How Viewpost Serves Bank Of America’s SMB Side

When it comes to running a business day-to-day, there’s one aspect that can prove challenging to any small business owner: cash management and electronic invoicing management.

That’s where Viewpost’s solution comes into play.

Viewpost, a creator of a secure B2B network that provides electronic invoicing and payments tools for businesses of all sizes, has recently secured a relationship with Bank of America that brings Viewpost’s time-saving technology to their small business clients across the country.

Will Barr, Executive for Small Business Deposits for Bank of America, explained that what this relationship does is ensure the bank refers its small business customers to Viewpost to serve their electronic invoicing needs. From their perspective — and their customer’s — the biggest hurdle has also been ensuring their cash flow is managed in a way that ensures they are getting paid on time. And most importantly, that they can track the flow of those invoices.

Having the ability to track and manage those invoices in one place is what made Viewpost the right company to work with Bank of America and its small business side.

“The Viewpost solution will give our customers the ability to see when and how much they are going to be paid. Understanding when they are going to be paid is critical to a small business owner. This will allow them to do that. The capabilities will give them the freedom to manage and pay their bills anywhere and anytime,” Barr said.

Viewpost’s team understands, as they explained in an interview with PYMNTS, “one of the biggest challenges small businesses face when it comes to managing their cash flow is getting paid.” But Viewpost makes that hurdle easier by helping those businesses ditch the paper checks and innovate their system toward one that involves faster payments.

This, in turn, gives them the ability to manage cash flow better. On Viewpost, business owners can send and receive invoices and payments electronically, track the status of transactions online and on the go, while securely integrating payment data between banks, suppliers, buyers and their own business.

“What happens to small business is they get real-time cash-flow management that they’ve never been able to get to in the past,” said Tanya Plotnikoff, EVP Chief Experience Officer at Viewpost. 

And by integrating Viewpost’s network, Bank of America is able to provide their small business clients with the peace of mind that they can know the statuses of their invoices, when they are getting paid and when that money is ending up in their accounts. By providing the electronic invoicing, payments and cash-flow management for Bank of America’s small business customers, it also helps create efficiency and lowers the cost of doing business.

And the best part? It comes at a free cost to those customers.

The first phase of the relationship between Bank of America and Viewpost is underway, and plans are in place to have the second part of the integration roll out in late 2016. This includes the ability to streamline the online banking experience for those small business customers.

Viewpost also recently launched a mobile app for small business owners who want to manage invoicing on the go.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Max Eliscu, founder and chief executive officer of Viewpost, said that sophisticated invoicing systems that are nonetheless “easy to use should not be only available to bigger companies with millions of dollars at their disposal,” adding that for smaller companies, especially in the case of, say, smaller proprietorships, paying a service for invoicing capability may be a stretch “if they have to pay $20, $40 or $90 a month to deliver PDFs” or a pictorial form of an invoice. “In that case,” he noted, “the only alternative is an invoice that is done on paper,” with all the inefficiencies that entails.

By offering Viewpost Invoice entirely free, said Eliscu, the wheels are set in motion to help SMBs accelerate getting rid of paper and improve connectivity with their trading partners, while electronic payments, of course, help cash flow; through the Viewpost payments offering, funds move the same day. Generally speaking, said Eliscu, the push toward faster invoicing and electronic payments can help shave the cash cycle by at least several days.