Coupa Alternatives Comparison for UK Businesses

• Built-in OCR with touchless invoice processing. 
• 3-way or 2-way invoice matching. 
• Intelligent routing of approvals.
• Payment methods, entities, currencies, subsidiaries, and geographies are combined and reconciled in real-time.   
• Eliminate financial and compliance risks with VAT ID tax compliance, audit trails, approval workflows, and role-based views.

Companies with high volume and complex AP operations across various business verticals from software to eCommerce, manufacturing, online services, tech, gaming, gig economy, and marketplaces.

• Global, performance-based platform for marketplaces, networks, and communities.
• Reduce your payment error rates against 26,000 rules.
• End-to-end, invoice-based supplier payments designed for growing companies.
• AI-driven analytics for business intelligence and decision-making. 
• Outstanding customer support, with a a 98% customer satisfaction rating. 

Pricing is custom and varies based on business needs, processing requirements, and the volume of users.

Tipalti Starter and Tipalti Pro are the two plans offered.

• Tipalti Starter has straightforward payment capabilities for small business owners.
• Tipalti Pro is for medium and enterprise companies with multi-entity payables and international tax IDs.

• For invoice matching, allows POs, goods receipts, quality checks, or contracts, and uses recognition methods to view available data for best matching with missing information.
• Meets tax compliance regulations in over 50 countries.
• KPIs and process inefficiency insights with suggestions to improve.

Basware is used by large corporations with over 50 thousand invoices processed per year. Basware also provides an AP automation software solution for mid-market companies with a lower number of invoices processed.

• 100% accuracy rate for invoice capture using SmartPDF technology.
• High invoice match rate.
• Automated tax code handling and tax calculations.
• Automate non-PO invoices with custom spend plans, AI coding, and approval workflows. 

Basware pricing is by custom quote depending on business needs, with pricing by functionalities needed, business volume, and customisation needs. 

• Gets accurate and quick invoice data capture with machine learning and deep learning for invoices received by mail, email, fax, or EDI. 
• Provides a supplier portal for onboarding and status. 
• Automates invoice processing and approvals workflow, including 3-way matching and auto approval of invoices with no exceptions for global payments.
• Uses AI-driven predictive invoice coding by GL account, tax code, cost type, and cost centre. 
• Provides real-time dashboards with KPIs and other metrics for accounts payable visibility.  
• Allows multi-ERP integration for users with multiple systems. 

Large and medium-sized companies seeking a comprehensive solution for automating the cash conversion cycle. 

• Ability to receive supplier invoices in several different ways.
• Allows integration with multiple ERP systems.
• Feature set includes supplier statement matching and dynamic discounting.

Pricing is available by custom quote.

• Digital invoice capture.
• 3-way matching with purchase orders and receipts. 
• Anomaly and fraud detection for risk management.
• Audit trail. 
• Dashboards with KPIs.

Companies of all sizes in a wide range of industries use Medius for AP automation and payments. 

• ERP connector partnerships with ERP system consultants. 
• Pending vs. paid spend management visibility and KPIs. 
• Uses AI and machine learning. 

Quote-based pricing. Medius offers a range of pricing plans with increasing features, including Starter (for startups and small businesses), Professional, Enterprise, and Premium. If using Medius Pay in addition to AP Automation, unlimited number of suppliers are included in each plan; otherwise the number of suppliers is limited. Medius pricing is based on users, fixed invoice volume ranges, countries, and payment accounts. 

• Uploads invoices and bills to extract data. 
• Flags duplicate invoices. 
• Performs 3-way matching. 
• Automatically extracts Inventory data to your inventory software and price checks inventory. 
• Includes multi-tier approvals. 
• Reconciles supplier statements. 
• Provides foreign currency conversion. 

Best for small businesses and mid-market companies looking for inventory management integration.

• Manage 100% of invoices electronically, reducing processing time by up to 80%.
• Get inventory invoice price checking vs. supplier pricing data and immediately transfer inventory data on the invoice to integrated inventory software. 

Lightyear SaaS pricing (with a 1-month free trial) starts from £89 per month for 100 credits. Lightyear includes unlimited pages at no extra cost, unlimited users and sub-entities, and has no installation fees.

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 a growing amount of payments. You also need to offer a wide range of localised 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 need to keep investing 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 centralised controls and financial reporting.

Tipalti’s advanced capabilities include KPMG-approved tax capability for IRS compliance and collecting, validating, matching, and maintaining VAT IDs. Tipalti collects data and produces DAC7 preparation reports. 

While Coupa has limited international payout capability, Tipalti can execute fast global payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies, supporting multiple international payment methods—global ACH, wire transfer, PayPal, and prepaid debit card. You can also streamline your FX conversion workflow with advanced FX capabilities such as Multi-FX, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimisation.

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

Tipalti makes AP processes invisible. By cutting out 80% of manual payables workload, 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 in order 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.

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, providing 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 sanctions list compliance, and improve management oversight of key AP processes. Tipalti enables you to strengthen control with built-in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, constantly improving the performance of invoice approval routing with the ability to incorporate Fixed Approval Roles.

Tipalti solves the complex and manual process of collecting tax information via digital capture during the onboarding flow, ensuring information is validated before payment is even processed. Help ensure VAT ID, DAC7, and IRS tax compliance for payers.

Coupa is a solution primarily for large enterprises looking to solve a procurement problem that have sizable technology budgets. If you are a midmarket company, Coupa can be cost-prohibitive as the pricing model is designed for larger enterprises. Midmarket companies might find Coupa’s solution too complex as it is suited more for large enterprise companies with a dedicated procurement team. As primarily a procurement solution, Coupa is a fit for slower-growth large enterprises where growth is every bit as important as just cost controls. 

In contrast, Tipalti’s pricing model is ideal for midmarket companies. Pricing starts at £119 per month for the platform fee. As your business gets more complex, you can upgrade to Tipalti’s more advanced capabilities, such as W-8 tax forms, international tax IDs, or multi-entity payables. 

Tipalti’s solution is ideal for midmarket companies to pursue cost controls while growing and scaling efficiently. Eliminate the manual workload spent managing payables while avoiding AP hiring and focusing finance on high-value initiatives. As companies add more invoices, payments, global suppliers, subsidiaries, costs, and audit controls, Tipalti is built to easily and rapidly handle changing needs without requiring more resources.

It can take 8-12 months to implement and go live with Coupa. Many resources are required to be involved in the implementation process, including project managers, IT, procurement, and finance. Also, implementing Coupa requires significant change management initiatives and company-wide training because of the number of end-users needed for procurement, sourcing, and inventory solutions. If your priority is to automate AP instead of the overall procurement process, you still have to wait for the lengthy implementation effort to be completed.In contrast, Tipalti has a proven track record of getting customers live in as little as two weeks. The “white glove” implementation service provides customers with dedicated implementation, customer success, and supplier enablement experts that ensure a successful and scalable payables setup and a stable and accurate ERP sync.

Coupa is primarily a procurement solution designed for large enterprises. It is suitable for large businesses to manage their procurement process, but some AP automation capabilities are unavailable. So your business needs to manage them manually or add several other solutions to round up the AP cycle.

For the supplier payment workflow, Coupa launched “Coupa Pay” in 2018, but it still has a relatively low adoption rate within its customer base. Also, Coupa doesn’t have its own payment rails, relying on integrations with PayPal, TransferMate, and banks for card payments, creating complexity and unpredictability.

Coupa Pay offers limited cross-border payments capabilities and has no advanced FX solutions such as Multi-FX and FX hedging.Lastly, Coupa has limited tax compliance capabilities. They collect tax forms but do not offer tax rules validation to help ensure VAT ID, DAC7,  and IRS compliance. You need to manage the vendor tax compliance process outside of Coupa.