Note: This article is written for web publishing in standard American English, based on real product information, official company materials, reputable software reviews, and SMB finance/payroll research. No raw source URLs are inserted in the article body.
Introduction: The Year SMBs Needed Software That Actually Helped
Running a small or midsize business in 2022 felt a little like assembling furniture with instructions written by a raccoon. Inflation was loud, hiring was weird, remote work was still changing the rules, vendors wanted faster payments, employees wanted cleaner benefits, and founders wanted one magical dashboard that did not require a finance degree, a legal department, and three cold coffees.
That is why my favorite SMB apps of 2022 were not the flashiest tools with neon dashboards and motivational taglines. They were the apps that removed real operational pain: Gusto for payroll, HR, benefits, and employee administration; and BILL, formerly Bill.com, for accounts payable, accounts receivable, approvals, and business payments. Gusto describes itself as a platform for payroll, benefits, and HR, while BILL positions its platform around creating and paying bills, sending invoices, managing expenses, controlling budgets, and supporting SMB financial operations.
For an SMB, the best apps are not simply “nice to have.” They protect Friday payroll, prevent lost invoices, reduce awkward vendor emails, and make bookkeeping feel less like spelunking through a cave of PDFs. In 2022, Gusto and BILL stood out because they solved the two administrative nightmares every growing company eventually meets: paying people correctly and paying everyone else without losing your mind.
Why Gusto Became a Favorite SMB Payroll App
Gusto Makes Payroll Less Terrifying
Payroll is one of those business functions that sounds simple until you actually run it. Then suddenly you are thinking about tax filings, direct deposits, contractor payments, state registrations, W-2s, 1099s, benefits deductions, PTO, and whether “off-cycle payroll” is a software feature or a punishment.
Gusto’s biggest strength for small businesses is that it brings payroll, tax filing, employee records, onboarding, benefits administration, time tracking, and HR workflows into one approachable system. Gusto’s payroll materials highlight unlimited payroll runs, automated tax filing, integrations, time tracking, employee management, and support for payroll-related workflows.
For an SMB founder or office manager, that matters because payroll is not just a back-office task. Payroll is trust. When employees are paid accurately and on time, the company feels stable. When payroll gets messy, everyone notices immediately. Nobody says, “Take your time, I enjoy suspense with my rent money.”
The Employee Experience Feels Modern
Another reason Gusto earned a favorite-app spot is that it does not treat employees like mysterious rows in a spreadsheet. Employees can access their own payroll documents, tax forms, benefits details, and onboarding tasks. That self-service experience reduces basic administrative questions and gives employees more control over routine information.
For a small business without a full HR department, this is a big deal. A five-person company may not have an HR manager. A 25-person company may have one operations person handling payroll, recruiting, snacks, broken chairs, and the printer that has chosen violence. Gusto helps shift repetitive HR tasks away from inbox chaos and into a structured workflow.
Gusto Works Well for First-Time Employers
Many SMBs do not start with polished HR systems. They start with a founder, a bookkeeper, a few contractors, one full-time hire, and a Google Sheet named something like “Payroll_FINAL_v7_reallyfinal.” Gusto is valuable because it gives small teams a path from informal administration to repeatable process.
Reputable small-business software reviewers have repeatedly praised Gusto for being user-friendly, especially for payroll and HR administration. NerdWallet describes Gusto as a strong payroll option with user-friendly software, unlimited payroll runs, health insurance administration, and automated payroll, while Business News Daily has recognized Gusto’s focus on easy payroll and benefits for small businesses.
That friendliness is not a superficial design detail. Ease of use affects compliance, accuracy, and founder stress. A beautiful payroll system is nice. A payroll system you can understand on Tuesday night before the deadline is survival.
Why BILL Became a Favorite SMB Finance App
BILL Turns Accounts Payable Into a Real Workflow
If payroll is the heartbeat of an SMB, accounts payable is the digestive system: not glamorous, absolutely necessary, and deeply unpleasant when blocked. Bills arrive by email, PDF, portal, mailed invoice, text message, and occasionally through someone saying, “I think we owe that vendor from March.”
BILL’s core value is that it centralizes bill capture, approvals, payments, vendor records, and accounting syncs. BILL describes its accounts payable product as automation for capturing invoices, routing approvals, processing payments, and syncing with accounting software.
For SMBs, this means fewer bills disappearing into inbox caves. Instead of forwarding invoices around like digital hot potatoes, the business can create approval rules, assign responsibility, track status, and maintain a clearer audit trail. That is especially useful when the same founder approving a vendor payment is also trying to sell, hire, manage cash flow, and remember where the office stapler went.
Approvals Matter More Than People Think
Approvals may sound boring, but they are one of the first signs that a business is growing up. In a tiny company, one person can approve every payment. As the business scales, that approach becomes risky. You need rules: who can approve what, which vendors require review, what dollar amounts need a second set of eyes, and how to stop duplicate payments before they escape into the wild.
BILL helps SMBs add structure to these decisions. NerdWallet notes that Bill.com provides essential accounts payable and receivable features for small businesses and integrates with major accounting platforms including QuickBooks, Oracle NetSuite, Xero, and Sage.
The accounting integration piece is crucial. SMB owners do not want a payment system that creates another bookkeeping island. They want transactions, bills, vendors, and payment statuses to connect back to the accounting system so reconciliation does not become a monthly archaeological dig.
BILL Was Already a Serious SMB Platform in 2022
BILL was not just a niche app in 2022. In its fiscal 2022 reporting, the company said that more than 157,000 customers used its platform and that it processed $219.1 billion in total payment volume during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022.
That scale matters for SMB trust. Business payments are sensitive. You are dealing with cash flow, vendors, bank accounts, customer invoices, and payment timing. A platform operating at significant payment volume gives small businesses more confidence than a random tool discovered at 1:00 a.m. after searching “please help accounts payable.”
In 2022, BILL also earned attention from software review communities. The company announced that Bill.com earned the top spot in G2’s 2022 accounting and finance software ranking, and the same announcement referenced PC Magazine recognition for advanced automation of payables and receivables.
Gusto vs. BILL: Different Problems, Same SMB Superpower
Gusto Handles People Payments
Gusto is strongest when the question is: “How do we pay our team, manage employee records, handle basic HR, and keep benefits organized?” It is the people-operations app. It supports the emotional contract between employer and employee: work gets done, pay arrives, tax documents appear, benefits are understandable, and onboarding does not require a scavenger hunt.
BILL Handles Vendor and Customer Money Movement
BILL is strongest when the question is: “How do we pay vendors, collect from customers, approve bills, track documents, and keep finance workflows under control?” It is the financial-operations app. It brings structure to accounts payable and accounts receivable so payment activity is not trapped in email threads, sticky notes, and one person’s memory.
Together, They Reduce Founder Bottlenecks
The deeper reason I liked both apps in 2022 is that they reduce founder bottlenecks. In many SMBs, the founder becomes the default approval engine, HR department, payroll checker, payment signer, and emergency problem-solver. That is not leadership; that is being a human router with tax anxiety.
Gusto and BILL help move repeatable tasks into repeatable systems. Payroll becomes scheduled. Onboarding becomes checklisted. Vendor bills become routed. Payments become trackable. Approvals become visible. The business starts to operate less like a heroic sprint and more like a company.
Where These Apps Shine for SMBs
1. They Save Administrative Time
Time savings are the obvious benefit, but the better phrase is “attention savings.” Gusto and BILL reduce the number of tiny decisions owners must make manually. That matters because SMB leaders do not suffer from a shortage of tasks; they suffer from a shortage of uninterrupted thinking.
When payroll and bill pay are systemized, the owner can spend more time on pricing, sales, hiring, customer experience, and cash strategy. In other words, the business can focus on making money instead of constantly proving it knows how to move money around.
2. They Improve Visibility
Visibility is underrated until something goes wrong. Which invoices are waiting for approval? Which vendor payments are scheduled? Which employee documents are missing? Which payroll run includes a bonus? Who approved that expense? Without software, the answer is often, “Let me check six inboxes and experience personal growth.”
With Gusto and BILL, more of that information lives in dedicated workflows. The result is not perfection, but it is a huge upgrade from scattered files and memory-based finance.
3. They Help SMBs Look More Professional
Professionalism is not only branding, logos, and a nice website. It is paying employees on time. It is sending clean invoices. It is approving bills consistently. It is giving vendors confidence. It is giving employees access to their documents without making them ask three times.
Gusto and BILL help small businesses behave like larger organizations without requiring enterprise software budgets, consultants, or a 90-day implementation project involving the word “stakeholders” too many times.
Limitations: No App Is Magic, Sadly
As much as I like Gusto and BILL for SMBs, neither app eliminates the need for good judgment. Gusto still requires accurate setup, correct employee classifications, clean payroll data, and attention to state-specific rules. BILL still requires disciplined approval workflows, reliable vendor records, accounting oversight, and cash flow awareness.
Reviews of both tools also show that customer experiences can vary. Some users praise ease of use and centralization, while others report support frustrations, pricing concerns, or integration challenges. For example, third-party review summaries of BILL mention positive feedback around scalability, ease of use, and centralized payments, but also note complaints about customer service and integrations.
The lesson is simple: software is leverage, not autopilot. If the underlying process is broken, automation may simply help you make mistakes faster, which is efficient but not ideal.
My SMB Experience: Why These Two Apps Stuck With Me
Looking back at 2022, what made Gusto and BILL memorable was not that they had every possible feature. It was that they reduced the number of operational moments where a small business owner thinks, “I cannot believe this is still manual.” Every SMB has those moments. A vendor asks whether a payment went out. An employee needs a pay stub. A contractor asks about a 1099. A bill sits in someone’s inbox while the due date gets closer with the confidence of a horror movie villain.
Gusto helped with the human side of business administration. The experience felt less like running payroll through a government-adjacent obstacle course and more like following a guided checklist. That matters because payroll anxiety is real. Even when everything is correct, the stakes feel high. People are depending on the company. Taxes must be handled properly. Benefits deductions must make sense. New hires should feel welcomed, not processed like paperwork with shoes.
The best part of using a tool like Gusto is the sense of rhythm it creates. Payroll stops being a dramatic event and becomes a recurring operating habit. Employees know where to find their information. Contractors can be handled in a cleaner system. The founder does not need to rebuild the same workflow every pay period. The company becomes calmer, and calm is an underrated business asset.
BILL, meanwhile, helped with the money-out and money-in side of the operation. Accounts payable is one of those areas that can seem manageable until growth exposes every weak point. At first, paying bills manually feels fine. Then the business adds more vendors, more subscriptions, more contractors, more approval steps, and more “urgent” invoices. Suddenly, the old process starts leaking. Bills get missed. Duplicate questions happen. Month-end reconciliation becomes a detective story, except nobody enjoys the plot.
What I liked about BILL was the way it turned payment activity into a visible workflow. Instead of wondering whether an invoice had been reviewed, approved, scheduled, or forgotten, the business could track it. That visibility changed the tone of finance conversations. Vendor payment questions became easier to answer. Internal approvals became less personal and more procedural. The company could separate “we have not approved this yet” from “we lost it in someone’s inbox,” which is a surprisingly important distinction.
In practical SMB life, the combination of Gusto and BILL created a useful division of labor. Gusto handled the team. BILL handled the bills. Gusto made payday feel less fragile. BILL made vendor payments feel less chaotic. Together, they helped the business move from founder-memory operations to system-based operations.
That shift is bigger than software. It is a maturity milestone. Many small businesses do not fail because the product is bad. They struggle because operations become too heavy for the people carrying them. The founder becomes the approval department. The bookkeeper becomes the historian of every invoice ever received. Employees become dependent on one person for basic documents. Vendors become nervous when communication is inconsistent.
Gusto and BILL reduce that fragility. They do not replace accountability, but they make accountability easier. They do not eliminate mistakes, but they make mistakes easier to spot. They do not magically create cash flow, but they help the business understand where money is going and what obligations are coming next.
That is why these were my favorite apps of 2022 as an SMB. Not because they were trendy. Not because they had the loudest marketing. But because they made the business feel more adult. And when you are running a small company, anything that makes operations feel more adult without requiring you to become a corporate robot deserves applause, maybe even a small standing ovation from the finance drawer.
Conclusion: The Best SMB Apps Solve Boring Problems Beautifully
The most valuable SMB software rarely looks glamorous from the outside. Payroll, HR, accounts payable, accounts receivable, approvals, tax documents, vendor records, and reconciliation are not cocktail-party topics unless you attend very unusual cocktail parties. But these are the systems that determine whether a business runs smoothly or slowly drowns in admin work.
Gusto and BILL were favorite SMB apps in 2022 because they solved practical problems with practical workflows. Gusto helped small businesses pay and support their teams with more confidence. BILL helped small businesses manage bills, payments, invoices, and approvals with more control. Together, they represented exactly what SMB software should do: save time, reduce confusion, improve visibility, and make the company feel more stable.
For small business owners, the lesson is clear. Do not choose apps only because they are popular. Choose tools that remove recurring pain from your week. Choose tools that protect relationships with employees and vendors. Choose tools that make your business easier to run when you are busy, tired, growing, or all three at once.
In 2022, Gusto and BILL did that exceptionally well. And for SMBs, that kind of boring brilliance is worth celebrating.