Bill Pay overview

While you can always send payments for free through your Mercury account, Mercury Bill Pay gives you more precision and control and allows you to pay bills more efficiently. Using AI, Mercury Bill Pay automatically extracts data so there is no need to copy and paste invoice information. Bill pay allows you to receive bills to a dedicated inbox, which helps you manage and prioritize your unpaid bills, organizing them by approval status and due dates. Lastly, bill pay allows you to sync your bill data directly to your accounting software.

Setting up bill pay

From your Bill Pay dashboard (located on the left-hand menu under Workflows, click Get Started or Settings to complete your set up.
Here, you will find your dedicated bill pay email to which you can either: 1) forward bills yourself, 2) set-up automatic email forwarding from an existing email, or 3) have vendors send you bills to this email directly. Any emails received by your bill pay email will show up in your bill pay Inbox to start reviewing.
Configure your Approval rules. These allow you to maintain control over your outgoing payments and ensure transactions are reviewed and approved by the right team members.
Set up your Accounting integrations
1. While paying a bill, you can categorize by one or more GL codes and sync the payment directly to QuickBooks Online, Xero, or NetSuite using one of our accounting integrations.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll be set up to take advantage of all the benefits of bill pay. You can view and manage your bill pay settings at any time from your Bill Pay dashboard.

Your Bill Pay dashboard

Accessible from the left-hand side of your dashboard under Workflows, navigate to your Bill Pay page. This is where you can review outstanding bills, add new ones and configure your bill pay settings.

View a high level summary of total invoices outstanding, anything overdue and bills due soon.
Your “Bill Inbox” houses all your incoming bills that have been forwarded or uploaded and need to be actioned.
The “Bills Needing Approval” tab will list any outstanding unpaid bills that require approval from admins. Click into a bill to review its details before approving the payment.
“Scheduled Bills” includes any unpaid bills that have been scheduled and will be paid on the indicated dates. Payment timelines are dependent on payment method (we support payments via ACH, check, domestic and international wire).
“Paid Bills” provides you with a historical view of all bills paid.

Paying bills

Pay bills directly from your bill pay dashboard by clicking +Add Bill, by dragging and dropping an invoice into your bill inbox or forwarding to your bill pay email.

You can also pay bills by clicking “Move Money” in the top right hand corner of your dashboard and clicking “Send” where you’ll see the option to drag and drop or upload bills.

Once a bill is uploaded, you'll see a preview of the bill on the right side of your screen, and the details for your payment on the left. Mercury will automatically extract the details using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). If a matching recipient is found, you can proceed with the match. Otherwise, you can search for or create a new recipient.

Only users with the correct permissions and approvals can review bills. Read more about user permissions
Next, you’ll be able to select your payment method and verify your recipient’s bank details, before confirming the payment amount (populated from your uploaded bill), funding source, and send date, with the option to schedule recurring payments.
If you have an accounting integration set up (we currently support QuickBooks Online, Xero, and NetSuite), you will have the option to add a GL code to each bill payment. Only bill payments tagged with a GL code will sync over to your accounting software. More details on how it works and what data is synced in our accounting integration help articles for QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite.

If you are on our Mercury Plus/Pro plans and use QuickBooks Online or Netsuite, you will have the ability to toggle from “Single GL Code” to “Multiple GL Codes”, which allows you to categorize a bill by one or more GL codes and sync the payment to your accounting software.
On the Details page, you’ll be asked to confirm the name you’d like to be displayed on the payment, include an optional memo for the recipient, and specify whether you’d like to send any email receipts. This is also where you’ll see the invoice number, invoice date, and due date pulled from your uploaded bill. Here, you can add an internal note and/or upload any additional attachments.
Finally, review your payment to make sure the details are correct. To finish up, you’ll either click “Send Payment” if you are sending the payment today, or “Schedule Payment” if you’re paying in advance or setting up a recurring payment
If it was an immediate payment, the transaction will appear in your Transactions list upon processing. If you created a recurring or scheduled payment (for tomorrow or beyond), it will appear in the Scheduled Bills section on the Bill Pay page (it will also appear in the Scheduled section on your Payments page).
If the payment requires approval, Approvers will be able to review and approve or decline it from the Needs Approval section on the Bill Pay page (it will also appear in the Needs Approval section on your Payments page).

Depending on your recipient and invoice, we support payments via ACH, check, domestic and international wire. Here are typical timelines and further details on each method.

We’ve built the product assuming each PDF is one invoice, and can allow invoices to be processed only one at a time for now. You can drag-and-drop multiple invoices (or we can receive an email with multiple invoices attached) to pay, but they need to be separate PDFs.

To make paying multiple invoices a bit easier, you can multi-select invoices to review and pay, and they will be queued up one after another.

Approvals

Payment Approvals allow you to enable rules around outgoing payments based on amount, as well as designate specific admins as approvers. Here is more information on the types of Approvals you can set up and how.

If you are an approver, you can review outstanding bills in a few ways:

On web, from your Bill Pay page or Payments page
On mobile app, from your Home tab > Action items
On Slack. Here’s how.

Accounting

If you integrate with an accounting software such as Quickbooks Online, Xero or NetSuite, bills will be synced and recorded in your accounting software. The sync is triggered by selecting a GL code within the payment workflow before scheduling the payment. Upon scheduling, an unpaid bill record will be created in your accounting software, and upon payment the bill will automatically be marked as paid.

Please note that a bill record will only be created if at least one of the following fields in the “bill details” section is filled out: invoice number, invoice date, or due date. You can find this section on the Details step when making a payment. If none of these fields are filled out, the payment will sync to your accounting software as an expense when it is paid — it will not sync as a bill.

To view and edit recurring bill payments, click on the "Scheduled" tab and find the payment you want to update. If the recurring bill includes an invoice number, each recurring bill payment in the future will automatically append the invoice number with a [-#] at the end that increments (e.g. INV-100-1, INV-100-2) to ensure uniqueness. Both the invoice date and due date will match the scheduled send date for that specific recurring payment.

If you use another accounting software (or none at all), you can still use bill pay to upload, manage and pay bills.

Search