Bill Pay, you can now automate nearly every step of paying both your domestic and international bills, from uploading the invoice to approving and sending global payments, all on the Airwallex platform, with transparency, speed, and accuracy.

“Transitioning our accounts payable and corporate cards workflows to Airwallex has simplified our internal processes significantly. It means we no longer have to manage multiple tools across capture, approval, and payment of invoices and card management. Overall, the Airwallex platform has significantly reduced the time and cost of managing our accounts payable and expenses.”

Joel Stehr, COO, Bilue

Eliminate manual data entry with the support of AI

Employees can now upload or email bills directly to Airwallex, which will automatically extract all relevant details using AI and optical character recognition (OCR) technology, reducing manual data entry. With your chart of accounts imported from Xero, bills can be easily coded by employees as well. Users can also enable the email forwarding feature to create draft bills. Later, when the bill is ready for payment, Airwallex uses AI to check for duplicate invoices and check that the payment details match the invoice to ensure money is being sent to the right recipient.

in product images of airwallex's optical character recognition data capture tool
AI-powered data capture makes processing bills a breeze

“Getting our international invoices paid is much more seamless now compared to our previous process of paying bills manually through a separate banking system. We’ve reduced hours and manual data entry for our finance team significantly. Plus Airwallex’s integration with Xero automates more of our reconciliation process.”

Ben Joy, Financial Controller, TDM Growth

Ensure responsible spending with multi-layer approvals

Multi-layer approvals give your business more control by ensuring the right people within your company review expenditure before payments are made. Approval flows can be set up depending on the bill currency and amount, and approvers can be set to be an employee’s manager, specific individuals, or specific roles. Comments and audit trails are included in a single tool for full transparency so it’s clear what’s been approved and by whom, and what the current status of the transaction is. Staff can also approve invoices on the go with the Airwallex mobile app.

in product images of airwallex's multi-layered approvals system
Multi-layered approvals ensure the right people review expenditure

Pay multiple bills at the same time – domestically and internationally

Airwallex Bill Pay solution allows businesses to simplify the process of paying multiple bills to vendors across countries and currencies. Instead of paying individual bills and adding recipients one by one, Airwallex Bulk Payments features allow users to make all the payments in one go.

Pay bills using highly competitive international payout coverage and FX rates

Airwallex also provides a fast and cost-efficient process for sending payments to vendors once bills have been approved. Payouts can be sent to 150+ countries, in 60+ currencies with near instant payouts to 60+ countries. Because Airwallex allows money to be held in multiple currencies, you can pay your vendors without always needing to convert funds. If a currency conversion is needed, Airwallex’s competitive rates can help.

Your business account for global success

Airwallex exists to help companies around the world unlock new opportunities across borders while streamlining their financial operations. Airwallex’s global business accounts, powerful payment processing solutions, corporate cards, and spend management workflows aim to save you time and costs as you scale. With Airwallex Bill Pay, businesses can make their accounts payable process more efficient, automated, and reduce manual errors. If you’re an Airwallex customer, try Bill Pay and integrate with Xero at no cost today. If you’re not an Airwallex customer yet, sign up online.

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