HONG EXAMINER – December 2025
Monthly Newsletter of Hong Consulting, LLC.
Bill Pay Automation. I have been lucky enough over the last six months to be able to demo and use several newer accounting tools and software. The experience has blown me away. Software companies are providing capabilities I wouldn’t have dreamed of five years ago. Now there is off-the-shelf software for bill payment automation, online business bank accounts, AR automation, automated bank reconciliations, and automated coding of transactions. There is even software to help automate the uploading of transactions into a new accounting information system, automate journal entries, and automate the consolidation process.
Recently a friend asked me out of all the software and services that I had seen, where I would start first if I had to implement from scratch. My answer was bill pay automation. I found it was the easiest to implement and saved time and money. Services like Ramp and Bill.com allow you to receive bills electronically, automate coding of the bills, send those invoices for approval per your policy, and pay those bills through ACH payments and checks that the vendor sends out on your behalf. These services then post these transactions into your accounting system and attach the documentation of the transaction to your accounting records. This makes transactions easier to audit, eliminates the need for physical documentation, makes approval easier, and speeds up the accounts payable function.
Both also have expense management (i.e. credit card) tools that reduce fraud, provide better insight, and take all the effort out of matching and reconciling credit card charges at the end of the month. The services allow you to create numerous physical and virtual credit cards that each have their own credit limit. This allows you to use one card for purchasing laptops, one card for your news subscriptions, etc. Having a card for each vendor with a separate limit allows you to reduce your exposure to loss if a card is compromised. It also allows you to better track where the card was compromised.
A card for each vendor allows for better expense tracking and the services make it easy for employees to upload receipts, which Bill.com and Ramp match to the related transactions. These transactions are then synced to your accounting system reducing manual entry. Ramp also provides an easy way to reimburse employees for businesses expenses.
If you are interested in implementing one of these services, please email me at adrianhong@hongconsutlingllc.com as I would be happy to discuss these tools with you. I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving and I look forward to working with all of you in the new year!
