 Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. Welcome back here on theCUBE at QuickBooks Connects 2016, we're in San Jose and bringing you coverage throughout these next couple of days about this really vibrant entrepreneurial spirit that's alive here and that QuickBooks is really making happen, enabling on a global basis. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls and we're joined here on the main stage here in a pretty exciting convention center with Rene LaServe, the CEO and founder of bill.com. And Rene, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, good to see you, sir. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. The energy, like you just said, is just so powerful right now. I mean, the accounts, the small businesses, the folks at Intuit, all the apps that are here, everybody just wants to go help make business a little bit easier and it's just kind of fun to feel that energy. So we have CUBE viewers right now saying, okay, bill.com, what do they do? So a business payments business that you started some 10 years ago, tell us a little bit more about your core functions, what you do, and then pivot to the relationship that you have with Intuit and QuickBooks. That sounds great. So the simplest way to describe it is that we dramatically simplify how businesses pay their bills and get paid by their customers. So I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Dad had five businesses, granddad had seven. Always heard that cash was king, stretch out the payables. When I started my first company, the day-to-day was hard. And I was trying to figure out which bills I would not pay. And what I found was lacking was the ability to kind of track all of my documents, all of my payments, all of the interactions with my employees. All of that was lacking in the ability to kind of track it from anywhere. So I always had to go back to the office. And so what we do at bill.com is we give customers the ability to store all their bills, to route those bills for approval, make those payments electronically, track those payments, be able to interact with your vendors, and we do the same thing on their receivable side. So our customers have the ability to kind of have their back office and their back pocket is the way I like to talk about it. So I can be anywhere. I can be in a taxicab in New York City. I can pull up a customer. I can pull up a vendor. I can look at the source contract. I can make a payment. I can ask for a payment. All of that can do for my phone and it integrates seamlessly with the accounting package, QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop. And so now about the relationship then. I mean, what was the genesis of that? And then where are you today? You've had some news that you've made here recently. Yeah, so, you know, we've... I've been, I used to work out into it in the mid 90s. And so I've known a lot of the folks that into it. When they started their app platform, you know, maybe six or seven years ago, we were one of the first apps to kind of go on to the platform. And so we've always had a very strong developer relationship between the two companies, just helping us develop integrations into what our customers use for their accounting solution and helping them understand how to extend their platform. And so when they, you know, kind of started looking at this in the last year, they started thinking there are some pretty interesting things that they wanted to build into the core QuickBooks Online platform. And those things would be basically, you know, UI and workflow integrations inside of the platform for their partner, their app partners. And so what we've done is what we're in the process of doing is taking all of the workflow, all of the automation that we've built in build.com, and we're embedding that inside of QuickBooks Online. So, QuickBooks Online has 1.1 million US customers today growing to 2.2, I think, over the next year. All of those customers are going to have the ability to be able to get in there and automate the entire payables process. All the source documents and the bills would be automatically routed into QuickBooks Online. No more filing cabinet, no more desks that you're chained to. All that paper just gets routed and tracked in QuickBooks Online through build.com. The ability is to then ask other employees to approve those bills, interact with those employees and say, hey, why is the bill this much? You know, could it be less? All that interaction is going to happen again inside of QuickBooks Online through build.com. And finally, when you go to make that payment, that payment's going to happen online. We have over one, over a million members in our network that use us to pay and get paid. So, that number is growing, doubling every year. So, the ability for our customers through QuickBooks Online to now extend and pay all their vendors electronically is a real possibility, it's something we're excited about. So, it's really a deep integration because one of the problem now, we all have so many SaaS applications that we work with every day and notifications are coming from Eventbrite and email and Slack and text and Salesforce, it just gets bananas. But what you're talking about is really a deep integration in that they stay within the QuickBooks environment online but you're really executing the build.com functionality inside that, we're going to understand you right. Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think that's part of the power. I mean, we are, we and I think the other partner they've announced is T-Sheets, but the first two apps to be embedded from a UI and a workflow perspective. So, if you think about it, the way apps in the past have kind of integrated is just through kind of sharing data. And now they're saying, well, let's share that user experience and that workflow so it becomes more powerful and more known to the customer, something they can actually maybe trust a little bit sooner, brand they may have already known, stuff like that. And so that's part of the power is actually integrating seamlessly inside of the application. Same way we do it with banks. So, we have three of the top 10 banks that we're partnered with and again, we're integrated seamlessly inside of their apps so that they have the ability to kind of go in there and their customers have the ability to kind of have all of their AP and AR integrated into one place. So, you're working on, the problem was getting my money faster and hanging it onto my money longer. Yes, right. To boil it down. Can you show whatever, what's the metric for measurement there in terms of the effectiveness that you've provided a real solution to that problem? Yeah, so the core thing on the payable side, the simplifying the bill payment process, our customers consistently tell us, when we survey them, we get an exact number, right? Something like 58%. But they consistently tell us somewhere between 50 and 75% of the time it takes to process those payments, gone. That's just time back in their life, money in their back pocket, an opportunity for them to go do something very different with that time and think ultimately more strategically about their business which is what our customers tell us that they do. When you have the insight, the reason I kind of started the company was, when dad and granddad would sit at the dinner table talking about you got to stretch out the cash, which vendors are we not going to pay today because we're waiting for this customer over here to pay us, which ones we're going to stretch out. When you make that decision, there's a lot of content that the business owner is actually using to make that decision. They're looking, in the old day, before you had everything, you might have gone and looked at your filing cabinet, but it might be the last time you had a golf game with them or maybe you're going to see them for dinner tomorrow night or whatever it is, all that content is information that's necessary for you to decide who you're not going to pay and when you have all the information in one place, you can make those decisions faster, be more strategic about it, look over all across the business and have the ability to see how can I actually be more efficient and have a better run business and so that time savings of 50 to 75%, huge. 10% of payments today for businesses are made online. You look at, when I was working out into it, 70 billion checks a year were written back then, that's now 21 billion checks a year written. 50 billion checks roughly have come out of the system. All of those are consumer. Of the 21 billion, 19 billion involved businesses, either B2B, B2C or C2B. So businesses are still using paper to actually track and do everything they do and so if we can automate all that and give people time back, that's huge. On the AR side, our customers say that they get paid two times, three times faster. The ability to kind of track all those invoices automatically, have the payments flow automatically, all of that stuff's really important. So where do you go next? Is it a better integration of kind of that softer data or those influencer data that helps the decision maker decide whether I'm paying bill one or bill two? Is it more integration points? What's kind of your roadmap as you look forward? Well, the first thing that, when we think about the problem that we're solving today, I think the number that I think Brad mentioned in the keynote or Sassan mentioned in the keynote was something like 30 million bills a year go through into it. Something like $1.4 trillion a year goes through the QBO economy. And when we look at our payments, we do roughly a million payments a month and over $30 billion a year. So tremendous growth opportunities to kind of just focus on that first. So whenever I'm asked where I go next, it's always like we just need to go help more businesses do what we're doing. When I can bump into people at a party and they can tell me, oh, I just got paid by bill.com or I just got invoiced by bill.com or I use bill.com, any of those three things and they can say how much time it saves them. That's the energy and the motivation, the passion that fuels everybody in the company because we know that everybody is still using filing cabinets. When people ask me what's the competition, it's always the pencil and paper. It's what Scott used to say when I was adding to it. It's always the opportunity to kind of just automate what people are already doing today. So that's the first thing. There's lots of opportunity when we get through all the customer acquisition to do more. It's funny, I remember when B of A first introduced, you could log on to your account and pay a bill. They would even tell you, oh, by the way, we're just going to cut a check. All you were doing was kind of remote check generation. There was nothing really electronic behind the wall. Well, and that's one of the things that, one of the ha's for me was that you have to build a bridge. Technology just doesn't come in and make something happen immediately. There's always a bridge and that's a bridge, right? And so, well, we actually print checks too. When our customers start, 95% of their payments are made via check in the first month. By month six, we get them up to 50%. A year later, they're up to 70% or electronic. Up or down. Electronic. It goes very, very fast, right? And the way we do that is we easily email or we give every customer the opportunity to just add the email address of the vendor where the customer emails go out, people come in, they want to connect and collaborate electronically. And so, that bridge though was important. We have the ability for customers to fax their documents in. Nobody here's talking about faxing anymore, but yeah, we still have probably 25 to 30% of all the documents we receive every month. And it's millions of documents that come into the repository come in via fax. 25 to 30% still come in fax. It's just easy. I have it actually just drop it in here, right? So, can we beat those folks by the way? That's going to say we're buying toner for those machines. Well, and hopefully, you need to have a bridge, right? That's one of the key things I think about. It's a good start. Starting a company, you have to, you always have this vision about where you want to get to, but you have to actually have bridges to get there. People can't just jump and follow you immediately. You have to have the bridge. Well, the thing that is really exciting about your space is that it's about this constant evolution. And if you don't, someone else is going to overrun you. And obviously, bill.com, you've done a great job of that. And adapting with the times and continuing to evolve. So, congratulations on that with your continuing partnership. And thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Well, happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Renee. Back with more here from QuickBooks Connect 2016 on theCUBE in San Jose. And just a pet.