The Top Alternatives to Concur

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

While Concur has limited international payout capability, Tipalti can execute 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 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.

While Concur provides limited supplier management capabilities, Tipalti 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.

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, and W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports with automated filing.

Concur is primarily an expense management platform with basic invoice management capabilities. It can be suitable for small domestic businesses with simple AP workflows, but many AP automation capabilities are unavailable. So you will need to manage them manually or add several other solutions to round up the AP cycle.

Concur has limited supplier management capabilities. The supplier portal was retired in October 2020, so all the supplier requests must be handled manually outside of Concur by the AP team, which puts additional burdens on the team.

Concur provides limited payment methods via check and the virtual card while they retired their ACH payment capability in January 2022. So, many of the payments have to be executed outside of Concur through integration with other payment providers or integration with banks, creating complexity and unpredictability.

Lastly, Concur doesn’t have built-in tax compliance capabilities and tax rules validation to help ensure IRS compliance. You need to manage the vendor tax compliance process outside of Concur.

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. And your team will have to spend much time maintaining the vendor master file and managing vendor requests. It is not a scalable solution if you manage a large number of vendors.

Concur does not support vendor W-8 and W9 tax form collection and year-end 1099 and 1042-S prep reports. So you will need to manage vendor tax compliance outside of Concur.

Lastly, there is no built-in fee-splitting option to help your payees to adopt safer, lower cost, and more efficient payment methods and reduce check usage.

Concur has minimal global capabilities to help support your operations outside of the US. Concur provides limited supplier management capabilities and does not allow self-service vendor onboarding. There is no systematic, technology-driven, rule-based process to validate the supplier’s banking details, especially for international vendors, to help reduce payment errors proactively.

Concur does not have Multi-Entity capability. Payers need a separate instance of Concur for each entity, so payers can’t instrument centralized controls and will have to reconcile payables data manually for each entity.

Concur 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 minimal. Concur only offers the virtual card option for global payments but does not support payment methods that global payees might demand, such as PayPal, Global ACH, and wire transfer.