QuickBooks Bill Pay vs. Melio: What You Lost and How to Get Remittance Advice Back

In mid-2024, Intuit made a major change that caught thousands of QuickBooks Online users off guard: the company ended its partnership with Melio and migrated bill payment functionality to its own QuickBooks Bill Pay service. For many users, this transition was not an upgrade. It was a downgrade. And one of the biggest casualties was the ability to send remittance advice to vendors.

If you were using Melio through QuickBooks to pay your vendors and notify them about what was being paid, you woke up one day to find that workflow gone. No warning, no equivalent replacement, and no clear path forward. This article explains exactly what happened, what you lost in the transition, and how to get remittance advice functionality back.

What Was Melio, and Why Did People Like It?

Melio was a third-party bill payment platform that integrated directly with QuickBooks Online. Intuit partnered with Melio starting around 2021, and for a few years, Melio powered the bill payment experience inside QBO. When you clicked "Pay bills" in QuickBooks Online, you were often routed through Melio's payment infrastructure behind the scenes.

Melio was popular for several reasons:

• Free ACH payments. Melio allowed businesses to send ACH payments at no cost, which was a significant draw for small businesses paying vendors electronically.
• Credit card payments to vendors. Melio let you pay vendors with a credit card even if those vendors did not accept cards. Melio handled the conversion, sending the vendor an ACH or check. This let businesses earn credit card rewards on AP spend.
• Payment notifications. When you made a payment through Melio, the vendor received an email notification with details about the payment, including which invoices were being paid. This effectively served as a remittance advice — vendors knew what was coming and could reconcile accordingly.
• Simple, clean interface. Melio's payment flow was straightforward. Select bills, choose a payment method, review, and send. The integration with QBO was tight enough that it felt like a native feature.

For accounts payable teams, that payment notification feature was critical. It was the closest thing QBO users in the US had to built-in remittance advice. Vendors received clear, timely payment details without any extra work on the payer's part.

What Happened: The Melio-to-Bill-Pay Migration

In 2024, Intuit ended its partnership with Melio and rolled out QuickBooks Bill Pay as the replacement. The transition happened in waves — some users were migrated as early as mid-2024, while others were moved later in the year. For most users, the change was not optional. One day Melio was there; the next day it was QuickBooks Bill Pay.

Here is how the transition unfolded:

The migration was not inherently problematic — Intuit bringing bill payments in-house makes business sense. The problem was that QuickBooks Bill Pay launched without feature parity, and one of the most important missing features was the ability to notify vendors about payment details.

What QuickBooks Bill Pay Is Missing

QuickBooks Bill Pay handles the core mechanics of paying bills. You can schedule payments, pay via ACH or check, and track payment status. But when it comes to vendor communication and remittance, there are significant gaps compared to what Melio offered.

The missing remittance advice is the most painful gap for accounts payable operations. Without automatic vendor notifications, every payment you send through QuickBooks Bill Pay lands in your vendor's bank account with no context. The vendor sees the deposit amount but has no idea which invoices it covers, which credits were applied, or what the payment reference is.

This leads to a predictable cascade of problems:

• Vendors cannot reconcile payments. When a vendor receives a $12,847.50 ACH deposit and they have 30 outstanding invoices, they have no way to determine which invoices that payment covers without contacting you.
• Increased inbound inquiries. Your AP team starts fielding calls and emails from vendors asking "what was that payment for?" This creates work for both sides.
• Incorrect vendor statements. When vendors cannot properly apply payments, their statements to you show incorrect balances. You then spend time reconciling statements that should have been accurate in the first place.
• Damaged vendor relationships. Consistent failure to communicate payment details signals disorganization. Vendors notice, and it affects how they prioritize your account.

What the QuickBooks Community Is Saying

The frustration is not theoretical. It is documented across dozens of threads in the QuickBooks Community forums. Here is a sample of what users have been posting since the migration:

• "This is a major need for all AP operations. We need to be able to send remittances to vendors when we make payments."
• "We were moved from Melio to QuickBooks Bill Pay and lost the ability to send payment notifications. This is a huge step backward."
• "I don't understand how you can build a bill payment product and not include remittance advice. This is basic AP functionality."
• "We're now back to manually emailing vendors after every payment run. It's 2024 and this should not be a manual process."

These are not edge cases. The threads have hundreds of views and multiple users echoing the same sentiment. Intuit's own support moderators have acknowledged that remittance advice is not currently available in QuickBooks Bill Pay and have suggested workarounds like exporting reports — the same workarounds that existed before Melio. The partnership with Melio temporarily solved the problem, and when the partnership ended, the problem came back worse than before because users had built workflows that depended on it.

The Manual Workarounds (And Why They Don't Scale)

After the Melio migration, users were left with two manual options for sending remittance advice from QBO. Neither comes close to what Melio provided automatically.

Workaround 1: The Bills and Applied Payments Report

QuickBooks Online has a built-in report called "Bills and Applied Payments" that shows which bills were paid and which payments were applied. You can filter it by vendor, set a date range, export it to Excel or PDF, and then email it manually. The problem is that this report was designed as an internal accounting report, not vendor-facing correspondence. It includes accounting-specific formatting, extra columns your vendor does not need, and requires 5+ manual steps per vendor to extract, format, and send.

Workaround 2: Manual Email After Each Payment

The other approach is simply opening your email client after every payment run and typing out payment details to each vendor. You look up the payment in QBO, note the invoice numbers and amounts, compose an email, and send it. This works for 2-3 vendors. If you are paying 15, 30, or 50 vendors in a batch, it is completely unsustainable.

Both workarounds share the same fundamental problem: they require repetitive manual labor for every single payment. Melio automated this entirely. QuickBooks Bill Pay does not, and the manual alternatives do not scale.

How to Get Remittance Advice Back

The good news is that you do not have to accept the gap. The Remittance Advice app was built specifically to fill this hole in QuickBooks Online — and it predates the Melio migration. The app has been on the Intuit App Marketplace since 2018, serving QBO users who have always needed remittance advice regardless of which bill payment method they use.

Here is what it does:

The app connects to your QuickBooks Online account through Intuit's official OAuth API. It reads your bill payments, vendors, and invoice data in real time — nothing is stored outside of what is needed to generate remittance documents. It is a QuickBooks-certified application that has been listed on the Intuit App Marketplace since 2018.

How It Compares to What You Had with Melio

If your primary concern is restoring the remittance notification workflow you lost when Melio went away, here is how the Remittance Advice app stacks up:

The one difference is timing: Melio sent notifications automatically as part of the payment process, while the Remittance Advice app requires you to select payments and click send after the payment is recorded. This takes about 30 seconds for a single vendor and a couple of minutes for a full batch. In exchange, you get significantly more control over the output — custom branding, format options, credit detail, and the ability to send remittance for any payment method, not just payments processed through a specific service.

Pricing and Getting Started

The Remittance Advice app is $14.99 per month, flat rate. No per-user fees, no per-email charges, no transaction limits. Send 5 remittance emails or 500 — the price is the same.

Every new account gets a free 30-day trial with no credit card required. You can connect your QuickBooks Online account, send remittance advice to your vendors, and evaluate the app fully before spending anything. If it does not work for your workflow, you simply do not continue after the trial.

Conclusion: The Feature Gap Is Real, but It Is Solvable

The Melio-to-QuickBooks Bill Pay transition removed a workflow that thousands of businesses relied on daily. Remittance advice — telling your vendors what you paid and which invoices it covers — is not a nice-to-have feature. It is a fundamental part of accounts payable operations. Without it, vendors cannot reconcile, your AP team fields unnecessary inquiries, and your payment communication looks unprofessional.

Intuit may eventually add remittance advice to QuickBooks Bill Pay. But the QuickBooks Community forums are full of feature requests dating back to 2020 that remain unresolved, so it is not wise to hold your breath. In the meantime, the Remittance Advice app exists specifically to solve this problem. It works with any payment method you record in QBO, it handles batches, it produces clean and professional documents, and it costs less per month than the time your AP team spends on the manual workaround in a single week.

If the Melio migration broke your remittance workflow, you do not have to accept the gap. There is a solution available today.