In short: BILL has expanded its Supplier Payments Plus product to let large enterprise suppliers accept card and ACH payments from any SMB customer, including those with no BILL account, converting paper checks into digital transactions automatically and depositing card payments directly into supplier accounts. The company says the changes can shorten collection times by up to approximately seven days.

BILL launched Supplier Payments Plus in June 2025 as a tool to help large enterprise suppliers process and reconcile high volumes of incoming payments from the thousands of small businesses they sell to. Wednesday’s expansion takes that product in a strategically significant direction: for the first time, an enterprise supplier on BILL can collect from SMB customers who have never used BILL and have no intention of creating an account. The closed-network assumption that has shaped B2B payment platforms for years is quietly being set aside.

Opening the network to non-members

The centrepiece of the April expansion is a feature called Payment Links, which allows enterprise suppliers to send a payment link to any SMB customer and accept card or ACH payment through it, no BILL account required on the buyer’s side, no portal login, no onboarding friction. The receivable is captured, reconciled, and routed into the supplier’s existing workflow alongside payments from businesses that are already part of BILL’s network of more than eight million members.

The practical implication is that an enterprise supplier with thousands of SMB customers no longer needs to segment its customer base into “on BILL” and “off BILL” and manage two separate collection processes. A single dashboard provides visibility across all incoming payments regardless of origin, with the supplier’s existing payment preferences and settlement controls applying uniformly to both populations.

Mary Kay Bowman, executive vice president and general manager of payments and financial services at BILL, described the challenge her company is attempting to solve at scale: “B2B payments are complex, requiring orchestration, trust, and precision across both SMBs and their enterprise suppliers. BILL operates at the center, absorbing complexity at scale so customers on both sides can move money with greater clarity and control.”

Automating what was manual

Alongside Payment Links, two further capabilities address the processing side of the equation once payments arrive. Card Straight-Through Processing automates card payment settlement by depositing funds directly into supplier accounts, eliminating the manual receipt processing and exception handling that typically accompanies high-volume card collection. Configurable payment rules allow suppliers to set preferences by payment method, weighting the mix between card and ACH based on cost and speed priorities, with the seven-day acceleration figure reflecting the outcome when those preferences are tuned for pace.

The third new capability, Intelligent Check Conversion, targets the portion of the SMB market that still pays by paper cheque. BILL’s system intercepts paper cheques and converts them into digital transactions before they reach the supplier’s finance team, removing the manual processing step entirely. The feature directly addresses one of the more persistent structural problems in SMB-to-enterprise payment flows: the supplier that has modernised its own operations still faces customers who have not, and bears the reconciliation cost of that gap.

According to industry research cited by BILL, 93% of companies are prioritising improvements to cash application efficiency in 2026, identifying manual reconciliation and payment delays as the primary sources of friction. BILL’s argument is that its network position,  sitting between a large enterprise supplier and the thousands of SMBs that supply to it or buy from it, makes it the natural place to absorb that friction rather than passing it upstream or downstream.

The competitive moment

The expansion arrives in a B2B payments market that has been consolidating quickly. Xero, which completed its acquisition of SMB bill payments platform Melio last October for $2.5 billion, now fields a combined product that spans accounting, invoicing, and bill pay for small businesses in the US, with AI-assisted financial workflows beginning to reach accountants who serve those businesses. The deal closed in October 2025 and significantly strengthened Xero’s presence in the American market where BILL operates.

BILL’s response has been to move further up the value chain, building more capability for the enterprise suppliers that transact with SMBs rather than focusing exclusively on the SMB itself. The Supplier Payments Plus expansion is an expression of that strategy: the more deeply an enterprise supplier integrates its receivables workflow into BILL’s platform, the harder it becomes for that supplier to route to a competing network, regardless of which bill-pay tool its SMB customers eventually choose. The broader category of SMB financial operating platforms has been attracting significant capital, with Paris-based Pennylane raising €175 million in January 2026 to expand its integrated invoicing, payments, and bookkeeping platform across Europe, validating appetite for the model on both sides of the Atlantic.

BILL processed 33 million transactions in its most recent reported quarter and reported core revenue of $1.3 billion for fiscal year 2025, a 16% year-on-year increase. Its network, which it describes as more than eight million businesses, is the primary source of the lock-in the company can offer enterprise suppliers: a supplier that accepts payments through BILL reaches an existing installed base of SMB payers without needing to separately onboard each one. The same network-effect logic that has driven enterprise software marketplaces , where the value of the platform increases with each new participant, applies to BILL’s two-sided payments network, and Wednesday’s expansion is designed to accelerate the rate at which suppliers on one side pull in SMBs on the other, even those who have never previously used BILL’s platform at all.