In response to customer feedback, we’ve decided to continue offering the billFLO service beyond the December 1st shut down date previously communicated. It’s become clear that shutting down the service before the end of the year would negatively impact too many billFLO users. That was never our intent so we’ve made the decision that the service will continue to be offered past the December 1st shut down date previously communicated. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience the original plan may have caused you.

Attached below is a list of questions we hope will help address any concerns you have. If you have additional questions please feel free to respond to this email, submit feedback from within billFLO or call us toll free on 1.877.444.2596

Kind regards,
Ian Sweeney
Founder of billFLO / VP of Partner Integration at Taulia

Can I get to my data on billFLO now?
Yes, you can log in to and use your billFLO account as usual.

When will billFLO be shut down?
We will review the need to shut down services next year and provide customers sufficient time to respond if the decision is to shut down the service.

billFLO services shutting down as of December 1st, 2011

Dear Users,

I’m writing to inform you that we have made the tough decision to stop offering billFLO services as of December 1st, 2011. As of that date we will be deleting all accounts and shutting down our billFLO servers.

In June of this year we made the decision to be acquired by Taulia. Since the acquisition we have worked on the right way to take the best parts of billFLO and enable the combined business to move forward and meet our customers’ needs. After much hand-wringing we have decided the best way is for billFLO not to operate as a stand-alone product. Rather it will be more efficient to expand Taulia’s product offering to include the benefits and value of billFLO. In time, we will offer many of billFLO’s features within Taulia.

Attached below is a list of questions we hope will help address any concerns you have. If you have additional questions please submit feedback from within billFLO or call us toll free on 1.877.444.2596

Thank you for taking this journey with us and we wish you and your business continued success.

Kind regards,
Ian Sweeney
Founder of billFLO / VP of Partner Integration at Taulia

What will happen on the shut-down date?
We will delete all accounts and shut down the applications server
Can I have my account deleted now?
Yes. Please have the account administrator log in to billFLO and request your account be deleted using the feedback button at the top right.
Can I get to my data now?
Yes, you can download your bills and expense reports in pdf format as usual.
What will happen to the information used to connect my add-ons to billFLO?
That information will be deleted along with all account data.
Will you remind me of the shut-down date?
Yes, we will send reminders up until the shut-down date.
Will you tell me when billFLO functionality is available in Taulia Products?
Yes, we will contact you by email.
When will billFLO functionality be available in Taulia Products?
We will take a phased approach and as such do not currently have a definitive schedule.

Today, we are announcing that billFLO has become part of Taulia!

After some very exciting years at billFLO we’ve decided to accept an offer from Taulia to be purchased. Taulia, like ourselves, is a San Francisco Bay Area company. It has had a meteoric rise in recent years and is now the leading provider of Dynamic Discounting to large enterprises, including Coca Cola Bottling. Taulia specialises in helping large companies better use their cash and small companies to receive accelerated payment for their services.

While this wasn’t an easy decision for us, the longer we spoke to the Taulia team the more we realized they share the same commitment to small business as we do. To that end, we are extremely excited about our future at Taulia!

Thank you all for your continued support and feedback that has enabled us to get billFLO to this new phase of its life. Stay tuned to our blog for more details over the coming weeks and months.

Best regards,
Ian Sweeney
CEO billFLO.com

	I want it now! We’ve baked some instant gratification into billFLO this month with the release of Instant Notifications. Now, as soon as something important happens, like a new bill being received, we give you instant notification. Just look for the orange message at the top of your screen.
	TurboCharged Email. We’ve also completed the final upgrade to our email server. Whether you’re emailing a receipt to receipts@billflo.net for your expense report or a supplier is emailing a bill to your billflo payables email, it will show up in your account ASAP!
	Blinksale Support. In our constant journey to make sure you can see all your finances in billFLO we’re adding support for Blinksale. That’s right, with a couple of clicks you can now manage and send your Blinksale invoices from billFLO!

And lastly..
A quick tip about expense reporting. Did you know expense reports can be created and submitted via billFLO?
Staff with the expenses module enabled can upload, email or type expenses into billFLO, create an expense
report and submit it. And! the expense report goes straight into your payables workflow for approvals!
Get started now by logging into billFLO and giving
your staff access to the expenses module in the Admin Center.

Until the next time,
Ian Sweeney
CEO, billFLO

Many of our customers say their business is getting “to the next level” thanks to the insight into cash-flow billFLO provides them.  In other words, smart business owners (that’s you, right!) recognize that cash-flow is critical to achieving the company’s financial goals. So, how the heck do you actually manage cash-flow? Well, today we’re going to give you the secret to cash-flow management!

As we discussed in the first post, cash flow is “the movement of cash in and out of the business over a specific period  of time, in the future.” Managing cash flow boils down to the following simple equation:

Cashflow = Cash - Money out + Money in

Lets say over the period we care about:

• We start with $20 today (cash)
• We pay $50 in bills (money out)
• We sell $100 of goods (money in)

Then, over the period we’re interested in, we’ll end up with $70. Not so fast! We’ve got to understand the timing of when the money moves. If the bills get paid before we get paid we could be in the red to the tune of -$30 ($20 cash – $50 bills). So, to manage cash-flow we have to track the amount and the timing of every financial transaction. Our example is nice and simple, but even the smallest of businesses have complicated cash-flow so lets talk in more detail.

Cash on hand is relatively simple to get a grasp of.  Get the latest cash-balance of all the accounts you want to include as operational cash (billFLO can do this automatically for you).  We’re striving for perfection so make sure you get the data from the most accurate source. For example, if your bank account doesn’t reflect what was spent yesterday use data from your accounting system if it does.  Type all this data into your spreadsheet, or have billFLO capture the data automatically for you. Ok, one down, two to go!

Money Out – Here’s where it begins to get a little bit more complicated. In a business, just about any employee can “spend” money on behalf of the business. For example, the sales-guy buying lunch, or the marketing director ordering flyers or the contractor submitting a time-sheet represent money going out. You need to know about this liability today and not when the vendor calls you looking for payment! To manage the money going out you need to ask anyone with the ability to spend money for the company, how much they’ve spent and when we have to pay it out. billFLO provides the tools for payables (bills, expense reports, etc) to be handled automatically and provides this data in real-time to you. You can do the same thing by regularly checking with employees and maintaining a spreadsheet which captures the amount and due date of every payable. Right, another one down, just one more thing left!

Money In – Managing receivables (money-in) can be time-consuming. It typically involves calling the customer, or whoever deals with the customer, to find out when they are going to pay. It’s important to get the best estimate as to when payment will happen so as to avoid any cash-crunches. You’re looking to build a list of all receivables and when you think they will get paid. billFLO creates this automatically by learning from your customers payment behavior and predicting payment times automatically for you.

Ok, we now have all the pieces of our little cash-flow equation. Let’s put it all together. What your spreadsheet should now show is your starting cash, the timing and amount of every payable (bill, expense report, etc) and the timing and amount of every receivable (aka invoice).  billFLO displays the information in the dashboard below.

In this example, we can see we should end up with $1,406 at the end of 60 days, but if we don’t do anything we won’t get that far. We’re going to be enjoying a nice St. Patricks Day drink on March 17th while our business goes bust due to negative cash-flow of over $500 (blue line goes negative). We’ll talk more about improving cash-flow (and enjoying our Paddy’s day drink!) in the next post, but the first step to fix the problem would be to understand if we can move out the payables (red line) or bring in the receivables (green line) to avoid the cash crunch.

Every business is different so you may find that your receivables are pretty stable but your out-going cost is more variable. Whatever type of business you have, focus on what varies the most  - thats where the opportunity lies! With billFLO you can drill down from the graph to find out what that bill is, or which customer owes you money.

And remember to keep your cash-flow data updated. It’ll change every day, even every hour and you don’t want to get caught out!

Next time: How can I improve cash-flow to achieve my goals?

	Help is here! Managing cash-flow can be a complex little beast so we’ve added contextual help to billFLO. If you have a question just point your mouse to the little question mark icon and help is at hand. Click “learn more” to dig deeper!
	Puttin the boot in. We keep squashing bugs and this release includes lots of fixes mostly focused on streamling the process of connecting add-ons. Please let us know how its working for you.
	Removing Data. What happens when you imported data that you didnt want from an add-on? Well, up until now you had to manually remove it. Not now! Just remove the add-on from the admin section and tell billFLO to remove the associated data too. No more manually removing data!

And lastly..
A quick tip about adding users! Let’s say you want to allow another user review your cash-flow, or submit an expense report or approve a bill…How do you do it? Just go to the admin section and click on Users & Roles. From there you can add new users and specify their permissions (what they can access) or even remove or add permissions for existing users.

Until the next time!
Ian Sweeney
CEO, billFLO

Handpicked from hundreds, billFLO got a mere 7 minutes on stage to demo our latest and greatest product.

Check out the video below starring our very own CEO, Ian!

	Paypal Support. Do your customers pay you with Paypal? You can now connect your Paypal account to billFLO so your Paypal Balance shows up in real-time in billFLO. No more data-entry needed!
	Harvest Integration. One of the most popular requests we’ve gotten is to add harvest support. We’re now happy to announce that we’ve integrated Harvest invoicing into billFLO. Now your and your staff’s invoices, expense and time sheets will show in billFLO automatically and in real-time!
	Looking into the Future with Freshbooks. We’ve added support for Freshbooks’ recurring invoices feature. If you have a recurring invoice profile in Freshbooks, billFLO will now forecast those invoices automatically, creating a forward looking view of your cash-flow automatically!

And lastly..

A couple of newsletters ago we asked our users to tell us what cash-flow means to you. From the responses it was pretty apparent that the term cash-flow means different things to do different people! Seeing as cash-flow is sort of important for businesses(!) we thought it might be worth starting a discussion on what cash-flow actually is.
You can read the first post “What is cash-flow (and why should I care)?” on our blog here. ]]> http://www.billflo.com/blog/2011/01/paypal-harvest-a-cash-flow-discussion/feed/ 0 http://www.billflo.com/blog/2011/01/what-is-cash-flow-and-why-should-i-care/ http://www.billflo.com/blog/2011/01/what-is-cash-flow-and-why-should-i-care/#comments Sun, 09 Jan 2011 12:08:49 +0000 admin http://www.billflo.com/?p=398 Continue reading →]]> This is the first in a three part series about cash-flow and how to make it work for your small business.

As a kid, my parents’ words of encouragement in regards to saving were “take care of the pennies and the pounds (or dollars!) will take care of themselves”.  That advice pretty much sums up the core of managing your personal finances; if you’re watching where your money is going you’ll be able to achieve your financial goals.

The equivalent advice in the business world is: manage your cash-flow and everything else will be ok! We all intuitively know cash-flow is important but the problem is there isn’t a whole lot of guidance on what cash-flow is and how to manage it! This series of posts is an attempt to solve that problem.

If someone asked you what the cash-flow of your business is, how would you answer? “em…it’s good?”. Cash-flow isn’t a thing, its a process. It’s watching the pennies move into and out of your business, over time. Personal Financial Tools like Wesabe.com and Mint.com did a great job of helping individuals manage their cash-flow by collecting all transactions from their bank accounts and then categorizing how they spent their money. As individuals, cash-flow is relatively consistent from month to month, so looking into spending history provides useful information on what will happen with future cash-flow (which is the only thing we can influence!).

In a business environment, the analogy to Mint is the accounting system. It literally accounts for the money your business spent and describes your historic cash-flow, e.g. you lost money last month by spending too much on office supplies.  Unlike individuals, using historic data to forecast future cash-flow doesn’t work for most businesses. Income and expenses fluctuate so looking into the past doesnt provide much insight into what the current or future cash-flow will look like.

Lets try a quick cash-flow definition to help us out:” the movement of cash in and out of the business over a specific period  of time, in the future“.

Right about now you might be thinking “I just read this whole blog post and I still don’t know why I should care about my business cash-flow”. Well, have no fear, the answer is here (or at least a simple example to explain)!

The dashboard view below from billFLO shows a 90-day forward looking view of a company’s cash-flow (automatically collected by billFLO from the business’s various systems and business processes). In the top right we can see the business is profitable and will end the period with $1641 in cash. All good, right? Not so quick! Look at the blue line (cash balance) over the 90 days. It goes negative in two places (January and early March). In other words, the company will go bust twice in the next 90 days because they run out of cash. Thats why managing cash-flow is important. This company knows about the cash-crunch and can respond ahead of time.

The message here is, whether you manage your cash-flow automatically in billFLO or on the back of a napkin, you should be managing it daily and building a picture of future cash-flow to avoid those nasty surprises and achieve your financial goals.

Next time: How to measure and manage cash-flow!

.

	Upgraded Email Server. We’ve upgraded our email server to speed up delivery of your invoices into your payables inbox and to your expense accounts. This is phase one of the upgrade which will result in you getting your emailed invoices and expenses quicker. (Remember invoices sent to your payables email address – e.g. mycompany@billflo.net – will automatically appear in your payables inbox and you can email receipts to receipts@billflo.net and they’ll appear in your expense account.)
	Better Freshbooks Integration. We’ve totally revamped our integration with Freshbooks to give you more control. billFLO will now import invoices, expenses and time entries to give you a full view of cashflow. We’ve also given you control to side whether you want billFLO to import some or all of that data.
	Payables Workflow. Thanks to the great feedback Beaker (our resident process nerd, pictured left!) has been receiving, we’ve fixed a range of small (but annoying) bugs in the payables approval workflow.

And lastly..

A little bit of light reading! Many people have told us we’re crazy starting a new business in a recession. We’re guessing many of you have been told the same thing about your business! If so, you might find this article interesting Starting Up in a Recession: Right Product, Right Price, Outstanding Service

Here’s to a great 2011 for your business!
Ian Sweeney
CEO, billFLO ]]> http://www.billflo.com/blog/2010/12/a-holiday-hamper-full-of-goodies/feed/ 0