The vendor onboarding flow is the standout feature. You send a shareable link, the vendor fills out their banking info and W-9 through Plaid, and they're set up to receive payments. No app download, no back-and-forth emails chasing tax forms. Most vendors finish in under 15 minutes. For businesses that work with a lot of contractors and freelancers (event crews, DJs, freelance chefs), this removes a real bottleneck.
The other thing that stands out is the pricing structure. Same-day ACH is included with no per-transaction fee. If you've used Bill.com, you know they charge $0.59 per standard ACH and more for faster options, plus per-user fees that add up once you have a few people approving invoices. Cleo's flat monthly pricing is simpler to budget for, especially for small teams running 30-100 vendor payments a month.
The 1099 tracking being built into the payment flow (rather than being a separate tool or end-of-year scramble) is also genuinely useful. It collects the W-9 upfront during onboarding and tracks cumulative payments per contractor throughout the year, so filing season doesn't require going back through spreadsheets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The product is still early. The integration list is limited to QuickBooks right now. If you're on Xero, Sage, or NetSuite, you'd need to wait or work around it. But the team is small, so feature requests are faster to ship than they would at a larger company. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.