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What it actually costs to pay your vendors

Sam Neal, CPA · October 29, 2026

Prices checked October 2026.

Every bill pay system has a fee page: so much per ACH, per check, per wire. We compared seven of them, plus paying straight from a Chase business account. The fees are worth knowing, but they’re not where most companies lose money. The bigger cost is whether your bill pay system talks to the system where your bills are entered and approved.

Want the numbers on one page? Get the PDF summary with the full fee table.

Start with where your bills get approved

In our experience, there are two common setups.

Approval happens in your ERP. Bills are entered, matched to the PO and receipt, and approved there. Once a bill is approved, it syncs or exports into the bill pay system, which mostly just sends the money. Here, what you need is a clean sync, both ways: approved bills come in without re-typing, and payments flow back so the bill shows as paid.

There’s no ERP approval step. Bills go straight into the bill pay system, and that’s where they get reviewed, approved, and paid. Here, the bill pay system is your control, so its approvals and audit trail matter most.

What the fees look like

We priced QuickBooks Online Bill Pay, Ramp, BILL, Melio, MakersHub, Adaptive, Stampli, and a Chase business checking account, using each one’s own pricing pages. A few things stood out:

  • For a month of 250 bills, payment fees ran from $0 (Ramp, paid from a Ramp checking account) to about $430 (BILL’s Team plan). Most options landed between $260 and $360.
  • QuickBooks Online Bill Pay sends standard ACH for free, but its Bill Pay pages don’t list wires, international payments, or card payments. Those go through your bank.
  • Card fees usually land on you. At BILL and Melio, paying a vendor with your credit card costs you 2.9%.
  • Paying straight from the bank costs about the same as the bill pay tools. But QuickBooks only sees the withdrawal, not which bill it paid.
  • A lot of pricing isn’t published. MakersHub, Adaptive, and Stampli don’t list all their fees, and none of the systems publish their exchange-rate markup on foreign payments.

We also looked for a bill pay tool built for modular companies. We didn’t find one. Several have construction pages, but none mention modular.

Get the one-page summary

The full fee table for all eight options, the 250-bill sample month, and what to check before you choose, on one page you can print or send to whoever signs off on software.

Get the one-page summary

The fee table, the sample month, and what to look for, on one page you can print or forward. Tell me who you are and the PDF is on the next page.

No newsletter, no drip sequence. I may follow up once to ask which system you're on.

The real cost: systems that don’t talk to each other

The fee difference between the cheapest and most expensive option was a few hundred dollars a month. Here’s what costs more:

  • Re-keying. If approved bills don’t flow into the bill pay system, someone types them in twice. At a few minutes a bill and 250 bills a month, that’s a big part of someone’s week.
  • Broken syncs. A sync that fails quietly means payments go out that your books don’t show, or bills show open after they’re paid. Someone finds and fixes each one at month-end.
  • Payments that don’t tie back. If a payment doesn’t link to its bill, and the bill doesn’t link to the PO and receipt, you can’t easily answer "what did we pay for this?"
  • Duplicate payments. Two systems with two copies of the same bill is how one invoice gets paid twice.

A quick way to size it: hours spent re-keying and fixing syncs each month, times what that person costs per hour. If that’s bigger than the fee difference between two tools, fees aren’t what you should be choosing on.

How to choose

  1. Start with where bills get approved. If it’s your ERP, pick the bill pay system that syncs best with it. If not, pick one whose approvals you trust.
  2. Check the sync on the plan you’d actually buy. Several tools only sync automatically on higher tiers.
  3. Then compare fees using your own monthly mix of ACH payments, checks, wires, and international payments.
  4. Ask for quotes where prices aren’t published, especially exchange-rate markups.

Where we fit

Our Outsourced AP service works inside the systems you already use. We enter purchase invoices in your ERP matched to POs and receipts, and prep payments in whatever bill pay system you run. You approve and release them. If the handoff between the two is costing your team hours, that’s one of the first things we’ll look at. Book 15 minutes and bring your monthly payment counts.

References

Prices and features checked October 29, 2026, on each vendor’s own pages.

Four Accounting: accounting for modular construction companies

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