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Introducing a Modern, Collaborative Procurement Experience

Fabio Hsu
By Fabio Hsu
Fabio Hsu

Fabio Hsu

Fabio Hsu leads Product Marketing for Tipalti’s Procurement solution, focusing on enabling finance and procurement teams to gain control and visibility over their spend.

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Updated December 3, 2024
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Ready to modernize your purchasing process and reduce your AP workload through automation? Let’s dive in.

Transform the Entire Intake-to-Procure Process

We are excited to announce the following major updates to Tipalti Procurement:

  • New Tipalti Home Tab
  • New AI-powered intake experience
  • Connected approval processes and parallel approval support
  • Streamlined supplier approval with comprehensive data collection
  • Supplier communication capability directly within the platform

These improvements are designed to boost employee adoption, improve collaboration, and provide a unified experience for finance and procurement teams. 

With a refreshed and intuitive interface, Tipalti now makes it easier than ever to manage all spend in a single view, reducing the time the procurement team spends on training employees and improving overall efficiency. 

The right procurement solution offers organizations clear visibility into spend by allowing them to track, manage, and optimize their purchasing activities, ensuring all spend aligns with their budget and strategic goals.

However, achieving the desired level of control is often limited by the employees, or more notably, employee adoption, especially if the solution is complicated and unintuitive. This adds additional work for procurement teams to train and guide employees through established processes. Additionally, procurement has become increasingly connected and collaborative, requiring extensive internal and external coordination with stakeholders and departments. If the entire organization isn’t aligned, that can quickly lead to bottlenecks and blockers. 

The updates we’ve made change the way procurement is perceived throughout the organization and provide more accessible and intuitive workflows to all employees.

New Tipalti Home Tab

We are introducing a new Home Tab in Tipalti Hub with a user-friendly dashboard layout specifically designed to be accessible to everyone in the organization. Our new Home Tab provides employees with a one-stop shop to submit spend-related requests for services, goods, or expenses, maximizing employee adoption while streamlining workflows. Finance, procurement, and approvers can also manage all their to-dos in one place, from approving requests to bills and reimbursements, without toggling between multiple tabs and dashboards.

New AI-Powered Intake Experience

We have incorporated generative AI capabilities to accelerate the intake submission process. Employees can easily create requests using a natural language input model powered by Tipalti AIâ„ . The system will automatically generate a purchase request, including creating a title, selecting the correct vendor, setting items and prices, classifying requests, and suggesting relevant information, even if the user does not initially provide it.

We also have a brand new consumer-grade intake experience, making it easier for employees to provide all necessary information upfront. Flexible, intuitive, and guided intake workflows adapt questions and selections based on request responses. All forms are clear and easy to understand, showing only a few fields at a time and providing step-by-step prompts to help employees complete their requests.

Connected Approval Processes and Parallel Approval Support

We have improved the approval workflow to provide each approver with the most relevant information, allowing them to review and approve requests while being more informed. 

Approvers now have full visibility into the entire approval chain, including completed and pending steps and overall budget status. By making informed decisions, approvers can better see whether the purchase fits within their budget range. 

We are also introducing ‘Parallel Approval’ support. By enabling multiple functional approvers to review and approve requests simultaneously, each team can complete its necessary review process without needing to wait or become a bottleneck for subsequent approvers.

Streamlined Supplier Approval With Comprehensive Data Collection

As procurement becomes more collaborative, supplier approval often involves multiple departments such as IT, Security, and InfoSec. Not collecting the right documentation upfront can lead to approval delays and frustrations. We have addressed this problem by requiring comprehensive business data to be collected upfront during the supplier onboarding process, including SOC compliance, data policies, and data schemas. 

By providing the necessary information to stakeholders in IT, Security, and InfoSec, they can conduct thorough reviews and make more informed decisions without the hassle of chasing down suppliers for more info. Requirements are fully configurable, allowing dynamic data collection based on supplier characteristics, such as integration types and security risks, and enabling you to tailor your onboarding process to your business needs.

Supplier Communication Capability Directly Within the Platform

We’ve made supplier communication even better by allowing approvers to directly communicate with suppliers at each stage of the approval process, to resolve any issues quickly. All communications remain secure and centralized within Tipalti, making it easier to sort through historical interactions, and ensuring transparency and accountability. 

Additionally, each purchase request includes internal and supplier-facing communications through the “Tipalti Comments” feature. 

A good example is if the legal team needs to ask a supplier any follow-up questions, they can do so directly through the built-in communication portal, eliminating the need to track down supplier contact information.

Our enhanced procurement experience and new Home Tab are now available to all Tipalti customers. If you are a Tipalti customer and want to learn more about Tipalti procurement, contact your Tipalti Representative. If you are new to Tipalti, schedule a demo below.

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