Bill.com Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:BILL) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript February 8, 2024
Bill.com Holdings, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to BILL’s Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us for today’s call is BILL’s CEO, Rene Lacerte; President and CFO; John Rettig; and VP of Investor Relations, Karen Sansot. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Karen Sansot for introductory remarks. Karen?
Karen Sansot: Thank you, operator. Welcome to BILL’s fiscal second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. We issued our earnings press release a short time ago and furnished the related Form 8-K to the SEC. The press release can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.bill.com. With me on the call today are Rene Lacerte, Chairman, CEO and Founder of BILL; and John Rettig, President and CFO. Before we begin, please remember that during the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about the future operations and results of BILL that involve many assumptions, risks and uncertainties. If any of these risks or uncertainties develop or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied by our forward-looking statements.
For additional discussion, please refer to the text in the company’s press release issued today and to our periodic reports filed with the SEC including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. On today’s call, we will refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to today’s press release for the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial performance and additional disclosures regarding these measures. Note that at times during this call, we will discuss those stand-alone results, which exclude our BILL’s Spend and Expense management, which was formerly called Divvy, Invoice2go accounts receivable and Finmark Financial Planning Solutions.
Now I’ll turn the call over to Rene. Rene?
Rene Lacerte: Thank you, Karen. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We delivered strong profitable growth in the second quarter as we continue to advance on our strategy to be the essential financial operations platform for SMBs. In Q2, we grew revenue 22% year-over-year, generated non-GAAP net income growth of 48% year-over-year and produced a 23% non-GAAP net income margin. We achieved this strong combination of growth and profitability in a challenging macro environment as SMBs continue to carefully manage their spend. Our performance demonstrates the strength of our business model, the value of our platform to our customers and our commitment to deliver profitable growth. These results reinforce our conviction that when the macro environment improves and SMB starts spending for expansion, BILL was well positioned to drive strong growth across our business.
The BILL platform serves as the center of financial operations for our customers. At the end of Q2, more than 470,000 businesses use our solutions. During the quarter, these businesses completed more than $75 billion in payment volume on our platform. Our scale and experience uniquely positions us to continue to redefine how SMBs everywhere automate their financial operations. We are the innovation leader, and we are continually expanding the breadth and depth of our solutions. As we do this, my confidence grows about our ability to help SMBs everywhere transform their payments and financial operations. Today, there are millions of SMBs transacting trillions of dollars of payments using manual legacy processes and paper checks. This is terribly inefficient, and it will change.
Our platform was purpose-built to help SMBs modernize and streamline their financial operations. We hear increasingly about the gains in efficiency, visibility and financial controls that we provide. In short, we eliminate the friction of doing business. An example of a business transforming their operations with our platform is Enlightened Equipment, an ultralight hiking gear company based in Minnesota. Jessica Sonnek, their Director of Finance said and I quote, “BILL has been a huge timesaver establishing strong internal controls and generating operational efficiency. Every single payment that runs through any of our bank accounts goes through BILL, from the electric bill and rent to raw material purchases from abroad. The increased control with Spend and Expense capability has been a game changer in terms of budgeting for different departments and managing spend for each vendor.
BILL really empowered me to transform the manual and time-consuming financial operations process into something that was simply beautiful and efficient.” SMBs are difficult to reach at scale. The diverse and broad ecosystem we developed that enables us to reach them efficiently is a core competitive advantage. We know how to partner and to bring this transformative experience to SMBs at the test points where they prefer to do business. Our go-to-market ecosystem includes direct sales and our large network as well as accounting firms and financial institutions who are among in SMBs’ closest advisers. BILL is trusted by more than 7,000 accounting firms who recommend and use our platform across tens of thousands of clients. We have a successful track record of partnering with accounts which includes having developed a platform that enables them to provide more strategic and operational value-added services to their clients.
There are firms now that base their entire practice on client advisory services. Before BILL, this was nearly impossible. Our platform empowers accounts with a suite of features to enable collaboration between their staff and clients across multiple workflows. With BILL, accountants help their clients simplify their operations and have more time to focus on growing their business. It’s a win-win for all. A good example is hiline, an SMB-focused and tech savvy accounting firm. Matt Gardner, Founder and CEO, said and I quote, “Combining AP, AR and Spend and Expense management into a central hub has been a great change for us. At hiline, we give our customers a competitive edge by getting them on to best-of-breed cloud tools like BILL. This gives them full operational transparency and 24/7 online access, which modern business owners expect.
BILL allows us to streamline our workflows to increase speed and work quality and focus more time on providing strategic advice to our clients.” We also partner with some of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. Similar to accounting firms, financial institutions leverage a white label embedded version of our platform to help their business banking customers modernize their financial operations. The FI channel positions us to tap large numbers of SMBs as they transform their financial operations via their online banking experience. Traditionally, most FI partners have offered just ACH and checks to their customers through our platform. Given our payments expertise, large network and extensive experience in driving payment adoption, we are making early progress in bringing our ad valorem offerings to our FI partners.
Six financial institution partners have started leveraging more of our payment modalities such as Virtual Card, Instant Transfer and Pay By Card. Regarding Bank of America, a couple of quarters ago, I discussed that given our success in serving BofA’s new small business customers, we were now working together to extend our solution to serve their installed base of SMB customers. Since then, we have been working with them to define and build the experience needed to reach their existing customers. Separate from this effort, the bank recently shared with us that they have been evolving their firm-wide payment strategy and that evolution will impact the solutions they offer to their existing customers. We will continue to work side by side with the bank to determine how to best leverage what we have currently deployed to support their broader payment strategy.
We are in the early days of understanding the impact on our expansion opportunity with the bank. Our experience serving nearly 500,000 businesses, more than 7,000 gallium firms and leading financial institutions in the U.S. gives us strong foundational competencies for extending our reach through more embedded offerings. The core competencies underneath this level of trust are our flexible ways to integrate with software systems, our payment risk management and regulatory expertise, our large data asset and network and our ability to serve businesses and transact payments at scale. We moved 1% of GDP and are licensed to move money in all 50 states and Canada. This set of foundational capabilities and expertise places us at the centre of the convergence of software and payments and positions us well to extend our capabilities to other software companies.
As the market unfolds, we see opportunities to expand our ecosystem to include embedded offerings beyond the accountant and FI channels. The convergence of software and payments is increasing the needs for more embedded financial operations. We have built our platform and ecosystem to support partners across the SMB landscape. We believe our agile platform model incorporates various capabilities into our partner solutions and can accelerate the convergence. In addition to our financial institution and accounting embedded solutions, we also have enabled API capabilities with embedded solutions for a number of different use cases. Hundreds of developers have created integrations using our APIs to support thousands of customers. For example, an accounting firm leveraged our API to automatically create e-mail and collect invoices for over 1,000 firm clients using the data from their practice management software.
The potential use cases are vast, and we are just beginning to increase focus in this area. We are excited about the scale of the market opportunity we are going after and our position for the next chapter in BILL’s growth. In preparing for the road ahead, we are doubling down on our core strengths, evolving our strategy, expanding our offerings and scaling operationally. As part of our focus, we have made some hard choices. In December, we made the very difficult decision to right-size our organization by reducing our workforce by 15% and closing our Sydney office. We made this decision in order to streamline our operations and further balance growth and profitability, while we concentrate resources on our most important priorities. As we build the foundation for our next phase of growth, I ask John to take on broader operational responsibilities in his new role as President and CFO.
The senior team under John’s leadership recently completed a thorough assessment of our business operations and growth priorities. And I would now pass the call to John to provide an update on this important effort.
John Rettig: Thanks, Rene. Today, I’ll start with an overview of our key operational focus areas over the next 12 to 18 months, and then discuss our financial results and outlook. The market we are pursuing is large and evolving rapidly. With our wide moat and talented team of employees, we are well positioned to capture the market as it matures and for BILL to become the essential financial operations platform for SMBs. In my new role as President, the senior team and I recently performed an assessment of our capabilities and readiness to scale our business in preparation for our next phase of growth. We identified several key focus areas to support execution on our top priorities that we outlined at the beginning of the fiscal year, which I’ll briefly recap.
Our first priority for fiscal 2024 is to drive adoption of our integrated financial operations platform. We launched our new integrated platform last fall, which brought together our BILL AP and Divvy Spend and Expense Solutions to create a unified customer experience. Initial customer feedback has been positive and we’ve also identified incremental improvements that will help us scale further. For context, in support of this launch, we revised our go-to-market activities around the new solution and made many changes to our direct sales motion, rebranded Spend and Expense from Divvy to BILL and revised customer onboarding flows. All these moving parts created inefficiencies in our acquisition funnel so we continue to pull back on marketing spend that we referenced last quarter.
This had an impact on acquisition and attrition mainly for smaller, lower credit quality prospects and led to lower net new customers for the quarter compared to historical averages. We expect these trends to continue in the near term. As a result, we are adapting our go-to-market approach and processes to offer individual or unified solutions as appropriate to accelerate the pace of customer adoption of our solutions. Over time, we expect the unified experience will benefit all of our customers, but in the meantime, we will deliver to customers the immediate solutions they need most. Additionally, we are prioritizing our go-to-market towards businesses with a higher propensity to spend which should translate into increasing penetration within higher ARPU customer segments.
Our second priority is to expand our ecosystem by bringing more innovation to our partners and attracting new partners. In support of this priority, we are continuing to grow our footprint with accountants and financial institution partners and invest further in our embedded strategy. Accounts have been at the center of our ecosystem strategy to reach SMBs from the very beginning and we are focused on continuing to expand our reach within the industry. We added approximately 600 accounting firms within the first half of fiscal 2024. As Rene discussed, we are seeing the convergence between payments and software and the emergence of embedded finance play out as we receive early inbound interest from other software companies for our AP, AR and card solutions.
Leveraging our deep expertise in architecting embedded solutions to serve and expand the ecosystem, we are investing in our platform to create new ways for our capabilities to be leveraged by third parties who serve SMBs. Our third priority is to enrich our payment experiences and drive penetration of our ad valorem solutions. To this end, we are doubling down on our investments for card offerings and international payments. As we discussed on our last call, we continue to operate in an environment where customers and their suppliers are increasingly focused on costs and are being more selective with their payment choices to minimize cost. As expected, this translated into a slight decline in transaction monetization in the second quarter as a result of muted payment volume growth for some of our highest monetizing products.
Our current portfolio today includes virtual cards and our Bill Divvy Charge Card. To capture more wallet share and drive payment adoption, we are improving the automation and reconciliation features of our virtual card supplier experience and creating a dedicated sales motion to serve large customers and suppliers in our network. In addition, we are beginning to rollout a unique card experience that enables AP customers to use a BILL debit card for traditional AP or off-line payments. We believe these actions will support expanding payment volumes on card offerings and drive improved monetization. We are also enhancing and scaling our newer ad valorem offerings, such as Instant Transfer and invoice financing. We believe our portfolio approach provides choice and flexibility to SMBs and our network members and creates balancing growth to our business.
Turning to international payments, in order to capture more off-line payments and drive further FX payment adoption, we are planning to introduce our enhanced international payment supplier experience to more countries and increased payment speed by leveraging local payment routes. Recently, the strength of the U.S. dollar has negatively impacted the option of our FX payments, given our scale, we are able to optimize our costs, which will allow us to provide more attractive FX pricing. We believe these actions to adapt our go-to-market approach, grow our footprint with partners and invest in our amended strategy and double down on our card offerings and international payments are the right focus areas for BILL. We expect to strengthen our core capabilities and enhance the foundation of our business, which will pave the way for the next phase of growth.
Now turning to a discussion of our second quarter fiscal 2024 financial results, in Q2, we delivered strong profitable growth. Total revenue for Q2 was $318 million, up 22% year-over-year. Core revenue, which includes subscription and transaction revenue was $275 million, representing growth of 19% year-over-year. Non-GAAP gross margin was 86% and non-GAAP net income was $73 million, growth of 48% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income margin was 23% of revenue and expanded 4 percentage points year-over-year. Free cash flow was $74 million, reflecting a 23% margin. Importantly, we were non-GAAP operating income profitable, excluding the benefit of float revenue. Now I’d like to dive deeper on revenue and key revenue drivers. Subscription revenue in Q2 was $63 million, up 3% year-over-year and transaction revenue was $212 million, up 25% year-over-year.
This growth in transaction revenue was driven by overall payment volume growth and higher ad valorem payment volume. Total payment volume, or TPV per bill consolidated, which also includes card processing volume was $75 billion in Q2, reflecting 11% year-over-year growth. BILL’s stand-alone TPV growth improved in the second quarter, representing an increase of 10% year-over-year compared to 7% in the first quarter, which was above our expectations. It’s too early to call a trough in B2B spend, and we expect the current interest rate environment will continue to depress overall spend growth. BILL’s Spend and Expense card payment volume was $4.2 billion in Q2 and increased 28% year-over-year. Turning to customer acquisition, BILL stand-alone customers increased 18% year-over-year.
Net new adds for the quarter were 10,100, including 3,900 net adds in the direct and accounting channels and 6,200 in the FI channel. This excludes attrition related to the sunset of Intuit Simple BILL Pay Solution, which was approximately 3,800 in Q2. To-date, we have retained the majority of the customers who used Simple BILL Pay prior to the payment integration being sunset. The number of BILL’s Spend and Expense spending businesses grew 28% year-over-year and net new adds for the quarter were 900. In addition to the items mentioned earlier, we also took further action to manage our credit exposure and tightened credit for smaller businesses and prospects, which impacted both existing and new customer acquisition. Float revenue was $44 million, an increase of 50% year-over-year.
Our yield on FBO funds was 490 basis points in the quarter. Now turning to a discussion of our Q2 profitability performance. Non-GAAP gross margin was 86%, which was above our target range due to favorable float revenue. As previously discussed, we expect our non-GAAP gross margin to moderate to the low to mid-80s as our payment mix evolves and our float revenue declines with lower interest rates later in this economic cycle. Non-GAAP operating expenses were 229 million, flat sequentially. Rewards expenses, which are included in sales and marketing represented 49% of Spend and Expense card revenue. G&A expenses remained slightly elevated, due primarily to an increase in our provision for credit losses, given the macro environment. Non-GAAP operating income was 44 million or 14% of revenue.
Non-GAAP net income was 73 million or 23% of revenue, up 48% year-over-year. Free cash flow grew 56% to 74 million for a free cash flow margin of 23%. Before turning to guidance, I want to provide a bit more context regarding our recent organizational changes. As Rene noted, in December, we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by nearly 400 employees and close our Sydney office as we right-size our organization, enhance profitability and reallocate resources towards the most impactful initiatives. In connection with this reduction in force, we incurred 25 million of restructuring charges in Q2. These charges, which are excluded from our non-GAAP results consisted primarily of cash expenditures for severance payments, employee benefits and related costs, in addition to noncash charges for stock-based compensation expenses.
These actions mark our enhanced efforts in driving efficient and profitable growth. Organization-wide, we are raising the bar on the ROI of the initiatives we are investing behind and proactively deprioritizing lower impact projects. We are adjusting our level of investments with the goal to generate more operating profit, excluding the benefit of float revenue. We believe the tough choices and prioritization decisions we are making today will make BILL a stronger company in the future. Now turning to our outlook, while SMB spending trends showed an early sign of improvement in Q2, we are looking for more consistent signals of spend growth recovery. Taking this into account, we expect BILL standalone total payment volume for Q3 to be up roughly 10% year-over-year and for fiscal 2024 to increase approximately 7% to 8% year-over-year.
Now turning to our financial outlook, for fiscal Q3, we expect total revenue to be in the range of 299 million to 309 million, which reflects 10% to 13% year-over-year growth. We expect float revenue to be 36 million in Q3, which assumes our yield on FBO funds to be approximately 450 basis points which takes into consideration a seasonal FBO balance decline and a lower-yielding portfolio mix. On the bottom line, for Q3, we expect to report non-GAAP net income in the range of 56 million to 66 million and non-GAAP net income per diluted share in the range of $0.48 to $0.57 based on a share count of 116.1 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. For Q3, we expect other income, net of other expenses or OIE to be 24 million. We expect stock-based compensation expenses to be approximately 65 million in Q3 and we expect capital expenditures of approximately 7 million to 9 million.
Moving on to full year guidance, for fiscal 2024, we expect total revenue to be in the range of 1.226 billion to 1.251 billion, which represents 16% to 18% year-over-year growth. We expect float revenue to be 151 million in fiscal 2024, assuming a yield on FBO funds of 450 basis points, which reflects our assumption that interest rates will begin to decline in Q4. We expect non-GAAP net income for fiscal 2024 in the range of 245 million to 270 million and non-GAAP net income per diluted share to be $2.09 to $2.31 based on a share count of 117 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. In addition, for fiscal 2024, we expect OIE to be approximately 107 million, up approximately 11 million from our estimate last quarter, as a result of reclassification of off-balance sheet financing assumptions.
We expect stock-based compensation expenses of approximately 260 million and capital expenditures to be approximately 26 million to 30 million for the full year. I will now pass the call back to Rene for closing remarks.
Rene Lacerte: Thank you, John. We knew this quarter was going to be challenging given the macro environment. Our platform and team delivered a strong quarter with profitable growth and significant scale. The work we do every day is focused on taking the complexity and guesswork out for SMBs as they manage their financial back-office. With these results, we know we are closer to our vision for the future of financial operations, a simple and powerful central hub built on our enhanced payment infrastructure empowered by automation and AI. We have many growth drivers and are tightly aligned to bring that blueprint into reality. These growth drivers position us well as macro conditions improve and B2B spend rebounds. I’d like to thank our customers and partners for the trust they place in us, I’d also like to thank the BILL team for their focused execution and commitment to serving SMBs. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.
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