Melio Reviews

Melio's primary goal as a B2B payment solution is to facilitate making and receiving payments. Since 2018, the company has processed over $100 billion in payments, more than $40 million in bills, and roughly 2 million paid vendors.

Most of the time, small businesses must process and manage all their bills manually, which can quickly become tedious and lead to financial inefficiency. However, Melio provides plenty of features to simplify and enhance your business’s payment operations.

Melio helps businesses by offering:

• Easy vendor and supplier payment.
• Advanced bill management.
• Multiple payment options, including international.
• Integrations with accounting software.

After signing up, the first access to Melio starts with a setup sequence that requires you to provide basic information about your business and yourself. When you finish these steps, you get access to the platform, where you should finish adding more detailed information in the settings window. This includes filling out the company’s legal information, tax details, and logo.

Following that, you can take advantage of Melio's user and role management tools to add more users to the platform with four different permissions. However, each added user increases your monthly subscription price.

Melio works with ACH bank transfers and credit and debit cards, supporting American Express, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover. Connecting a bank account to Melio is processed by Plaid, which offers an instant connection option, only taking one or two minutes to complete. Alternatively, you can choose manual connection, which takes one to two days, or connect with micro-deposits, which takes up to three.

It’s also possible to assign a default payment method for each vendor. If you don’t know how they want to be paid, you can choose to send the recipient an email notification with a link to choose their preferred method. In essence, Melio acts as an intermediary between you and the vendor or supplier, allowing all parties to use the more convenient payment method.

• ACH bank transfer.
• Fast ACH bank transfer.
• Instant payment to bank account.
• Fast payment to bank account.
• Paper check.
• Fast paper check.
• International payments in multiple currencies.
• Single-use virtual card.
• Debit card.

That said, despite offering vendors various options to get paid, their availability depends on the specifics of their banks. Plus, there are different fees for each option, which also change depending on your subscription.

Even though Melio is best suited to domestic payments, it does support international payments. In fact, it allows you to pay vendors in 17 different currencies and over 80 countries.

While this isn’t exactly full-fledged worldwide support, small and medium businesses often scale up and conduct business overseas. In those cases, you won’t need to change your payment gateway.

Adding and managing vendors with Melio is pretty straightforward. The vendor’s information includes its business name, contact name, email, and phone number. Whenever information changes, you can also easily update it.

We appreciated that you can submit any vendor as a 1099 contractor, and there are two options for doing so. You can use Melio's platform to directly send vendors an electronic W-9 form for filling out and submitting or simply upload the document after you’ve collected it yourself. However, the first option is a paid feature and consists of syncing Melio with Zenwork 1099s.

Payments can be made without bills, after adding a bill, or for existing bills on the platform. Fortunately, there are plenty of shortcuts to make payments.

Much like the vendor’s tab, the bills tab offers an overview of all your bills with relevant details like bill number, creation date, due date, status, and amount. Plus, there’s a dropdown menu that lets you quickly view, edit, delete, pay, or mark the bill as paid.

We love that you can import multiple bills at once in different ways. This includes manually uploading documents or sending them to a designated email (provided by Melio) or automatically connecting them to your Amazon business, Gmail inbox, or accounting software.

When creating a bill, you can either fill out the form manually or automatically using Melio's invoice scan after uploading the file. This feature worked really well when we tested it against several different invoice templates, making it a lifesaver when it comes to saving time on ‘copy-pasting’ tasks.

The bill details include bill amount, invoice number and date, due date, custom notes, and payment frequency. While it’s possible to add more line items to bills for more transparency and expense control, that option is a paid feature. After completing the bill form successfully, you can then make the payment right away or save it.

Fortunately, Melio lets you select multiple bills and pay them in batches or combine all the invoices from a single vendor into one, helping you save precious time.

Melio also offers automation features, which definitely should be highlighted. There’s a multi-level workflow builder where you can customize payment automation according to your specific desired criteria, including payment amount, vendor, and user role. For example, this lets you control payments above a certain amount, requiring your approval before scheduling them.

The fact that you can schedule payments only adds to the platform’s richness. For that, you only need to select the payment frequency in the bill data. Several options are available, such as first payment date, end date, and number of payments to be made.

Melio is not only about sending money – it’s also about getting paid. In this case, you can set up a custom URL for your payment page. Then, you have to either add invoices manually (with support for multiple at once), via a connected accounting software, or ask the customer to add the invoice details themselves.

After choosing this, you can then send the payment request by adding the recipient’s email with the option for writing a custom note. That said, you can make things even easier if you’re working with recurrent customers by adding their information to the customer’s tab before making the request.

We loved how simple it is to track payment requests. Melio offers two ways to monitor payments: via email or on the platform. In the email you receive, you get information on when the payment was scheduled and sent and an estimated delivery time.

Within the platform, you can access a little bit more data, including the invoice upload date, schedule date, if the payment was processed, and if it was successfully paid.

Generating reports is crucial for any business to ensure efficient financial oversight. While Melio offers an intuitive dashboard with different metrics across the platform, its reporting capabilities are limited to exporting a CSV file with payment history data. We’d love to see this feature upgraded in the future to match all the other excellent tools this service offers.

Melio offers three main integration options with accounting software: Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop, and Xero. While all of them are popular accounting solutions, this limits the range of flexibility for established businesses working with different alternatives, such as FreshBooks and Sage.

Regarding this service’s secondary integration options, it integrates your Amazon business or Gmail accounts to fetch your invoices automatically. Considering the options available, we think Melio is the best solution for newly founded small businesses or those working with compatible accounting software.

Melio offers transparent pricing options, starting with a free plan limited to one user. Although it doesn’t unlock this service’s full potential, it’s an excellent option for those with basic payment needs looking for a quick, zero-cost way to handle them.

The service’s paid plans start at $19 per month with an annual subscription for the Core plan. This is the company’s mid-tier plan, offering premium payment options, scheduling, and comprehensive workflows.

Its most expensive plan is $41 per month and offers all the premium features, such as advanced workflows and more integration possibilities. It’s important to mention that these are the base prices for each subscription.

The final monthly price varies according to the number of users on the platform and the different fees associated with payments. Since each subscription offers different fees, we recommend you check them before purchasing.

Melio is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a solution with a good price-to-feature ratio. Businesses needing premium features can take advantage of Melio's 30-day free trial for all paid subscriptions, and discounts of up to 25%.

For contacting customer support, Melio offers an email contact form and live chat available on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST (excluding holidays). Even though it lacks 24/7 customer support, our experience with its chat support was outstanding – an agent replied in less than two minutes.

In addition, the general customer consensus is favorable, with most of them praising the company’s promptness in solving issues. Those who’d like to keep in touch with the company’s latest news can follow Melio's socials on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.

While its integration options and reporting capabilities are limited, most small businesses won’t be as impacted as established ones, which often require more integration support and advanced analytics. Melio also supports international payments, but it isn’t as expansive as other global payment solutions.

With a free version, a 30-day free trial for paid subscriptions, recurrent discounts, and prices starting at $19 per month, small businesses on a budget can start processing payments without a hassle right away.