New technologies for electronic bill presentment and payment, or EBPP, could streamline accounts payable processing by consolidating invoices and payment data online.
CyberBills and SurePay discussed their new EBPP plans at last week's Internet World show here. Cyber Bills' new Business Payables Management, a Web-based EBPP application for small and midsize businesses, has built-in interfaces with Intuit's QuickBooks, Peachtree Software's Peachtree and MYOB US's MYOB bookkeeping applications.
The software, available now, lets users set approval amount limits by vendor, approve and deny invoices, allocate invoice amounts to general ledger accounts, adjust credits and discounts, and apply finance charges, said Cyber Bills officials in San Jose.
New York-based SurePay, a spinoff of First Data, introduced itself and its merchant e-commerce services. It is working on payment solutions to support electronic funds transfer, which could help expand electronic payment for small companies.
Yet, while electronic bill paying seems hot, the technology has been available in one form or another for more than five years, with little recognizable success. Intuit, for instance, developed an EBPP offering in 1994, but it never achieved widespread acceptance, company officials said. The Mountain View, company is giving EBPP a second go-around with CyberBills and CheckFree, the two companies that provide the infrastructure for Intuit's personal finance Web site, Quicken.com.
An Intuit spokeswoman said the real battle with wide-scale EBPP adoption is getting enough billing companies to provide electronic presentment.
Oil behemoth Texaco beta tested CyberBills' Business Payables Management and plans to implement it in its 1,000 retail operations. But it's not doing so without reservation.
"One of the requirements of making the transition from a paper bill system to paperless systems is you have to get billers to change [the routing] address," said Alex Paidas, e-business development manager with Texaco, in Houston. "That address change process is a sticking point."
Although billing companies are the ones pushing for online presentment, it's been a chicken-and-egg scenario: Customers won't adopt EBPP until billing companies are on board; billing companies are hesitant to go online without customer demand.
At least one Intuit employee believes adoption is a far-off reality. "It's still a couple of years away," said Sandy Kraft, group project manager for Intuit's Online Transaction unit.
