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


In this guide, we’ll provide a comparison of Stampli vs.Tipalti. In this guide, we’ll provide a comparison of Stampli vs.Tipalti. We’ve also paired it with a comprehensive guide to accounts payable.

When your business expands, the number of transactions you need to handle will grow. It’s critical to effectively manage supplier invoices from the beginning, as the volume and complexity of your accounts payable will inevitably increase over time.

AP automation solutions streamline financial workflows and enable overburdened AP departments to process a larger volume of invoices without breaking a sweat. 

Tipalti and Stampli are both popular AP automation solutions, which boast features like invoice processing and approvals, payment remittance, ERP integrations, and more. Unless you know the ins and outs of each system, choosing between the two can be a challenge.

Which solution fits your business best? In this article, we’ll compare the product capabilities of both systems and discuss how each one manages your accounts payable needs.

What Does Tipalti Do?

Tipalti is an accounts payable and procurement automation platform that integrates your entire AP lifecycle and payment management workflow into a single cloud-based solution.

Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview

Tipalti is built to support accounts payable across your entire enterprise, including business entities, subsidiaries, and international divisions. The software provides granular control over payables to protect your business from fraud and loss while augmenting internal processes. 

Tipalti can process payments in 50+ methods across 196 countries, and in 120 currencies, making it a lot easier for a business to transact on a global scale.

The system offers end-to-end automated features including:

The platform is designed to save your business time and money.

Tipalti integrates with any ERP and accounting system. This includes popular systems like:

  • Oracle NetSuite
  • Sage Intacct and Sage ERPs
  • QuickBooks
  • Xero
  • SAP ERPs
  • Microsoft Dynamic ERPs

Tipalti Pricing

Tipalti’s pricing model scales with your company. Pricing starts at $149 per month and you can seamlessly upgrade to Tipalti’s more advanced capabilities like multi-entity payables at any time.

What Does Stampli Do?

Stampli provides AP automation software for companies to manage financial workflows and process payments.

Stampli Product Capabilities Overview

Stampli helps organizations streamline accounts payable with communications, documentation, corporate cards, and payables features delivered via a centralized dashboard. Its AP automation solution supports both PO and non-PO invoices and gives your team control and visibility over corporate spending.

The Stampli solution includes features like invoice capture and coding, approval notifications, internal controls, integrations, and IT support. 

The platform integrates with a variety of common ERP systems including:

  • Sage Intacct
  • QuickBooks
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • SAP
  • Netsuite 

Stampli Pricing

Stampli does not provide public pricing on its website. The company charges a monthly platform fee that includes a fixed number of user licenses and invoices. There are fees for additional users and invoice overages. 

Stampli also charges a monthly fee for its payments module in addition to per-transaction fees. Stampli may also charge a monthly connector fee depending on your ERP integration.  For an exact quote, you will need to contact sales.

Features of Tipalti vs. Stampli

Although Tipalti and Stampli are both great tools to automate your AP processes, each platform has varying capabilities. Take a look at some of the features and solutions each platform has to offer:

FunctionalityTipaltiStampli
*Limited functionality 
Global Payments
Send payments via 6 methods to 196 countries in 120 currencies. 26,000 payment rules to reduce errors. Money transmitters licenses (MTLs) in the US; e-money institution authorization in the EU and UK
Send check or virtual card payments internationally in USD. International ACH to 30 countries. International wire to 150+ countries. No prepaid debit or PayPal payments. No MTLs
Bill Approval
No charge for bill approvers, approve bills via email with no login required
Invoice approvers pay a monthly fee, login required, cannot approve via email
Invoice Processing and PO Matching
Header and line-level OCR with machine learning + managed services for invoice data capture; AI-based GL coding, 2- & 3-way PO matching at the header and line-level with tolerance thresholds
Header level OCR with machine learning but no managed services to augment invoice data capture. ML-based GL coding. Tolerance thresholds for 2-way PO matching only
Foreign Exchange (FX) Solutions
Save time and money on currency conversions. Manage intercompany bank transfers between currency accounts, hedge your FX exposures, and provide full FX rate visibility to both payers and payees
Visibility into FX rates and the ability to automatically execute payments based on preset FX rate goals. No intercompany bank transfers between currency accounts
Tax and Regulatory Compliance
KPMG-approved tax engine: • Digital W-9 and W-8 tax forms • Collect and validate IRS tax forms and VAT tax IDs • 1099/1042-S tax prep reports • 3K tax validation rules • eFiling integrations and services
Collect, track, and manage W-9 and W-8 tax forms, as well as other vendor documents. No data validations, no tax prep reports, and no year-end eFiling.
Supplier Onboarding & Vetting
Advanced self-service client-branded portal to easily collect & track payment methods, currency, and payment thresholds. 26K payment validation rules reduce errors by 66%. Fee splitting allows payers to incent partners to adopt safer, more efficient payment methods
Branded supplier portal with self-service onboarding but no banking and tax rules validations. No fee-splitting.
Fraud Prevention
Fraud module for detailed payee monitoring and proactive screening before every payment. Screening of payees against OFAC/SDN lists
OFAC/SDN list screening but no fraud module.
Multi-Entity Payables Reconciliation
Manage multiple entities in a single instance with a consolidated view, instant reconciliation across entities, and payables workflows
Supports multiple entities in a single instance. Cannot offer different branding or tax onboarding flows per entity.
Procurement
Friendly purchase requisitions, PO creation & real-time budget visibility. Amazon punchouts, Slack, ticketing system, and other integrations accelerate approval workflows. Contact interface for renewal management
No procurement capability
Corporate Cards
Issue, control, and reconcile physical and virtual cards for pre-approved spending. Earn cash back on every transaction
Physical & virtual cards are issued for pre-approved purchases per vendor or expense category. Earn cashback
Expense Management
Set expense policies. Mobile app for expense filing and approvals. Global reimbursements and automatic reconciliation
Card-focused expense management. No employee reimbursements for out-of-pocket spending.

Which Solution Works Best for Your Business (and Why)

Choosing the right AP automation software for your business is not as easy as it seems. You must dig through a pile of features, tools, and integrations to decide on one that best fits your business. Here, we’ve tried to create a few scenarios to help you decide between Tipalti and Stampli:

When to Choose Tipalti

You need best-in-class invoice management to reduce payable team workloads

Tipalti’s AP solutions are proven to eliminate 80% of workloads. This helps you to avoid future AP hiring and uplifts your teams out of manual tasks, enabling them to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives

Smart Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology eliminates tedious, error-prone manual data entry. Tipalti provides not only header level, but also line level data capture, which means the difference between spending just 2 minutes to verify the coding vs spending 20 minutes capturing line level data with other solutions.

Approvals are considered the slowest stage in the invoice processing lifecycle. That’s why Tipalti ensures that our approval experience is streamlined from both the AP and approver’s perspective. 

Our solution speeds up approval time on the AP side by using AI technology that recommends the right approval flow based on historical data. If you have an approval policy in place, our flexible approval rules engine can maintain your approval metrics based on any combination of parameters.

Approving bills is also very easy, as we provide an optimal approval experience via email by making sure approvers can see the info they need at a glance, from the vendor’s past bills to any other related documents. Approvals can be done directly from email and with no need to log in or purchase additional users. 

Tipalti’s PO matching module is one of its strongest differentiators:

  1. We support both 2 and 3-way matching, on both the header and line level. 
  2. Our automatic AI matching engine, together with our intuitive UI, cuts down on AP time wasted manually comparing tens of lines per invoice. It allows you to complete the matching process within seconds and you can easily view all exceptions and update the bill if needed. 
  3. Our flexible matching tolerance engine, which allows you to define any combination of tolerance rules you want – on header level, line level, or both. You get the control you need without wasting time on redundant approvals.

You have growing domestic or global payables needs

You want to automate the entire accounts payable process from supplier onboarding through to payment reconciliation

When to Choose Stampli

You need a low-cost cost solution

Stampli offers a low-cost solution and flexible contracts with “try before you buy” free trials, and  month-to-month contracts with no commitment terms. It charges fixed monthly fees that include a set # of invoices and users. However, there can be hidden costs when working with Stampli

  • Each approver requires a user license and is charged an additional fee if above your user allotment – there is no ability to approve invoices directly from emails
  • Stampli’s payment module is an additional monthly fee (in addition to per-transaction pricing)
  • Stampli charges a monthly integration fee that varies based on API or file-based syncs

Consider value for money and ROI beyond the sticker price. Make sure you are getting a scalable solution that you will not need to rip and replace down the line as your payables workloads grow in volume and complexity.

You run a small business with simple AP needs

You need to get set up quickly

Four Signs It’s Time to Upgrade to Tipalti

Stampli is designed to help small businesses pay suppliers and perform lightweight bookkeeping. Its solution limitations begin to show once your business starts to grow.

Here are four reasons you may want to consider upgrading to Tipalti:

1. You Need to Streamline Global Supplier Payments

Stampli has limited international payment options, but Tipalti can send payments to 196 countries in 120 local currencies via global ACH, wire, PayPal, and more.

2. The Volume of Payments is Overwhelming

Are you processing hundreds of payments at a time? Then you need a flexible AP automation solution that efficiently scales with your business. Tipalti offers integrations that will automatically synchronize and reconcile ERP and accounting systems.

3. Your Business Needs Better Financial Controls

As you grow and add more people to the team, there is more of a need for financial controls. The payment lifecycle must be audited on a regular basis. Tipalti boasts enterprise-level financial controls that include built-in bill and supplier audit trails. It also automates reporting to support audit preparedness.

4. Your Reconciliation Challenges are Increasing by the Minute

Tipalti consolidates payment remittance results into custom reports for quicker and more accurate payment reconciliation and a faster financial close.

What Our Customers Say

The amount of time that’s been saved from moving to an automation process is very significant. We’ve removed 90% of the manual elements from the process, and we’re making it super easy for everyone at each stage to understand what’s going on.

Bradley Clifford | Assistant Controller, Stack Overflow

We were looking for something that made the approval process better. We liked the efficiency of Tipalti’s approval flow and its simplicity was very user-friendly and integrated well with NetSuite.

Byron Whitman | Corporate Controller, Next Insurance

The system is flexible for dynamically processing invoices with both two-way or three-way PO matching. That process is seamless. I can do it all in Tipalti and automatically know it’s synced back in our ERP system.

Cherith Aasen | Staff Accountant, RealWear

Save Time and Money with Accounts Payable Automation

Our in-depth survey of global AP teams found that nearly 50% of all respondents spend over five days each month processing invoices manually. That’s a lot of time wasted!

Adding accounts payable automation technology to your workflow allows teams to spend less time on manual data entry and more resources on business strategy and growth.

When comparing the benefits of Tipalti vs. Stampli, consider both the short and long-term needs of your business. If you plan to expand and work with more suppliers in the future, Tipalti’s automated AP solution is your answer. It enables a company to rapidly scale while enhancing visibility and strengthening financial controls.

Get started today with a free demo of Tipalti.

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