Why Bluevine is the best cash flow management platform for small businesses

Managing cash flow involves tracking where your cash is coming from, controlling spend across your team, and collecting payments from customers. Bluevine is a business banking platform that consolidates and automates these financial tasks. Instead of juggling multiple financial tools or manually moving money between accounts, you can manage much of your business’s financial operations from a single platform. 

Below, we’ll explore how Bluevine helps businesses organize cash, automate workflows, and put every dollar to work.

What you need to know

• Bluevine combines business banking, cash flow management, invoicing, and bill payments into one online platform.
• Built-in accounting, payroll, and invoicing tools reduce manual work and improve cash flow visibility, saving you time and money.
• Bluevine offers competitive APY on checking balances, eliminating the need to move money between accounts, simplifying cash flow management even further.^BVSUP-00166

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What to look for in a business cash management platform

Cash management is the process of organizing, controlling, moving, and maximizing your business’s cash. That can involve much more than sending and receiving payments, and growing businesses may find that manual cash management can quickly scale out of control. 

By providing the following capabilities inside a single banking platform, Bluevine keeps cash flow management under control as you grow:

• Organize money for different business purposes
• Automate recurring transfers between your main account and sub-accounts
• Automate recurring external transfers and bill payments
• Control employee spending
• Reconcile accounting records
• Process incoming customer payments
• Earn interest on checking balances^BVSUP-00166

The result is less manual work, greater visibility into cash flows, and more control over how money moves throughout your business.

Organize your business finances with sub-accounts

One of Bluevine’s most broadly useful cash flow management features is the ability to create up to 50 sub-accounts, each with its own unique account number. This way, instead of drawing all operating funds from one account, you can pre-emptively budget funds according to their purpose.

For example, you could create dedicated sub-accounts for:

• Profit
• Payroll
• Owner’s pay
• Tax savings
• Operating expenses
• Marketing campaigns
• Equipment leases or purchases
• Project-specific funds
• Emergency reserves

In fact, many businesses use Bluevine to proactively set aside profit and streamline cash flow. With the right combination of sub-accounts and automatic transfer rules, you can boost your business profitability and make sure the right amount of money is distributed across expenses, payroll, tax reserves, and more—without lifting a finger.

Automate your cash flow management

By setting up automatic transfer rules for apportioning revenue into sub-accounts, your Bluevine account makes cash management significantly easier. You don’t have to worry that your tax payments will impact your ability to meet payroll, because the funds for each expense have been automatically separated into different sub-accounts. Your budget has become part of your financial operations, with no recurring manual work necessary.

Control team spending with additional debit cards

Instead of sharing one company card with your employees or dealing with unnecessary expense reimbursements, Bluevine supports issuing up to 50 physical and virtual debit cards. You can customize daily or monthly spending controls per card, for different departments, projects, or individual employees.^BVSUP-00076

These cards can be connected to a specific sub-account, which allows you to silo employee spending based on your designated budgets. Common use cases for additional debit cards include:

• Marketing cards with campaign budgets
• Purchasing cards for inventory buyers
• Travel cards for sales teams
• Project-specific cards tied to dedicated budgets
• Operations cards funded through departmental sub-accounts

Send payments the way you want

Since payment needs vary by industry and your individual business—as well as your vendor’s payment terms—Bluevine supports multiple payment methods. All the options below are conveniently built directly into your Bluevine Business Checking dashboard.

Having multiple payment options at your disposal helps you balance speed, cost, and convenience without juggling multiple banking and payment platforms. Whether you’re paying suppliers, sending payroll, or transferring funds internally, your payment workflows remain centralized with Bluevine.

Keep your accounting up to date automatically

Reconciliation is time-consuming for many small businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. Bluevine can reduce that burden in multiple ways: two-way synchronization with QuickBooks Online,^BVSUP-00056 or other integrations with Xero, Wave, and Expensify.

Any of these methods allows you to automatically reconcile financial information between your checking account and accounting books. That can help your business:

• Spend less time on bookkeeping and reduce manual data entry
• Improve transaction accuracy and eliminate manual errors
• Automate monthly reconciliation so your books always line up
• Maintain clear financial records

Simplify payroll management

Payroll is one of the largest recurring expenses for many small businesses, and it requires consistent, on-time funding.

Bluevine integrates with payroll providers like Gusto, making it easier to coordinate payroll processing with your business checking activity. When combined with a dedicated payroll sub-account and automated transfer rules, you can set up an automatic payroll workflow.

Streamline invoicing and get paid faster

Getting paid on-time is essential for healthy cash flow, as it directly impacts your ability to pay your employees, send timely payments to vendors, and cover necessary expenses.

In fact, a Bluevine survey found that 28% of small businesses have $5,000 or more tied up in unpaid invoices—and nearly 1 in 3 owners have delayed paying themselves as a result.

To help you combat this unfortunate reality, Bluevine provides built-in accounts receivable tools that make sending invoices and accepting customer payments as easy as possible. These include:

• Estimates for your customers to review, which can be turned into invoices once approved
• Professional invoices with your business logo
• Payment links for seamless customer payments
• Tap to Pay for quick in-person transactions, right in your Bluevine app^BVSUP-00192

For example, you can create invoices directly from your dashboard and send them to customers however you’d like. You can also enable payment processing, powered by Stripe, to allow customers to pay you directly through the invoice.^BVSUP-00180

Then, your customers can choose their preferred payment option, including credit card and digital wallet. This creates a smoother payment experience for customers, which ultimately reduces the time you spend chasing unpaid invoices to close cash flow gaps.

Did you know?

Stripe-enabled invoices through Bluevine help businesses get paid 174% faster than traditional invoice methods. In fact, traditional invoicing methods are typically paid within 18 days on average, while Stripe-enabled Bluevine invoices are usually paid within 7 days.

Explore invoicing and more with Bluevine

Earn high APY on checking balances

Traditional business banking often forces owners to choose whether they want their funds liquid or interest-bearing. Small business owners, 39% of whom have less than a month of cash on hand, often don’t have the luxury of moving funds to a savings or investment account to earn higher yields. 

Bluevine solves this problem by offering high-yield interest on checking balances. In fact, businesses can earn up to 3.0% APY on Bluevine Business Checking balances across main and sub-accounts.^BVSUP-00166

That means your operating balances can continue working without constantly transferring between multiple accounts.

Boost earnings on idle cash with Treasury

Even higher yields are available if you open a Bluevine Treasury account. Bluevine Premier plan customers get instant access to Treasury, which allows you to get more from your cash with returns on a mix of conservative and higher-risk institutional funds.

Standard and Plus checking plan customers can also access Treasury if they maintain a $50,000 balance in their Bluevine Business Checking account.^BVSUP-00129 

If you qualify, you simply need to apply for a Treasury account from your dashboard to activate it, then you’ll be able to set up your portfolio preferences.

Access multiple types of business loans via one application

According to Bluevine’s small business financing survey, 75% of owners have tapped their personal credit cards to cover business expenses in the past year. Unfortunately for many, mixing personal and business finances can lead to messy consequences like increased personal credit utilization, missed mortgage or bill payments, and lower personal credit scores.

To help cover small business cash flow needs, Bluevine allows you to apply for multiple forms of business financing through a single application. Depending on your eligibility, you may receive an offer for:

• A Bluevine Line of Credit up to $250,000, with approved draws available instantly in your Bluevine Business Checking account^BVSUP-00127
• A line of credit or term loan up to $500,000 from one of our lending partners^BVSUP-00151

A business line of credit is typically the better choice for recurring or unpredictable cash flow needs, while a term loan is often better for large one-time purchases. By using Bluevine’s simple business loan application, you won’t have to navigate multiple lender websites or applications—or field unsolicited lending offers—to get the funding type that’s right for your business.

Consolidate your financial workflows in one platform

Cash flow management is most effective when your financial tools work together instead of being separated across platforms and accounts.

Bluevine consolidates your banking, budgeting, payments, invoicing, accounting, financing, and payroll workflows into a single digital platform, so you can do all your business banking and financing from one place—and spend less time managing your money and more time running your business.

Join the largest small business banking platform in the U.S.^BVSUP-00186

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