Bill.com Quietly Decided to Divert Customer Funds To Unwanted Bank Accounts
Just received a very strange email from Bill.com:

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Hello,

We wanted to let you know that as of March 21st, 2022 we enabled a new feature called Bill.com balance for your account. We apologize for not communicating this ahead of time which is our standard practice.

This new Bill.com balance capability enables you to pre-fund your Bill.com account, store funds for payment flexibility, and enable faster payment delivery times with no additional fees.

It’s important to note that this change means that as of March 21st all payments received through Bill.com are automatically routed to your Bill.com balance instead of your connected bank accounts. As long as Bill.com balance is activated, the funds will continue to be routed this way.

To withdraw funds from your Bill.com balance:

From the Overview section of your Bill.com account, select Manage Balance
In the Manage Balance section, select the three dots, then select Withdraw Money
Enter the amount you want to withdraw in the Amount field, choose which connected account you want to withdraw the money to, and select the Withdraw button
Withdrawals initiated by 5pm pacific time will lead to funds being available next business day by 10am pacific time
Once you’ve withdrawn all funds from your Bill.com balance, you can also choose to turn the feature off.

To turn Bill.com balance off:

In your Bill.com account, select Settings, then select Bank & Payment Accounts, then select Bill.com balance
Select the Turn off button
Questions? Learn more about Bill.com balance or contact us by clicking HERE. We’re here to help.

Thank you,
The Bill.com Team

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This seems genuinely crazy. Like without warning, without prior opt-in authorization, a company that's responsible for vast amounts of business to business payments, made the call that it was OK to, just, not actually send money onwards to their customers? Not as a feature they enabled, or even something that's a little aggressively pitched, they just silently did it.

So a customer of yours decides to send you money, and they thought they'd sent it to you, but instead it never got to you, your payment intermediary just held it in some kind of new payments account they decided to assign in your name without even getting your permission. And without telling you.

After receiving this email I just went into my Bill.com account where I discovered a six figure balance that they just decided not to give me and didn't tell me about (even now, this email doesn't say that. I had to go look) and I certainly never gave them permission to do that. Even when looking at this balance, the button to withdraw money is hidden.

Like they aren't making it clear they unilaterally decided to keep enough money for me to buy a house in a quasi-bank account I never opened and don't fucking want. And I have customers that paid me that I assumed had not paid me who had. I have an A/R person emailing client statements asking them for overdue payment when they actually did pay me last month.

It's absolutely appalling, I'm sort of speechless. Wondering if anyone else experienced this or has any personal knowledge of what's going on and what severely misguided executive decided this was OK.