The Top Alternatives to Stampli

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

While Stampli 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 both 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.

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.

While Stampli doesn’t have its own payment rail, Tipalti has US money transmitter licenses in every state to ensure there aren’t disruptions to payer’s payout operations and eliminate the risk of fines and penalties for improper payouts.

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

Stampli is suitable for slower growth SMBs with simple AP workflows. Therefore, many AP automation capabilities are unavailable via Stampli, so you will need to manage them manually or add several other solutions to round up the AP cycle.

For invoice processing, Stampli’s OCR technology captures only the header-level information but not the line-level details. Stampli charges each bill approver $29 per month, which can quickly add up the cost for larger organizations. Stampli requires approvers to log in to the system to approve bills and does not have an email approval workflow. 

Stampli does not have purchase order management capabilities. You will need a different solution to manage the PO process; many AP problems occur during the PO creation process as the decision happens during the PO phase. Without a PO management capability, these inherent AP mistakes can’t be corrected after PO is created.

Lastly, Stampli 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 Stampli.

Stampli has minimal global capabilities to help support your operations outside of the US. 

Stampli OCR technology doesn’t support additional languages other than English. So the international invoice processing workflows will remain manual, increasing the finance team’s workloads.

Stampli 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 limited. Stampli only offers to pay via virtual card for global payments but does not support other payment methods that global payees need, such as PayPal, Global ACH, and wire transfer. 

Stampli has limited vendor management capability to help you manage a large number of vendors. There is no bi-directionally vendor record sync between Stampli and the ERP, so you will need to manage the payee data updates in both systems.

Stampli doesn’t provide self-service vendor onboarding capability and vendor payment data validations. So you will have to manage these workflows in your ERP.

Stampli 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 Stampli.

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.