Positive pay with Bill.com (BILL)
Positive pay is a fraud control your bank runs against your account. You send the bank a list of every check you issued (check number, amount, date, and account), and the bank holds any check that does not match for your review. The piece that trips people up with Bill.com (now branded BILL) is figuring out which payments positive pay even applies to, because BILL does not always draw checks on your account.
This page explains the distinction, then walks through exporting your check data from BILL and turning it into the file your bank wants.
First, know which checks positive pay covers
BILL pays vendors in a few ways, and they are not all the same for positive pay purposes.
- BILL prints and mails the check. When BILL cuts a paper check for you, that check is drawn on BILL's own bank account, not yours. BILL debits your bank account in a lump sum for the day's payments, then issues checks from its account. Your account number never appears on the check. Because the check does not clear your account as a check, your bank's positive pay service has nothing to match it against. These payments are generally outside your positive pay file.
- You print the check yourself. If you mark a bill as paid in BILL and then print the actual check from QuickBooks or another system on your own bank account, that check clears your account and does belong in your positive pay file.
- ACH and card payments. Electronic payments are not checks and are not part of positive pay. Some banks offer a separate "ACH positive pay" or ACH debit filter, which is a different product.
So before you build any file, confirm how the payment leaves your account. A quick test: look at a cleared item in your bank statement. If the payee's check cleared as a check drawn on your account number, positive pay applies. If BILL debited you in a daily lump sum, those individual checks are BILL's, not yours.
One more wrinkle worth checking with your bank. BILL sequences check numbers across its whole platform, so the numbers on BILL-printed checks are not sequential within your account and may collide with the numbering of checks you print yourself. If you run both, keep separate number ranges so your positive pay file stays clean.
Exporting check and payment data from BILL
For the checks that do belong in your positive pay file, BILL gives you the raw data through its reporting and export tools. You need a user role with the right permissions (managing the relevant records, and sync/export rights) to pull these.
- Bill Payments report. Under the Reports tab, run a report that lists bill payments. It includes the payment date, vendor, amount, and check number. This is the cleanest source for check-by-check detail.
- Export the Payments tab. From the Vendor Bills and Payments area you can export transactions to a CSV file, either with default filters or with a date range and filters you set. The export carries vendor name, payment amount, check number, and check date.
Whichever you use, the goal is the same: a spreadsheet with one row per check, containing at minimum the check number, the dollar amount, the issue date, and the account number the check is drawn on. Trim rows for ACH, card, and BILL-printed checks so you are left only with checks that hit your own account.
Turning the export into your bank's file
Your bank does not accept a raw BILL export. It wants a positive pay file in its own layout, often a fixed-width or CSV file with the fields in a specific order, sometimes with a header and trailer record. Banks publish that spec through their treasury or business-banking portal, and the exact column positions vary from bank to bank. We do not guess at any bank's layout; match the one your bank documents, which you will usually find in the positive pay or "check issue" section of your treasury platform, or by asking your treasury contact.
QuickBooks, by the way, cannot export a positive pay file natively, so if BILL syncs payments into QuickBooks you still have a conversion step either way.
That conversion is what PositivePayMaker does. It is a free, browser-based tool: you drop in the CSV or Excel export from BILL, map your columns (check number, amount, date, account) to the bank's fields, and it produces the upload file. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the check data never leaves your computer. It ships with 11 bank layouts (six built from published specifications, including Chase and Huntington), plus a custom format builder for any layout you need to match and a validator to sanity-check a file before you send it.
Paid alternatives, and when they make sense
If you would rather not map columns yourself, a few paid desktop tools handle BILL or QuickBooks data:
- Big Red Consulting PositivePay File Creator runs about $119 the first year and $99 a year after. It is Windows-only, and the QuickBooks Online edition needs Excel installed.
- Treasury Software Bank Positive Pay is an installed Windows product, roughly $29.95 to $89.95 per month depending on tier, with 350-plus prebuilt bank layouts. It tends to suit higher-volume shops or accounting firms juggling many banks.
- MoneyThumb and ProperSoft sell paid desktop converters that can reformat transaction exports as well.
For most small businesses paying through BILL and printing the occasional check, the conversion is light enough that a free in-browser tool covers it. If you are producing files daily across several bank accounts, a paid tool with a saved profile per bank may save time.
Always test the first file
Before you rely on any process, send one real file to your bank and confirm it loads without errors and matches the checks you actually issued. Field widths, date formats, and the void/issue flag are the usual sticking points, and they are far easier to fix on a test file than on a rejected production upload. After the first clean file, the rest is repetition.
If you want to see the format your bank expects laid out plainly, read our positive pay file format reference next.