Symple Is Aiming To Get Small Businesses To Embrace Digital Payments

Small businesses across the U.S. may have been slow to embrace digital payments, still preferring paper checks to remit and accept B2B payments, but startup Symple is aiming to change that.

The company, which is part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch of startups, is billing itself as the Venmo for businesses, reported TechCrunch.

According to the report, with Symple, a business takes a picture of an invoice and sends it to Symple, which then determines the amount, due date and other information and notifies whoever is in charge of the budget that there is a pending payment. After one click, Symple remits a payment directly to the vendor’s bank account, noted the report. Steve Abraham, cofounder of Symple, told TechCrunch that vendors have been open to signing up because it will increase the “speed and reliability of their accounts receivables.”

In addition to helping small businesses with their payments and billing, Symple also comes with analytics built in, including a dashboard to track payments, upcoming and overdue bills and even provides the main categories over time that the business spends the most money. Symple is focused on signing on restaurants and bars largely because that industry has a lot of invoices to pay on a weekly basis. Over the long run, Symple plans to expand into other markets with the aim of becoming the online payment platform for all business-to-business transactions.

Symple’s service is free to make and receive payments online, as well as to manage invoices. The company is gearing up to roll out a premium service that will offer more accounting features, such as integrating directly with QuickBooks. That will cost as much as $150 a month, noted the report.