In this guide, we’ll offer a comparison of Concur vs. Tipalti, examining key features like AP automation, procurement, invoice processing, expense management, corporate cards, approval workflows, and global payments.
As your business expands, you need an automation system that will efficiently handle invoice processing and global supplier payments, reducing business costs; steering through any economic headwinds to optimize results.
You can do this by using AP automation software to streamline the payables workload, including supplier onboarding and tax compliance, purchase order and invoice management, approvals, and payments. This workflow automation lets your company reduce routine accounting time and shift to higher-value strategic work.
Scalability for handling a larger volume of complex supplier transactions and reducing future accounts payable hires are benefits of AP automation. You’ll also improve financial controls, reduce costly fraud, and reduce errors.
Alternatives, like Tipalti and Concur, use ERP systems or accounting software integrations to eliminate manual processes from an AP workflow.
Which solution best meets your business needs? In this guide to Tipalti vs. Concur, we compare product functionality for each platform. We also highlight the differences to help you decide which software is a better fit for your company.
What Does Tipalti Do?
Tipalti is a provider of robust, cloud-based AP automation software. The intuitive platform is mostly used by midmarket companies, offering in-depth insights, dedicated customer support, and a universal solution to your burning financial needs.
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Stop wasting skilled workers on monotonous, manual processes. Use them for innovation. Tipalti bridges the gap with end-to-end automation for various accounting tasks like invoice management, global payments, PO matching, reconciliation, and more. Sign up for a free demo now.
Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview
Tipalti’s AP automation, and global payments software provides purchase order management, self-service supplier onboarding, invoice management, and tax and regulatory compliance. Tipalti software improves business efficiency. The holistic platform also offers advanced tools for expense management, procurement, and corporate cards.
Tipalti offers scalability to expand through internal growth and acquisitions while minimizing headcount additions. Tipalti software saves you money and lets you avoid the need to implement an on-premise system to perform the same functions, when you experience business growth.
A few of the top features include:
Global Capabilities
With multi-entity cloud architecture, Tipalti supports payables across your enterprise globally, including business units, subsidiaries, and divisions. Unlike key competitors such as Stampli, Bill.com, or Avidxchange, Tipalti provides enterprise-grade financial controls to protect your company from fraud risk and strengthen internal controls.
Multiple Payment Methods
Tipalti supports multiple payment methods in 196 countries and 120 currencies, supplier payment status communications, payment reconciliation, and reporting. You can also decide whether to split or shift payment processing fees to payees, reducing your costs.
Expense Management
The Tipalti platform provides advanced tools for expense management as well. Using a single system, you can bolster spend control and gain consistent visibility into what employees are purchasing.
Finance teams can efficiently reimburse employees worldwide with a program that automatically categorizes expenses and integrates with your ERP. A business can also set spending limits within specific categories over pre-defined periods, ensuring meticulous budget control.
Corporate Cards
Tipalti offers both physical and virtual cards that simplify the issuance, control, reconciliation, and reporting of employee expenses. This facilitates payment management and shortens the window of time it takes to reimburse an employee; which is particularly important for a small business that may have limited staff.
The Tipalti platform allows a business of any size to manage card spend, expenses, AP, even procurement, in a single, centralized dashboard.
Procurement
Compared to Concur, Tipalti offers advanced procurement management to help a business gain control over spend, gain visibility, and minimize risk. Modernize operations with a powerful, easy-to-use solution that manages all your purchases and fortifies workflows.
Using Tipalti Procurement, companies of any size can simplify intake, streamline supplier management, build custom approval workflows, establish a contract repository, speed up PO matching, and facilitate real-time integrations.
Top Integrations
Tipalti integrates with all ERP and accounting systems, including:
- Oracle NetSuite
- QuickBooks
- Sage Intacct and Sage ERPs
- Xero
- Microsoft Dynamic ERPs
- SAP ERPs
- Acumatica
Tipalti Pricing
Tipalti offers pricing plans that are suitable for businesses of different sizes and complexity. The Starter package costs $129 / month and includes a set number of users and invoices and free local bank transfers with every invoice processed.
Add-ons to the platform include additional users, multi entity payables, and currency accounts. Upgrading to higher-tier packages gets you access to Tipalti Procurement and Tipalti Expenses can be added on as needed.
What Does Concur Do?
Concur provides cloud-based software for expense management, travel, invoice processing, and payment. Concur has a strong travel and expense (T&E) offering and is primarily a spend management platform. Businesses use the company’s invoice products for AP automation.
Concur Product Capabilities Overview
Concur helps businesses manage their spend with expense management, travel, and invoice software. The invoice module provides functionality from purchase requisition through to invoice payment. Here are some of the top features:
Invoice Management
Invoice capture uses OCR technology and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to auto-populate data, followed by human validation to ensure the information from the header and line item level of the invoice is accurate before it gets processed.
A new feature has been introduced called the Invoice Payment Manager. This enables a business to batch schedule payments for a preferred time, and manually release payment for final approvals.
Concur Expense
This feature integrates with all of your expense data, so a business can effectively manage and control spending, wherever it happens. You can integrate travel spend, ERP, accounting, and card data into one system that manages the entire expense process, from request to reconciliation.
Payment Options
Once captured, the invoice gets routed for review and approval with the option to use a mobile app (iPhone or Android) for approvals. Once an invoice is fully approved, it can be paid via check or by integrating Concur with a payment partner solution..
Payment Partners
The Concur platform needs integration with third-party apps to provide payments functionality and access to a broader range of payment methods beyond checks.
Concur payment partners include NvoicePay, Paymerang, WayPay, TransferMate, AMEX, and others.
Top Integrations
Concur integrates with ERP systems including:
- SAP ERPs
- Oracle NetSuite
- QuickBooks
- Sage ERPS
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Microsoft Business Central (NAV)
Concur Pricing
Concur offers three packages:
- Automate: ~$2 per invoice average price (includes OCR, approvals routing, 2 and 3-way matching, check / ACH / credit card voucher payments)
- Insights: variable pricing (adds on personal data views, spend management alerts, line-level data capture to the Automate package)
- Optimize: variable pricing (add ons budget management, monitoring features, and consulting services to the Insights package)
Features of Tipalti vs. Concur
Both Tipalti and Concur offer software platforms for accounts payable process automation. Each software vendor offers features and solutions to streamline the payables process.
Let’s identify and compare some of the differences between Tipalti vs. Concur:
| Functionality |  |  |
|---|---|---|
| *Limited functionality | ||
| Payment Methods | ACH, Global ACH (eCheck), Wire Transfer, PayPal, Check, and Prepaid debit card.
| Check payments only. Payment partners are required for all other payment methods.
|
| Global Payment Coverage | Payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies.
| Requires use of payment partners for country and currency reach. |
| Automated invoice processing | Invoice capture by OCR at header and line level, machine learning, managed services. 2- & 3-way PO matching, custom fields support.
| Comparable capability
|
| Procurement | Integrated PO management solution, helping streamline company purchases, improve spend controls, and reduce AP processing time.
| PO creation, no Slack integration to accelerate approvals, no integrations with 30+ ticketing systems. |
| Supplier Onboarding and Vetting | Self-service supplier onboarding with a client-branded portal. Supplier choice of preferred payment method, currency; 26,000+ rules validate payments, screen against OFAC/SDN lists.
| Vendor data is uploaded manually or via API; no self-serve onboarding capability; the supplier portal was retired in Oct 2020.
|
| Tax Compliance | KPMG-approved tax engine, captures W8 & W9 tax forms, collects and validates IRS and VAT tax ID, 1099 & 1042 prep reports and calculates tax withholding. Automatically validates using more than 3,000 rules.
| No tax compliance |
| FX Solutions |
Currency conversions without the complications – save time and money on currency conversions. Also, advanced FX solutions – intercompany bank transfers, FX hedging, payee FX. | No FX solutions |
| Expense Management | Manage all employee spend in a single platform, mobile-friendly and desktop, global reimbursements, automatic reconciliation, compliance, and strong UX. | Comparable. Concur Expense is mobile-friendly, cloud-based tool to manage spend, with custom controls and AI technology. No global reimbursements. |
| Corporate Cards | Physical and virtual card solutions to streamline corporate spend, simplifying the issuance, control, visibility, and reconciliation of card expenditures. | Strong corporate card integrations. |
| ERP Integrations | Native API integrations with major ERPs (NetSuite, Intacct, and QuickBooks Online). Integration with all other ERPs via pre-built connectors using no-code, drag-and-drop interface. | Comparable ERP integration options, but no longer have native integration capabilities with NetSuite and require 3rd party connectors. |
Which Solution Works Best for Your Business (and Why)
Selecting and implementing an AP automation solution that best fits your business will streamline your financial workflows and save time and money by making the payables processes more efficient. The following scenarios will help you select the right partner:
When to Choose Tipalti
You run a hyper-growth business that is rapidly scaling
Your business needs scalability in an AP solution to meet your needs today and your expanded needs in the future. You will need software that processes a high volume of transactions or that can efficiently handle complex global payments for multiple entities or many geographic locations.
Tipalti Multi-Entity supports a consolidated headquarter payer account with multiple sub-entities associated with it so you can manage all entities’ payables operations from a single Tipalti model, enabling each entity to operate with its own unique workflow and enabling you to manage a large number of entities.
Tipalti lets you pay in 196 countries and 120 currencies without using third-party payment partners like in the case of Concur. Before every payment, Tipalti will screen suppliers against OFAC sanctions and other blacklists to prevent legal repercussions, including fines.
Additionally, Tipalti allows your suppliers to choose a preferred payment method with options including U.S. ACH, global ACH , wire transfer, PayPal, check, or prepaid debit card. Concur only offers, check and credit card voucher payment options.
Tipalti also offers advanced FX solutions including intercompany transfers, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimization to help streamline your global payments processes. These features are not available with Concur.Lastly, with Tipalti 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.
You want to automate the entire accounts payable process, end-to-end
Both Tipalti and SAP Concur can provide end-to-end accounts payable solutions from purchase requisition all the way through to invoice payment. However, there are some gaps in Concur’s offering.
Concur retired its supplier portal feature in October 2020 and instead uses vendor information from your ERP system in the payables process. Meanwhile, Tipalti helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labeled, multi-language portal, enabling faster, more accurate supplier data collection and verification.
Tipalti automatically validates collected supplier payment data in real-time using 26,000 global banking rules to proactively reduce payment errors by 66%.
The supplier portal is accessible 24×7 and provides visibility into payment status , and sends proactive automatic payment status emails. This reduces supplier inquiry and questions like “where’s my payment?” further saving you time.
Additionally, suppliers can choose a preferred payment method from a list of options. You can incent certain payment methods with early payment options that allow them to get paid before their due date and allow you to earn early payment discounts.
Both Tipalti and Concur offer similar invoice processing capabilities but some features that come standard with Tipalti result in extra costs with Concur. For example, line-level OCR data capture is not available in the baseline “Automate” invoice package. Tipalti also offers unlimited invoice approvers, whereas, with Concur, you may need to upgrade your package to allow enough approvers the ability to update coding on invoices.
Lastly, Tipalti handles the “last mile” of the payables process in-house, whereas Concur often relies on third-party payment partners for payment remittance. Tipalti is a licensed money transmitter and registered as a money service business with the ability to help you send funds quickly and securely across 196 countries in 120 different currencies.
You want to strengthen compliance and controls while reducing risk
Since AP involves direct access to cash reserves, it’s critical to institute proper controls and governance. 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.
20+ role-based permissions help enforce the segregation of duties by configuring who can initiate disbursements, fund accounts, create approval flows, run reports, and more.
The Tipalti Detect risk module is an internal network that proactively identifies and prevents potential ongoing fraud by proactively looking for patterns. Payers can block or suspend payees from receiving payments, identify blocked or suspended payees trying to create multiple accounts and get notified of suspicious payees.
Tax compliance is another crucial aspect, as manually collecting and validating tax forms from suppliers is fraught with legal and financial risk. 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, and W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports.
At the end of the year, the system can also automate the submission of 1099s (through integration with Zenwork for eligible payees) to the IRS using the data from Tipalti. Concur does not have any built-in tax capabilities.
When to Choose Concur
You do not conduct any business outside of the US
Concur has minimal global capabilities to help support your operations outside of the US. International payment options are minimal. Concur’s only global payment option is credit card vouchers and it does not support payment methods that global payees might demand, such as PayPal, Global ACH, and wire transfer.
In order to facilitate global payments, you will likely need to work with a third-party payment provider such as NvoicePay, Paymerang, WayPay, TransferMate, AMEX, or others instead of handling all payment operations in a single, unified manner. If you are OK with the provided payment methods or working with third-party payment providers, Concur may be appropriate.
You do not have a high volume of vendors
Concur provides limited vendor management capabilities and does not allow supplier self-service since its supplier portal was deprecated in October 2020. Therefore, vendor details and banking information must be manually uploaded or done through API instead of via self-service onboarding with built-in validations.
You also lose the ability to digitally collect vendor W-8 and W9 tax forms during onboarding and the resulting easy generation of year-end 1099 and 1042-S prep reports. Your team will have to allocate resources to maintain the vendor master file, managing vendor requests, and tax compliance.
This is not a scalable approach if you manage a large number of vendors. However, if your vendor list is small and not rapidly growing, Concur may be appropriate.
Your need if for a travel and expense management solution
Concur offers leading travel & expense (T&E) software for corporate travel and employee expense report reimbursement. If your primary need is for a T&E solution than an end-to-end accounts payable solution, consider Concur as a potential partner.
Signs It’s Time to Switch to Tipalti
Concur software is not as efficient as Tipalti because it lacks some critical AP automation features. Below are a few reasons why you should consider switching to Tipalti from manual processes or a less robust AP automation system.
1. You Want the Benefits of a Self-Service Supplier Portal
Tipalti helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labeled, multi-language portal, enabling faster, more accurate payee data collection, and validation against 26,000 global banking rules to proactively reduce payment errors by 66%. The portal also helps to reduce supplier inquiry on payment status further saving you time.
2. You need multiple supplier payment options and broader global payment coverage
Concur provides minimal international payment options and coverage for your global suppliers. Tipalti makes supplier payments to 196 countries and in 120 local currencies for worldwide coverage with six different available payment options.
3. You Need Help Streamlining Your Tax Compliance
Tipalti helps ensure IRS tax compliance with KPMG-approved tax form data collection, validation and withholding calculations. Collect W-9, and W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports.
4. You Have an Increasing Number of Reconciliation Challenges
Payables reconciliation takes time and can delay your financial close. With Tipalti, global payment remittance using multiple payment methods is automated and consolidated into real-time reports for more accurate and faster payment reconciliation, allowing you to accelerate financial close by 25%.
What Our Customers Say
As we were growing, we did not want to keep adding more people to support outbound payments. The big focus was to streamline everything, and remove manual processes as much as we could.
Phil Newell | Director, Finance & Accounting IT, GoDaddy
Our AP operation was all manual processing. It was brutal—emails back and forth and trying to record routine documentation. We were scrambling to find information for 1099s. We needed a more customized solution.
Nancy Spencer | VP of Finance, Aceable
Our finance professionals were spending 70 hours per month processing payments—we needed a system that would add automation and efficiency to our operations.
Andrew Cole | Senior Accounting Manager, Uptake
Save Time and Money with Accounts Payable Automation
In our survey of global accounts payable teams conducted with IFOL, we found that nearly half of all respondents process invoices manually over five days each month. Payables automation technology lets your company reduce data entry time and shift more resources and team knowledge to strategic finance for achieving business revenue growth and cost reductions.
When comparing the benefits of Tipalti vs. Concur, consider each system’s fit for your needs today and over the long-term into the future. Tipalti’s AP Automation solution helps you to streamline your day-to-day operations, rapidly scale and adapt to changing business needs, accelerate business visibility, and strengthen fraud, financial, cost, and cash controls.
Get started with a free demo of Tipalti today.
