Virtual payment runs. The future of business payments.

What are virtual payment runs?

Virtual payment runs allow you to create a list of payments outside of a bank account. These payments can be shared and collaborated upon by multiple parties (for example, an external bookkeeper can share this with a business owner). They can then be pushed via an API directly to a bank to initiate payment. It’s a simple solution to save you time and improve payment accuracy.

How do virtual payment runs work?

All the information regarding your business payments is already right there in your accounting software — the bills you owe, the supplier details, the amounts due. But, to actually make payments, you have to manually log on to your bank and key in every single payment one by one.

And it doesn’t end there. Once you have made the payments, you go back into your accounting platform and mark each invoice as paid. This whole process becomes even slower if multiple people are involved, and we’ve seen finance teams lose entire days to this.

Now, what if there was a way to remove 90% of this workload and streamline the whole process? I’d bet you’d be intrigued.

Well, Comma and virtual payment runs do just that. Virtual payment runs are designed to ditch the unnecessary steps by connecting your accounting data to your business bank account and automating steps.

This means, for example, you can select the bills you want to pay from your Xero account, share them with a colleague and approve everything before anyone even needs to log into a bank account. When everything is ready and approved, the list of payments can be initiated with a click via open banking, meaning you don’t have to key in anything to the bank again.

Because we connect your accounting software and bank, Comma updates your accounting software to show they’ve been paid, so you don’t have to! The same process, but in a fraction of the time.

I’m used to spreadsheets…

Virtual payment runs are easy to get used to, simple to use, and help protect against user error.

They help keep things up-to-date, so you can get out of an email chain spiral. Got a payment in the run that you don’t want to make just yet? Simply remove it from the payment run. Changed the invoice amount? Comma automatically updates this from the accounting system. They’re collaborative and always in sync.

Plus, unlike emailed spreadsheets, Comma payment runs are only accessible if you have a login to the organisation. That means, only people you invite to your company on Comma can see the data.

How can I work in tandem with a teammate?

Take Alice and Bob for example. Alice the bookkeeper has access to Comma but not the business bank account. Bob the business owner has access to Comma and also to the company bank account. Alice puts together a list of payments and sends it to Bob. Bob reviews and pays this in bulk by logging into the bank account. Teamwork!

What about payroll, that’s not stored in our system?

You can add any extra payments you like inside Comma. We have both a CSV upload option and an individual bill creation. These can be used for any extra payments that don’t normally go into your accounting software. We love to use it for our payroll upload! You can also check out how this works with our guide here.

Any questions? The team would love to hear from you!
Reach out to hello@usecomma.com