Paying bills as a small business owner is like playing digital hot potato. You’re juggling invoices, tracking due dates, managing approvals, reconciling your books… and guessing when to make a big payment without wrecking your cash flow. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of our new Bills feature. Now available to all customers, Bills in Relay brings your entire bill management workflow into your banking platform to give you unprecedented visibility and control over your accounts payable workflow.
Relay is a financial technology company and is not a bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank². Member FDIC.
Picture a typical month at an interior design firm: bills flood in from every direction. Suppliers email their PDFs, furniture shipments arrive with paper invoices attached, and contractors send texts with photos of handwritten bills. This scattered approach is frustrating, hard to manage, and risks important payments falling through the cracks.
At Relay, we're transforming how small businesses handle their bills by eliminating the need to juggle multiple systems and giving business owners more control over their outgoing payments and cash flow.
With Bills, you can:
Upload or email bills directly into Relay with automatic extraction of vendor details, due dates, and amounts—all your bills in one place
Categorize bills effortlessly by matching line items to your chart of accounts and sync everything with QuickBooks Online or Xero
Create approval workflows to maintain control over spending (Grow & Scale plans)
Schedule payments for immediate processing or future dates using ACH, wire, or check
Combined with our Expenses feature, Bills creates a comprehensive spend management solution for your business. While Expenses handles all your past card purchases and receipts, Bills takes care of your upcoming invoices and bigger vendor payments. Together, they give you unprecedented control over every dollar flowing out of your business, past and future.
That’s the Relay difference: an all-in-one money management platform that brings banking and all your financial workflows together in one place, so you can get back to doing what you do best—running your business.
Choose the Relay plan that fits your needs
Bills is available across all of our plans, with features tailored to businesses at different stages:
Starter Plan: Perfect for solopreneurs and businesses getting started. You get access to the core workflow you need to upload and review bills, categorize each line item, and sync with QBO & Xero. You can then pay your bills by ACH, domestic wire, international wire, or check.
Grow Plan: Ideal for growing teams. You get everything in Starter, plus advanced approval workflows. You can split a bill into multiple categories for more detailed tracking, and process bills in batches to save even more time. Plus, get better rates on outgoing payments. Looking ahead, Grow plan users will soon enjoy even more approval workflows by vendor and GL code, plus custom categorization rules, and partial bill payments for better cash flow management.
Scale Plan: Designed for businesses with bigger teams and more complex needs. You get all the features in the Grow plan, and (coming soon) enhancements like a bills dashboard to reveal spending trends, streamlined bulk payments, and customizable CSV exports for your accounting team. Plus, get our best rates on outgoing payments.
How It Works
Step 1: Create a bill
There are 3 ways to enter your bills in Relay:
Upload it from your computer
Email forward it to your dedicated Relay email address
Upload the bill to QBO or Xero and import it into Relay
Step 2: Review the bill
Relay automatically reads and fills in the vendor name, invoice number, due date, amount, and all the separate line items. No manual data entry required. Take a quick glance to confirm everything is correct and make any edits.
Step 3: Categorize the line items
Match each bill to your chart of accounts imported from QBO or Xero—creating detailed financial records with minimal effort.
In the Starter Plan, you can easily assign an entire bill to the appropriate category.
Grow and Scale plan members get even more granular control. You can categorize each line item of a bill separately. For example: fabric purchases as "Materials & Supplies” and design consultation as "Design Services".
Keep meticulously detailed books, without having to email your accountant to explain all the context, so that you always know where your money is going.
Step 4: Export to accounting software
Approve the bill in order to sync it with QBO or Xero, creating a seamless connection between your banking and accounting system. Your financial data will be consistent across platforms without manual data entry.
Step 5: Send bill for approval (Grow and Scale plans only)
For businesses with teams, set up approval rules based on the dollar amount of the bill, with one-stage or multi-stage approvals required.
This means a small fabric order might need a simple approval from any senior designer. Meanwhile larger expenses might need multiple approvers and a final go-ahead from the firm owners—maintaining financial control without creating bottlenecks.
Additional advanced approval rules are coming soon, including vendor-based and GL code-based approvals.
Step 6. Pay the bill
Choose when and how to pay each bill: via ACH, domestic or international wire, or check.
Once the payment is complete, watch as the status updates to "paid" in both Relay and your accounting software. No need to manually mark bills as paid or reconcile systems.
Grow & Scale plans only: Enjoy the added efficiency of batch vendor payments. If two or more of your bills have the same payee (like multiple fabric invoices from the same supplier), you'll be prompted to combine payments into a single outgoing transaction—saving time and potentially reducing transaction fees.
A win-win for businesses and their accountants
With Bills in Relay, business owners categorize invoices themselves, providing accountants with clean, organized data. No more endless back-and-forth emails asking, "What was this charge for?" or "Which expense category should this go under?"
Business owners get back precious time to focus on growing their company and serving their customers. They gain peace of mind knowing bills won't be lost or late, and they can easily plan for upcoming expenses with better cash flow visibility.
Meanwhile, accountants and bookkeepers can shift their focus from tedious data entry to providing higher-value services like financial analysis and strategic advice. Month-end closing becomes dramatically faster when transactions are already properly categorized and reconciled.
This collaborative approach creates a true win-win: business owners feel more in control of their finances, accountants receive cleaner data, and both sides enjoy better cash flow visibility with significantly less admin work.
Ready for all-in-one money management?
Bills is the latest addition to Relay's all-in-one platform for small businesses, combining essential banking services, financial tools, perks, and strategic partnerships tailored to every phase of your business's cash flow journey.
When combined with Relay's other features—like multiple checking accounts to keep your cash organized, Expenses for tracking purchases, and Payment Requests for getting paid fast—Bills completes the picture, giving you unprecedented clarity and control over your entire financial landscape in one place.
Sign up or log in to your Relay account today to start experiencing the benefits of streamlined bill management.
