Tipalti vs. Coupa: Which Product Is the Best Fit for You?

Whether growing domestically, internationally, or both, you need software with scalability to future-proof your payables 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 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 need to keep investing more resources as you grow. With Tipalti Multi-Entity, you can manage several business entities with different AP processes & workflows within a single instance of the platform. Tipalti’s multi-entity capabilities will help your business to centralize financial controls & reporting while providing visibility into operations at both the entity and consolidated business levels. Coupa offers multi-entity capabilities but it cannot offer features like customer branding and tax workflows per entity.

While Coupa only collects tax forms, Tipalti has advanced, global tax compliance capabilities that include collecting, validating, and maintaining IRS, W-9, and W-8 series forms and VAT details, generating 1099/1042-S preparation reports, and calculating any necessary withholdings. Our tax capability meets IRS requirements, as prescribed by KPMG.

Tipalti can also 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 optimization. Coupa has limited international payout capabilities.

Tipalti and Coupa both automate AP processes and reduce manual workloads. However, only Tipalti offers end-to-end AP automation from supplier onboarding through to global remittance and payment reconciliation in a single purpose-built solution. Coupa requires you to add-on modules such as InvoiceSmash or Coupa Pay to achieve end-to-end functionality. 

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 GRNs from your ERP to Tipalti in order to complete the PO match flow, helping to eliminate overspend 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. Tipalti automatically validates supplier payment data in real-time using 26,000 global banking rules to proactively reduce payment errors by 66%. Tipalti’s supplier portal is accessible 24/7 and available in multiple languages. Suppliers can access the portal to check on invoice & payment statuses and the portal also sends proactive automatic payment status emails to reduce supplier inquiries. With Coupa, all supplier management is via the Coupa network with no white-label capabilities that let your brand take center stage. Coupa also does not do any payment validation to reduce payment errors.

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, providing a consolidated view of all payable accounts.

Both Tipalti and Coupa have experienced customer support teams and provide implementation services. Tipalti’s implementations are collaborative engagements where our team works closely with you to guide you through the process. Average time to go-live is four weeks, but the timeline can easily be accelerated with fast turnaround from your team.

In a mid-2022 presentation, Coupa sets the average timeline for go-live implementation at four months for mid-market companies and eight months for enterprise customers. It can often take 8-12 months before you are up and running with Coupa as its implementations are very time & resource intensive, involving project managers, IT, procurement and finance. Onboarding with Coupa is also a significant change management initiative that requires company-wide training with many end users in procurement, sourcing, inventory, and more. 

With Tipalti, you will experience a much faster time-to-value. With Coupa you will need to navigate the change management burden, longer implementation timelines, intense resource commitments on multiple functional areas & large implementation fees.

Coupa is a solution primarily for large enterprises looking to solve a procurement problem. Its customers often have sizable technology budgets. If you are a midmarket company, Coupa can be cost-prohibitive as the pricing model is designed for larger enterprises with a dedicated procurement team. 

Coupa’s core solution, which includes Procure and Invoice modules, is priced as a simplified, bundled amount, which is based on the company size and number of users. Customers usually sign a 3-year contract, and fees are paid upfront annually. Implementation fees can come close to the amount of annual subscription costs of the core solution, which can be expensive. Optional add-on modules like Expenses & Pay and optional add-on features like InvoiceSmash or OCR are priced separately as well.

In contrast, Tipalti’s pricing model is much simpler and ideal for midmarket companies. Pricing starts at $149 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 capabilities. 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 or substantial financial commitments.

Coupa is primarily a procurement solution and has some AP automation gaps that may require manual efforts to manage.

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 does not have its own payment rails, relying on integrations with PayPal, Transfermates, 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 intercompany transfers and FX hedging.

Lastly, Coupa has limited tax compliance capabilities. They collect tax forms but do not offer tax rules validation to help ensure IRS compliance. You need to manage the vendor tax compliance process outside of Coupa.

Coupa Spend Analysis helps companies to understand their business spend and to create new dashboards and reports that track progress against KPIs. Coupa also helps you to classify spend data for better analytics. Coupa also offers Community Insights that leverage AI and analytics on spend data from its network to prescribe insights that help companies reduce risk, and improve efficiency. Lastly, Coupa also offers Spend Guard to help you identify fraudulent spend using AI.

Tipalti does not offer anything comparable to Coupa Community Insights. However, Tipalti does offer robust reporting and analysis that includes over 20 pre-built reports related to payments, payees, bills, tax forms and more. Tipalti also has integrations with Datarails, PowerBI, and Tableau that enable finance users to view all finance data in one place using predefined dashboards or by building their own dashboards, empowering users to leverage KPIs and trends. Coupa does not offer tax reports, payment reconciliation, or detailed payee reports.

Lastly, Tipalti also offers AI-based fraud detection called Tipalti Detect. Since Tipalti manages the end-to-end supplier payments operation, it is able to track a wide variety of relevant datapoints – contact details, account numbers, emails, and payments – to proactively uncover patterns that help identify potential fraudsters in your network. With more than 7,400 payees blocked and $4 million in potential savings, Detect cuts the risk without any additional work required from you.