How to Automate Melio

Melio is where a small business decides how each bill gets paid

Melio is bill-pay software for small businesses in the United States. Bills come in by phone camera, by upload, through a dedicated email address or from a sync with QuickBooks or Xero. The owner then picks how each one is paid: a bank transfer, a paper check that Melio prints and mails, a card payment even to a vendor that does not take cards, or an international payment in the vendor's currency. The vendor needs no Melio account.

Customers can pay the business through Melio too, from its invoices and payment links. Xero completed its purchase of Melio in October 2025, and Melio says it keeps supporting businesses on QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and other software.

The owner schedules and approves payments, a bookkeeper adds the bills, and an outside accountant may run several clients' accounts from Melio's Accountants Dashboard under one login.

Melio debits a check days before the vendor sees it

A check payment is debited from the operating account first and reaches the vendor by mail days later; even Melio's fast check, sent by FedEx, takes three business days. A supplier can phone on Tuesday about money that left the bank the Friday before.

An ACH payment bounces back because the vendor changed banks and never said. Two weeks after mailing, a check still has not been deposited. Melio may take extra time to review a first payment to a new vendor, and the vendor rings to ask why. On the Approvals tab, a payment waits because the owner was on a site visit when the approval email came in.

The bookkeeper picks each of these up between other jobs. They reply to the vendor, look up the trace number, check that a new set of bank details is genuine before anyone types it in, and work out whether next week's debits will clear.

The Notification Center counts failed payments and overdue bills

The bell icon at the top right of Melio opens the Notification Center, which counts failed payments, overdue bills and unpaid bills and, on the Core, Boost and Unlimited plans, payments waiting for an Admin's approval. Each failed payment links to the Payments tab, filtered to failures, where the owner resolves it. Melio emails a reminder 14 days after a check was mailed if nobody has deposited it, and from day 15 the owner can void it and resend the money by ACH or another check, or get it back.

Approval workflows, on Core and above, route payments by amount, by who scheduled them or by vendor, and approvers can clear several at once from the approval email. Agent Mel, an assistant Melio still marks beta, answers from the account's own data, such as which vendors are overdue or what went out yesterday, and takes no action itself.

The vendor asking where the money is writes to the bookkeeper's inbox. New bank details have to come from the vendor and be confirmed by phone before anyone edits the vendor in Melio. Whether the operating account covers next week's debits is a question for the bank's own site and for the customer payments still due in.

A vendor asking where the money is gets the NACHA trace number

The bookkeeper could answer a vendor's email about a missing payment in one message: the payment method, the debit date and, once the payment reads Paid, the NACHA trace number that the vendor's bank uses to find the funds.

A fix list each morning could hold every payment marked Failed, or not delivered by its expected date, each next to its bill and the vendor's latest email. The owner could check the coming week in one place: bills falling due within five days that nobody has scheduled, set against the operating account's balance and the debits already booked.

A check still undeposited at day 14 could come with the vendor's phone number and a short note asking whether it arrived, so the owner decides on day 15 whether to void and resend it. When a vendor emails a new bank account, the bookkeeper calls the number already on file before anyone touches the vendor in Melio.

WebRun brings the vendor's email to the Payments tab

Checking the Payments tab against the inbox and the bank's own site each morning is the job WebRun takes over. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser with its own Melio login, and it writes up only the payments that need a person.

A bank change that arrives by email goes on the fix list for a phone call and never into Melio, and the bookkeeper sends each vendor reply herself. The owner still schedules and approves every payment and makes the day-15 call on a check.

If failed ACH payments are the recurring problem, the morning failed payment watch logs each failure against its bill in Airtable and writes the fix list in Notion.