AP automation cost: AP automation pricing, accounts payable software pricing and bill pay fees compared

Here is the short answer for a US company on QuickBooks Online. A two-person team paying 60 bills a month spends from $0, if it moves its banking to Rho, to about $2,150 a year on BILL Team. A five-person team paying 250 bills a month spends from $0 on Rho, or about $1,080 on QuickBooks Bill Pay Elite, up to about $7,600 on BILL Corporate. The cheapest options are free because the vendor earns on its own card or bank account. The most expensive option at both sizes is BILL, because it charges every user, including people who only approve.

The published prices, read at source. BILL Essentials is $49, Team $65 and Corporate $89 per user a month, with Enterprise quoted; Essentials syncs to QuickBooks Online and Xero by CSV only, Team adds automatic two-way sync, and NetSuite and Sage Intacct need Enterprise. BILL charges $0.59 per ACH and $1.99 per mailed check. Melio's Go plan is free with 5 ACH payments a month; Core is $20 a month billed yearly with 20 free ACH, Boost $44 with 50, and Unlimited $64 with unlimited ACH and unlimited users. Extra users on Core and Boost are $10 a month each, and ACH beyond the allotment is $0.50. Every Melio check is $1.50.

Ramp Bill Pay has no software fee on Ramp Free, charges $0.59 per ACH and $1.99 per check from an outside bank and waives eligible fees when you pay from a Ramp checking account; line-item coding and three-way match sit on Ramp Plus at $15 per user a month plus a platform fee. QuickBooks Bill Pay Basic is $0 with free standard ACH, Premium is $15 a month and Elite, the only tier with bill approval workflows and payment release approval, is $45 a month or included with QuickBooks Online Advanced. Checks are $1.50. Intuit's pricing page footnote adds that standard ACH over monthly allotments costs $0.50 and allotments may vary. Rho charges no subscription, no per-user fee and nothing for ACH, wires or checks, but its Bill Pay runs on a Rho checking account. Tipalti starts at $99 a month with unlimited users plus transaction pricing it does not publish, and Stampli publishes no price at all.

What pushes the bill up is almost never the headline. It is per-user pricing on a team with many approvers, checks you still have to mail, faster payment fees, the ERP connector, and the plan jump you need for approval workflows. On QuickBooks Bill Pay the jump from Basic to Elite is $540 a year just to get approvals. On BILL, moving from Essentials to Team to get automatic sync adds $192 per user a year.

Expenditure sits on the other side of that line, and we want to be precise about it. We do not pay bills and we never move or hold your money. We read each invoice and receipt at line level, code every line to the right QuickBooks Online, Xero or NetSuite account, check it against your policy and route it for approval, then sync the approved record to your ledger. You keep paying vendors from your bank or from whichever bill pay tool above has the cheapest payment for your mix. Plans are $20, $35 or $55 per seat a month billed yearly, from three seats, and approvals start on Growth, so three Growth seats cost $1,260 a year. That is more than Ramp Free or Rho, and we say so. Buyers pick us when the bottleneck is invoices sitting uncoded or stuck in someone's inbox, not the cost of the ACH, or when they will not move banking or card spend to a new provider to make the software free. It is software and insight, not financial, tax or accounting advice.