The Best Mass Payout Solutions for Digital Businesses: My Thoughts as a CPA

Last Updated on December 4, 2025 by Ewen Finser

Let’s talk AP… the least sexy part of running a business. You have to pay your vendors, your contractors, your rent, your utilities — and it seems like all of this comes from your hard-earned cash. It’s also a headache that demands attention, because it’s where things can start to slip through the cracks and go south really fast if you’re not paying attention. 

So why not just issue mass payouts once or twice a week and move on with your life? Well, mass payouts sound glamorous until you’re staring at a spreadsheet with too many rows to count.

As a CPA who lives in the weeds of AP, I see the same pattern with digital businesses again and again: the product scales, the audience scales, and then the payout process starts to buckle because it’s often neglected. And what worked at $50K a month suddenly breaks down when they turn over $500K+.

This is where dedicated mass payout and bill pay platforms earn their keep.

At a Glance

Platform	Best for	Payout style	Accounting depth	Developer focus
Melio	Digital SMBs and mid-market firms on QuickBooks/Xero	Bulk bills, vendor and contractor payouts	Strong QBO sync, AP workflows, fee mapping	Light API, workflow first
BILL	Larger finance teams, global vendors	Bulk/Batch payments, domestic and international	Enterprise-grade AP, strong ERP ties	Limited API vs. Stripe
Ramp	Companies unifying cards, reimbursements, and AP	Vendor payouts tied to spend management	Deep spend analytics, AP plus cards	Some API, product ecosystem
Wise	Cross-border heavy digital businesses, remote-first teams	Batch transfers up to 1,000 payments per file	Light; AP lives elsewhere	Strong payout API
PayPal Payouts	Wallet-centric ecosystems, gig and reward platforms	Payouts to PayPal/Venmo via email/phone/user ID	Minimal; data needs ETL into accounting	Solid payouts API
Stripe Connect	Platforms and marketplaces where payouts are part of the product	Embedded payouts to connected accounts, flexible	Depends on your own GL and data model	Very strong developer stack

If you want a short answer, Melio is usually the best fit for digital SMBs and mid-market teams that live in QuickBooks or Xero and want clean, scalable mass payouts without turning the finance stack into an IT project.

What “Mass Payouts” Really Means for Digital Businesses

If you run a digital business, you probably have at least one of these:

• Creator or influencer programs
• Affiliate payouts
• Marketplace or gig-style vendors
• Freelancers across time zones
• Software resellers or referral partners
• A handful of agencies and contractors

Mass payout tools exist to solve a simple problem: you want one clean funding event to a platform that then fans it out to hundreds of recipients.

Under the hood, the platforms all aim to do the same thing, but they differ on a few key axes:

• Speed and payment rails
  • ACH vs. checks vs. cards vs. wires
  • Same-day vs. standard settlement
• Cost structure
  • Free or low-cost ACH
  • Card funding fees
  • FX margins for cross-border payouts
• Control and accounting
  • Approval workflows and roles
  • Two-way sync with QuickBooks/Xero/NetSuite
  • Audit trails and 1099/withholding support
• Developer story
  • Do you have an API and stack?
  • Or do you just want to upload a CSV and be done?

With this in mind, let’s walk through the options.

Melio: Mass Payouts for Digital Businesses that Care About Clean Books

Melio is a bill pay platform that doesn’t feel like punishment for small and mid-sized businesses. It lets you pay vendors by ACH, check, or card from one dashboard, while vendors choose how they get paid. More recently, Melio has leaned hard into features that matter when you start doing payouts at scale.

Best Use Cases

• Digital SMB and mid-market teams that live in QuickBooks
• Mass payouts via a dead-simple platform that’s easy to pick up with no learning curve
• AP setups where approvals and audit trails matter
• Teams that need flexible payment options, like allowing AP to be run on a credit card

Melio also invests in small but important workflow tweaks, like applying vendor credits in-platform and routing Melio’s own fees to the right accounts. These are the things that save time in a monthly close.

Downsides

• You won’t get a full developer-first payout API at the level of something like Stripe Connect.
• If your business is a two-sided marketplace with built-in seller onboarding, you’ll need more than standard AP tooling.
• If you run a homegrown ERP, you may want a more API-native platform; Melio is ideal for businesses anchored in standard accounting software.

For most digital businesses that are not full-blown marketplaces, Melio hits the sweet spot: modern UX, sane pricing, real AP depth, and mass payouts that don’t wreck your close.

BILL: Enterprise-Grade AP and Bulk Payments

BILL (formerly Bill.com) is the heavyweight in the cloud AP space, offering full accounts payable and accounts receivable workflows, the ability to send bulk payments in a single run, and support for payouts to vendors in more than 130 countries in their local currencies. 

There’s a reason BILL has the staying power it does… it seems to be able to do just about anything under the sun (and then some): approval chains, audit logs, roles, complex vendor setups, you name it. 

Best Use Cases

• Cross-border coverage, making international vendor payments feel similar to domestic ones
• Strong integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and mid-market ERPs

You can group multiple vendor payments into one funding event, while BILL handles the split and delivery to each vendor. That fits digital businesses with a global vendor base and a more traditional AP department.

Downsides

• The power that BILL offers can make it overwhelming for solopreneurs or small teams who aren’t familiar with the platform.
• Pricing is higher than other platforms on the list, and some of the most important features live behind more premium tiers.
• For simple digital businesses that just need creator and vendor payouts, BILL can feel like using an ERP when you just need a spreadsheet.

If you’re a larger digital business with a formal finance team and global vendors, BILL is a serious contender. For leaner teams, other platforms on the list tend to feel more approachable while still giving robust AP controls.

Ramp Bill Pay: Mass Payouts Tied to Spend Management

The Ramp Bill Pay product has become a strong AP and payout tool. It gives you an all-in-one spend view where card transactions, reimbursements, and vendor payments live in one place. It also automates vendor data extraction from invoices (including ACH details and W-9 information) and adds strong analytics so you can slice vendor spend by department, project, or time period.

Best Use Cases

• Finance teams that want tight control over all spend, not just AP
• Companies scaling past the “everyone has a card and a dream” stage
• Teams that value real-time reporting around vendor spend and budget variance

Downsides

• Ramp is less about ad-hoc program payouts to affiliates or creators and more about structured vendor and employee spend. 
• You’ll spend a good amount of time setting up the platform; it’s not just plug and play.
• You’ll need to adopt more of the Ramp ecosystem (cards, reimbursements, controls) to get the full value here, which some teams love and others resist.

Ramp is excellent if you’re rethinking spending top to bottom. If you just want to bolt on mass payouts to an existing stack, Melio and BILL are lower-friction.

Wise Business: Cross-Border Mass Payouts at Scale

Wise is very strong when you need to send money across borders without getting bled by FX spreads. With its batch payments (“BatchTransfer”), you can send up to 1,000 international payments in one go using a simple CSV or XLSX file.

Best Use Cases

• Global coverage from one platform
• Brands needing mid-market FX rates with transparent fees
• Technical teams that want a developer-friendly API for automated payouts

For digital platforms that pay remote teams, freelancers, or partners in multiple currencies and countries, Wise can cut costs and friction compared to traditional bank wires.

Downsides

• Wise is a payout and transfer tool first, not a full AP workflow platform. Make sure you have guardrails in place so that AP can be closely monitored.
• You won’t get the same native invoice processing, approvals, or accounting sync you see in Melio or BILL.
• Tax compliance, 1099 workflows, and vendor master data will live elsewhere.

I often see a hybrid pattern: digital businesses use something like Melio, BILL, or Ramp for domestic AP and then Wise for high-volume cross-border payouts.

PayPal Payouts: Mass Payouts Where your Recipients Already Live

If your recipients live in consumer wallets rather than vendor master files, PayPal Payouts starts to make sense, letting you send mass payments through the Payouts API and Payouts Web. Recipients get funds into their PayPal or Venmo account, using only an email, phone number, or PayPal ID.

Best Use Cases

• Gig, micro-task, reward, and cashback platforms
• Teams that appreciate a flexible set of technical options: web UI, file upload, or full API

You also get the added benefit of massive brand recognition, and most people will inherently trust the platform.

Downsides

• PayPal’s fees are exceptionally high and can add up for large volumes or micro-payouts. Pricing varies by payout type and currency.
• Funds often live in PayPal first; some recipients then move money to a bank, which adds a hop.
• Accounting and AP workflows sit outside PayPal, which means you’ll be stitching data into your ledger.

If your “vendors” are really users in a wallet ecosystem, PayPal Payouts is a strong contender. If they’re classic B2B vendors with invoices, Melio, BILL, or Ramp is usually a better fit.

Stripe Connect: Developer-Grade Payouts for Platforms and Marketplaces

Stripe Connect is the payment infrastructure behind many large marketplaces and platforms, acting less like a traditional AP tool and more like a full money-movement engine. With Connect, you can onboard and verify sellers, creators, or service providers, collect payments from buyers, split and route funds, and schedule payouts to connected accounts at scale.

Best Use Cases

• Deep developer tooling with APIs, dashboards, and webhooks
• Teams that need built-in KYC, onboarding, and compliance options

If your digital business looks more like a platform or marketplace, Connect gives you the most control over how you structure flows, fees, and payout schedules.

Downsides

• You’ll need real engineering time to get started; it’s not a two-click setup. Make sure you have people who are technically competent on your team for when things break.
• Connect is part of the broader Stripe ecosystem; you buy into their rails, risk logic, and fee model.
• For simple AP or just paying contractors once a month, it’s absolutely overkill.

I think of Stripe Connect as the right call if payouts are part of your product, not just your back office.

How to Pick the Right Tool for Mass Payouts

Here’s how I would frame the decision as your fractional controller.

What Are You Paying For?

If you’re heavy on classic, invoice-driven AP and program payouts like affiliate marketing, Melio hits a very nice balance — especially if you already live in QuickBooks. BILL and Ramp are the next two to test.

If you run a true marketplace or SaaS platform, Stripe Connect sits at the top of the shortlist, with Wise and PayPal Payouts as sidecars for certain regions or use cases.

Where Does Your Accounting Live?

If your accounting team spends every close hunting down missing vendor info and mapping fees, you want a platform that:

• Syncs tightly with your ledger
• Tracks approvals
• Assigns fees and FX correctly

Melio and BILL take the lead here for standard SMB and mid-market stacks. Ramp adds value if you unify card spend and AP. Wise, PayPal Payouts, and Stripe Connect expect you to wire in your own accounting logic, which can be quite a tedious task.

What is Your Appetite for Engineering Work?

• Minimal engineering: Melio, BILL, Ramp. Wise with CSV uploads
• Light integration: PayPal Payouts web/SFTP, some Wise API use
• Heavy engineering: Stripe Connect

If your dev team already has a full backlog, a click-to-run AP platform beats a multi-month payments integration project.

Why Melio Is the Top Contender in My Book

For many digital businesses, the real constraint is finance time, not payout features. You need one place to approve bills, a clean feed into QuickBooks or Xero, reliable bulk payouts, simple user permissions, and clear mapping of every fee. 

Melio hits those needs with a modern interface non-accountants can use, SMB-friendly pricing (including a free plan), and real AP workflows and fee mapping that support a clean, predictable close. 

Is it as programmable as Stripe Connect? No. Does it do cross-border batch payouts like Wise in 50 currencies? Not yet. But if you’re a digital business scaling from dozens to hundreds of payouts a month, and you want a system your team can adopt fast without trashing your books, Melio deserves a serious look.