The Top Alternatives to BILL (Formerly Bill.com)

If you run a hyper-growth business, whether scaling rapidly domestically or expanding internationally, you need a payable solution with built-in scalability to help future-proof your payable operations. As your company grows, your AP workflow complexities increase, including paying global suppliers, handling multi-subsidiary business payables, and processing many payments. You also need to offer a vast range of localized payment methods to pay your domestic and global suppliers in their preferred payment methods and local currencies.

Tipalti’s end-to-end accounts payable platform future proofs your payables operations, so you don’t have to keep throwing more resources as you grow. Tipalti’s Multi-Entity capability enables payers to manage a large number of entities within the same instance of Tipalti, enabling centralized controls and financial reporting.

Tipalti’s advanced capabilities also include KPMG-approved tax capability for IRS compliance, collecting and validating IRS and maintaining W-9, W-8 series forms, VAT details, generating 1099 / 1042-S preparation reports, and calculating any necessary withholdings. 

While Bill.com can only be funded in USD, Tipalti can be funded in 28 currencies instead of only in USD. Tipalti executes fast global payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies. Payments can be made in multiple international payment methods—global ACH (eCheck), wire transfer, PayPal, and prepaid debit card. You can also streamline your FX conversation workflow with advanced FX capabilities such as Multi-FX, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimization.

Accounts payable processing comes with many potential inefficiencies that increase the workload of your AP team, as manual operations increase complexity and slow down the financial close process.

Tipalti makes AP processes invisible by cutting out the manual work and wiping out 80% of the workload managing payables, so you can align your resources to focus on mission-critical activities instead of back-office financial operations. Tipalti enables a complete touchless invoice processing workflow with machine learning (ML) powered OCR technology that captures both the header and line-level details. 2-way and 3-way PO matching allow automated syncing of POs and GDRs from your ERP to Tipalti to complete the PO match flow, helping eliminate overspending and strengthen financial controls.

Tipalti also helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labeled portal, enabling faster, more accurate payee data collection and verification. Provide visibility into payment status via a 24×7 multi-language partner portal and proactive automatic payment status emails. Tipalti automatically validates supplier payment data in real-time using 26,000 global banking rules to eliminate payment errors proactively.

Bill.com has payment limits, so larger payments are processed slowly. For Tipalti, there are never limits on individual payments regardless of the volume and amounts of the payment, as Tipalti has a complete compliance screening process upfront and a separate Tipalti funding account that you wire or ACH funds into. 

You can accelerate financial close by more than 25% as payment methods, currencies, subsidiaries, and geographies are combined and reconciled in real-time for instant visibility. Detailed transaction and reconciliation reports are integrated with your ERP system to provide a consolidated view of all payable accounts.

Since AP involves direct access to cash reserves, it’s critical to institute proper controls and governance. Tax compliance is another crucial aspect as manually collecting and validating tax forms from suppliers is fraught with legal and financial risk.

Tipalti provides granular controls over payables and payment operations to increase the security of sensitive financial data, ensure ongoing OFAC compliance, and improve management oversight of key AP processes. Tipalti enables you to strengthen control with built-in Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning constantly improves performance for invoices approvals routing, including the ability to incorporate Fixed Approval Roles.

Tipalti solves the complex, highly-manual process of collecting tax information through digital capture directly during the onboarding flow, ensuring information is validated before payment is ever processed. Help ensure IRS tax compliance with KPMG-approved tax form data validation and withholding calculations. Collect W-9, W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports with automated filing.

Bill.com is suitable for slower-growth small businesses with low payment volumes and limited remittances capabilities. The average revenue per customer of Bill.com is $1,500. Therefore, many AP automation capabilities are not available via Bill.com, so you need to manage them manually or outside of Bill.com.

For invoice processing, Bill.com’s OCR technology only captures header-level details but not line-level detail. Bill.com also requires invoice approvers to be registered Bill.com users, which carries a user fee of $39 per month. Bill.com doesn’t support 3-way PO matching.

Bill.com doesn’t have built-in tax compliance capabilities and tax rules validation to help ensure IRS compliance. You need to manage tax compliance via a separate app outside of Bill.com and require an additional upgrade. 

There are other limitations to Bill.com’s AP capabilities—No payment approval workflow, no support of custom fields, and no payment validation rules to reduce payment errors proactively.

Bill.com has very limited global capabilities to help support your operations outside of the US. 

Bill.com lacks Multi-Entity capability. Payers need a separate instance of Bill.com for each entity, so payers can’t instrument centralized controls and will have to reconcile payable data manually for each entity.

Bill.com also does not support multi-entity branded communication. If you manage multiple brands across regions, your payees might not be familiar with the managing entity, which can create confusion. 

International payment options are limited. Bill.com only offers wire transfers for US-based companies to pay to 137 countries but does not offer other lower-cost options such as PayPal and global ACH (eCheck).  

With Bill.com, payments delivered to your payees are delayed and slow because it relies on pulling funds one by one from the client’s accounts as an ACH pull. Your payees have to wait several days for funds to clear while Bill.com sends instructions to their bank partners to pay. For larger payments (over $5,000 for regular ACH), it takes two additional business days to process. This is a burden on suppliers who are already subject to Net 30/60/90 terms and have their own cash flow issues to overcome. 

A slow or delayed payment processing time is not ideal if your business is growing and you want to create a world-class supplier experience to support your business. If you want your payments to arrive earlier, you need to pay an extra $9.99 per payment to use the Same-day/Next-Day ACH option. But it does not allow payments of more than $25,000. 

Early payment options are not available with Bill.com.