Bill.com is opening the data behind the business with a new application platform powered by open APIs for third-party developers. The new platform allows developers to integrate native apps with Bill.com’s software so finance professionals can access more information from individual customer transactions in real time.

The new application platform gives third-party developers access to Bill.com’s open APIs for abstracting the paper and all the manual tasks that come with managing different forms of transactions. Bill payment, invoicing, cash management and the associated integrations that come with Bill.com are now available with third-party apps. Developers may then offer the integrations on a marketplace managed by Bill.com.

The new integration includes Bill.com’s sync feature, which uses real-time data to help finance professionals to quickly find discrepancies and make quick decisions based on the immediacy of the information that they now have.

René Lacerte, founder and CEO of Bill.com, said they initially began using the API internally to connect Netsuite, Peachtree and Quickbooks. They collected the data into their customer and vendor accounting systems so they could see the data behind the transaction. For instance, it meant that someone in finance could see an expense and the reasons behind it.

Xero is integrating the Bill.com API, embedding it into the workflow so the data behind the transaction can be viewed. A P&L document can then have a link back to see the relevant information about the transaction itself.

Lacerte said that 73 percent of finance personnel use a spreadsheet to manage cash flow. But visibility is minimal. With Bill.com’s APIs, a third-party developer can integrate an app to do such things as better manage cash flow. It’s a data-metering capability that finance has traditionally not been able to access.

Bill.com is a modern data workflow company that is building pipes to filter the great pools of data that, until recently, have largely been cemented in spreadsheets, invoices, etc.

Some compare data to oil and the pipes that are used to turn it into any imaginable kind of product that can be produced in a data factory. That’s how I view Bill.com and the ecosystem it is helping to develop.

Intuit and iPayables can be counted as Bill.com competitors. But the toughtest fight of all for Bill.com is companies’ reliance on paper. Its overall success will be in delivering customers data workflows that automate the wasteful manual work so many businesses rely on.

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