The Top Alternatives to Zip
Tipalti
Tipalti offers procurement tools for a business to gain visibility into spend. Companies use Tipalti’s procurement software to capture, approve, and track spend. Save your team manual workloads and modernize operations with a powerful, easy-to-use platform that provides greater control over spending.
It’s time to move procurement away from ad-hoc emails, documents, tickets, and spreadsheets. Automation is the key to reducing maverick purchases, compliance risk, and manual processes. Tipalti customers see results with 90% spend under management, 3x faster approval cycles, and deployment in less than a month.
Top Features
- Collect Requests: Set up custom request forms for both vendors and purchases, ensuring the right data is always collected.
- Manage Approvals: Easy to build and manage approval workflows to match company policies without slowing down.
- Monitor Spending: Gain complete visibility into the purchasing process with easy access to documents and an audit trail.
Strengths
Guided Intake Forms Powered by AI
Employees create requests using a natural language input model powered by Tipalti AIâ„ . The system automatically generates a purchase request, including creating a title, selecting the correct payee, setting items and prices, classifying requests, and suggesting relevant information, even if the user doesn’t initially provide it.
It also provides dynamic intake workflows, offering step-by-step guidance with adaptive questions and selections that adjust based on responses, helping employees complete requests efficiently.
Integrations
Tipalti integrates with all leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This includes top brands like Xero, NetSuite, Quickbooks, Sage Intacct, Xero, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, and more, for data syncing.
Tipalti’s API
Tipalti’s API lets you connect your tech stack to the Tipalti solution. This will automatically trigger actions like approval, payments, data sync, and much more.
Pricing
Tipalti procurement plans depend on the number of requesters and approvers using the solution. Discounts apply when procurement is bundled together with Tipalti’s AP Automation solution.
Teampay
Teampay helps a business get ahead of spend with automated controls, greater visibility, and user-friendly analytics. Every purchase updates automatically, giving a company visibility into how it is tracking with a live reporting dashboard.
Optimize costs across your entire vendor portfolio and customize automated workflows that help control purchasing upfront. This works to enforce policies and directs employees to preferred vendors before a single dollar is spent. Teampay’s proactive approach makes it easy to code transactions as they happen.
Top Features
- Leverage Data: Data updates as transactions happen; quickly view vendor spend or export data.
- Automate Policies: Automated workflows help control purchasing upfront, prioritizing preferred vendors.
- Immediate Reconciliation: Import your chart of accounts and automatically reconcile with a vendor list.
Strengths
All-in-One Spend
Teampay integrates the tools teams use across every stage of the spend process, capturing all data in a single spot. This helps to deliver more accurate and relevant visibility into the data you need.
Ease-of-Use
The Teampay solution simplifies procurement and the approval process, with automation designed to guide and drive an intuitive spending process. It works the way people work, with easy implementation and zero training required.
Simple Automation
Spend more time on valuable tasks by automating repetitive, routine work. This creates more space in your day to focus on business growth.
Pricing
The cost to use Teampay requires a custom quote. They do offer a free, custom demo to see if the tool is a good fit for your business.
Precoro
Precoro is a procurement solution that helps a business streamline approval workflows, match invoices with receipts, set up rules for cost centers, control stock, and purchase directly from Amazon Business. It’s a fully automated process in one tool, with a completely customizable platform that makes procurement easier for your team.
The Precoro platform is easy to use and implement. Automate manual purchasing, improve team collaboration, and sync useful apps using intuitive features. Empower employees to enjoy procurement-related operations, increase order processing speed, and get 2.5x faster approvals.
Top Features
- Purchase Requests: Create, manage, and collect all types of purchasing requests.
- Approval Workflows: Workflow scenario builder and document-based approvals.
- Order Management: Manage a company’s expenses, purchases, stock, and payments.
Strengths
Continuous Support
Lifetime support of the product, with a 98% customer satisfaction rate. Using Precoro, there is also 80% less manual data entry.
Better Control
Plan, automate, and control operations and corporate spend. This includes greater oversight of budgets, reports, expenses, supplier management, 3-way matching, and products.
Real-time Tracking
Easily create a purchase request and track it in real-time. Precoro gives a procurement voice to employees and peace of mind to approvers.
Pricing
Precoro offers a 14-day free trial and simple, user-based pricing customized for your business type. For smaller teams with 20 users or less, the cost is $35/month, billed annually. For larger teams with over 20 users, pricing is individually tailored.
Procurement Express
ProcurementExpress.com is a simple procurement software solution that allows team members to create purchase requests on-the-go, and get approved by pre-defined parties. All relevant comments and documents can be attached to the PO, and easily managed for reporting and auditing.
A business can use Procurement Express to view and manage budgets in real time for insightful decision-making on each purchase. Eliminate spending mistakes and keep employees accountable for company card purchases. Draw accurate reports with a simple click, allowing your team to remotely manage POs anywhere in the world.
Top Features
- Purchase Requests and Approvals: Create PRs in minutes and quickly approve or reject requests.
- Custom Fields and Line Items: Set unique custom fields and upload all essential purchase data in minutes.
- 3-Way Matching: Cross-reference and verify AP expenses and turn your shopping cart into a draft PO.
Strengths
Cloud-Based
ProcurementExpress.com brings your entire purchasing process together in a single, cloud-based application. The platform’s efficient purchasing tools automate away the most menial, time-consuming tasks.
Batch Payments
Procurement Express simplifies batch payments, allowing a business to streamline financial controls and pay a variety of vendors at once.
Punchouts
Turn your online shopping cart into a ready-to-go draft purchase order. The system supports hundreds of online stores.
Pricing
Pricing is broken out into four plans:
- Basic – $340/month
- Self-Service Set-Up
- Single Company
- Reporting
- Small Business – $680/month
- Integrations
- Amazon Punch-Outs
- Standard Reporting
- Standard – $1,700/month
- Dedicated Implementer
- Amazon Punchouts
- Reporting
- Enterprise – quote
- Account Manager
- Integrations
- Custom Punchouts
Coupa
Coupa Procure is a leading spend management solution that allows a business to exercise spend control and position the company for resilience and growth. The system is ideal for organizations that seek visibility over expenses and optimization of supply chains.
The Coupa ecosystem enables finance teams to manage business spend across all of procurement, finance, and the supply chain to capture savings, mitigate risk, and improve efficiency.
The Coupa procurement system guides employees across the entire buying process. It’s built to surface preferred products and services, then alert employees to discounted pricing. The platform also provides flexible configuration rules to achieve optimum compliance.
Top Features
- SOW-Based Spend Management: Guide teams to enter the right data for SOW-based services with flexible forms.
- Seamless Shopping: Coupa Open Buy feature reduces rogue spend and increases savings with a central area to compare items.
- Simple Purchase Requisitions: Automatically alerts employees to advantageous terms and discounted prices.
Strengths
Better Control
By maximizing pre-approved spend, a business can gain complete visibility of its entire purchase-to-pay process. It gives you the control needed to ensure compliance.
Spend Under Management
Simplify your PR and order processes and track them in real-time. Coupa allows you to get the most pre-approved spend flowing through the procurement system.
Ensure User Adoption
Coupa’s Source-to-Pay program provides a modern procurement experience that enables easier adoption for every employee and supplier. This type of maximized adoption, inevitably, creates maximized value.
Pricing
Coupa offers custom pricing with options for licensing or a subscription. There is a one-time setup cost for installation, configuration, and customization for on-premise software.
The system also offers a variety of video tutorials and demos to ensure it’s the right fit before purchasing.
Tipalti vs Zip
Whether you run a startup or enterprise, understanding the top tools for procurement, and comparing those with your needs, is a critical first step to purchasing the right solution.
Here’s a closer look at two of the top brands on the market for procurement automation: Tipalti vs Zip HQ.
What does Tipalti do?
Tipalti helps a business modernize procurement operations with a powerful, user-friendly solution that provides greater control over spending. Capture, approve, and track expenses in a single spot, while reducing maverick spend, and promoting robust risk management.
Move procurement away from ad-hoc emails, documents, and spreadsheets. Tipalti can save your team manual work and provide more transparency. Customers see results with:
- 3x faster approval cycles
- 90% spend under management
- Less than 1 month to deploy
In addition to smart procurement tools, Tipalti provides an award-winning AP automation solution as well as corporate cards and expense management. It provides granular control over the payable process with a self-service supplier portal, custom approval flows, and a multi-entity architecture.
How are you automating procurement right now?
Tipalti gives a business greater control over spend and deeper insight into procurement. What are you waiting for?
Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview
Tipalti has a 99% customer retention rate with hundreds of accolades. The system offers scalability and efficiency while minimizing extra headcount. The platform saves your business money, processing transactions with 50+ different payment methods, across 196 countries, in 120 currencies.
Easy Requisition Management
Capture spend from the very beginning with AI-powered, employee-friendly intake forms that employees can easily submit with purchase requests. This centralizes control and ensures you collect all critical data upfront, like employee needs, amount, and budget items.
Seamless Purchase Orders
Automatically create POs and eliminate the need for manual data entry. Tipalti Procurement generates a purchase order once a request is approved.
Advanced Approval Flows
Companies can automate with rule-based approvals routing. Move approvals out of emails, tickets, and spreadsheets, and leverage automation to reduce manual work and eliminate bottlenecks.
Streamlined Vendor Management
A business can use Tipalti procurement tools to streamline its vendor onboarding and management. Custom registration forms make onboarding vendors fast and frictionless, including collecting financial, contact, and contractual details.
Real-time Integrations
Get more value out of your integrations and existing tech stack. Tipalti offers pre-built integrations with leading SSO, ERPs, and Slack to power a seamless process and ensure relevant data automatically syncs.
Tipalti Pricing
Tipalti procurement pricing plans depend on the number of requesters and approvers using the solution. Discounts apply when procurement is bundled together with Tipalti’s AP Automation solution.
What Does Zip Do?
ZipHQ is a robust procurement solution with strong upstream functionality in the source-to-pay process. They provide a single place for employees to initiate a vendor request or purchase. Requests are quickly routed for approval across several departments, like IT, finance, legal, and security.
Zip integrates with P2P and ERP platforms to quickly generate PRs and POs. It’s a solid intake-to-procure solution, helping companies gain greater visibility across all purchases, while dramatically improving the employee experience.
Zip HQ Product Capabilities Overview
Zip can help a business scale procurement operations and reduce administrative burden by up to 40%. It gets a business involved with spend earlier, reducing compliance leakage and cutting costs. Key capabilities include:
Zip Intake
Simple forms guide the purchase requester and loop in the proper stakeholders. Following approval, the requester has visibility into the open PO amount and number. The system ingests and categorizes vendors, and flags any overlaps.
Purchase Order Management
Create POs from approved requests, manage open POs, and send them to vendors through an open vendor portal. You can also manage change orders with associated approvals and sync PO data to the ERP with custom field support.
Zip Vendor Cards
Zip offers a corporate card solution that enables vendor payments while strengthening visibility into spend. Virtual cards can be issued for recurring or one-time purchases, or automatically generated for workflows based on approval conditions, like spend category or purchase price.
Renewal Management
ZipHQ has tools for a business to run a proactive renewal process. Get early warning signs before any renewals, letting teams know exactly when to start preparing for negotiations. Easily collect all performance and sentiment data needed to evaluate a renewal and automatically generate renewal workflows when contracts are uploaded.
SAP Ariba & Coupa Integrations
Zip has partnerships with both SAP Ariba and Coupa. Zip’s intake-to-procure solution and SAP Ariba or Coupa’s procure-to-pay solution give joint customers an end-to-end purchasing workflow with a consumer-style user experience.
ZipHQ Pricing
Zip does not offer pricing on its website – you will have to call for a custom quote.
Features of Tipalti vs. Zip
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| *Limited functionality | ||
| Procurement | Integrated procurement and payables solution. Streamline purchases with AI-powered,user-friendly requisitions, improve spend controls & compliance, and reduce payables processing time. | Comparable capabilities – focus on intake-to-procure, downstream procure-to-pay capabilities are new. |
| Approvals | Easy to build and manage approval workflows that match company policies. Accelerate approvals with connected workflows that support parallel approvals and approve requests from Slack or email.
| Loop in stakeholders upon request, sequenced and parallel-tracked approvals, visibility to track purchase and vendor approval pipeline, easily adjustable approval workflows. |
| Supplier Management | Onboard suppliers with self-service portal and choice of payment method, currency, etc., with 26K+ rules, validate payments, and reduce errors by 66%.
| White-label self-service registration for supplier intake and approval. No contingent workforce capabilities (contractors, freelancers) or fee splitting.
|
| Tax and Compliance | KPMG approved tax engine to collect & validate IRS, VAT tax IDs, W-9, W-8BEN, etc. against +3,000 rules. 1099 and 1042-S prep reports, auto-calculated withholdings, and eFiling services. | Tax form collection part of vendor intake but no KPMG-approved digital tax form capture and validation or global tax. |
| Invoice Management | OCR with header and line level data capture, change logic applied to future invoices, custom fields, expense accounts auto-filled based on predictive smart logic, 2 and 3-way PO matching, Pre-defined approval rules, and more.
| Invoice inbox and email sync, vendor portal invoice uploads, OCR data capture, two-way PO matching, dynamic approval routing.
|
| Global Remittance | Regulated MSB with MTLs across US. E-Money license in UK with FCA. Blue-chip bank partners Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo (plus Visa & PayPal). Pay to 196 countries in 120 currencies,50+ payment methods (ACH, global ACH / eCheck, check, wire transfer, PayPal, prepaid debit). | Partnered with Airwallex for payments. Pay vendors in 140+ countries and 40+ currencies. ACH, international ACH, wire, and check payment methods. |
| Corporate Cards | Physical and virtual cards; manage and reconcile card spend, receive cash-back, integrate with global payables automation platform bringing financial controls into card spend with automatic reconciliation.
| Virtual cards as vendor payment method.
|
| Expense Management | Automated expense policies, Mobile app, global reimbursements, automatic reconciliation of expense transactions, reimbursements are automatically captured, categorized, and processed.
| None
|
Knowing Which Solution is Best for Your Business
Selecting a smart procurement solution is a critical choice for growing teams needing to streamline spend management.
Consider some of these common scenarios when choosing between Tipalti and ZipHQ:
When to Choose Tipalti?
Your business requires a mature, proven end-to-end solution
Tipalti offers a single unified solution for everything from purchase requisition to payment reconciliation, enhancing their depth and breadth since 2010. The platform has a 99% customer retention rate, a 98% customer support satisfaction rate, and a customer roster that includes world-renowned brands like Twitter, Twitch and Roblox. Solution capabilities include procurement, AP automation, corporate cards, global payments, and expense management. Deep features like supplier management, tax compliance, advanced FX, fraud prevent, multi-entity, and more ensure Tipalti’s solutions will scale with you as you grow.
In contrast, Zip launched in 2020 as an “intake-to-procure” solution. In May 2023, they added “procure-to-pay” (P2P) functionality which will take time to mature. In many cases, Zip still hands over P2P responsibility to platforms like Coupa & SAP Ariba. Tipalti has more robust capabilities downstream as compared to ZIP’s new “procure-to-pay” solution.
Your organization needs adjacent solutions to procurement
The type of solution you choose will depend on your business needs. If you need anything more than procurement automation, you may want to consider Tipalti. Although Zip has some new AP automation features launched in May 2023, Tipalti has offered advanced accounts payable automation for years.
There is more maturity and depth to Tipalti’s solution, with features like optical character recognition (OCR) with header and line-level data capture, and other functionalities such as:
- Managed services to augment and improve invoice data capture accuracy
- Change logic applies to future invoices using machine learning
- Custom fields and expense accounts auto-filled based using artificial intelligence
- 2- and 3-way PO matching with tolerance thresholds and prepayments
- Pre-defined approval rules or approval flows based on predictive smart logic
In contrast, Zip makes no mention of ML-based OCR or managed services. There is no auto-GL coding, 3-way matching, or predictive approval routing, and much of its downstream “procure-to-pay” capabilities have dependencies on upstream “intake-to-procure” workflows.
Some of the additional features outside of procurement that Tipalti offers (which Zip does not) include:
- Mass Payments workflows
- Payment validation, screening (including OFAC/SDN lists) & fraud detection
- International tax compliance
- Expense management
- Real-time API integrations to several ERPs
Tipalti’s solutions are unmatched, as the company continues to execute on its finance automation vision.
Your business has growing global needs
As your business is scaling domestically or expanding internationally, Tipalti meets spend management needs with built-in scalability and future-proof functionality. It assists with workflow complexities, paying global suppliers, higher transaction volumes, and handling multi-subsidiary workflows.
You may also need to offer a wide range of localized payment methods and currencies to ensure everyone gets paid, whether in the same country or across borders.
Tipalti can execute quick, international payments to 196 countries, in 120 currencies, with built-in fraud prevention capabilities. Tipalti supports multiple payment methods, like:
- Wire transfer
- Global ACH (eCheck)
- US ACH
- Check
- PayPal
- Prepaid debit card
Tipalti is a regulated money services business with licenses across the US, UK, and EU, and has blue-chip bank partners, including Citi, JP Morgan, Chase, Wells Fargo, Visa and PayPal.
Zip has partnered with Airwallex for its payment capabilities and has less control over its payment processes and capabilities. Zip can pay vendors in 140+ countries and 40+ currencies via its Airwallex partnership.
Tipalti’s Multi-Entity architecture allows payers to manage a large number of entities within the same instance of Tipalti, enabling further centralized controls and in-depth financial reporting.
A business can also streamline FX conversion workflows with advanced FX features like intercompany bank transfers, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimization. Zip does not offer comparable advanced FX solutions.
When to Choose Zip
You have an upstream focus on the intake of purchase requests
Zip is hyper-focused on “intake-to-procure”. Thus, if your business is just looking for a solution to address that need, Zip may be a solid option. Zip has integrations with enterprise-level “procure-to-pay” (P2P) solutions like SAP Ariba and Coupa and still hands off P2P responsibility to other solutions in many cases.
Tipalti procurement can be purchased on its own as well. Tipalti enables you to modernize your procurement operations with a powerful, easy-to-use solution that provides greater control over spending, reducing maverick purchases while mitigating financial and compliance risk. You can always expand downstream into AP automation, global payments, cards, and expense management later for more complete spend control.
While Zip and Tipalti offer similar procurement functionality, Zip has some limitations in its “intake-to-procure” workflow, including:
- Zip does not offer a receiving module (e.g. for 3-way PO matching). All companies want 3-way matching sooner or later. Without a receiving module leveraged by the employees leading purchases, this cannot be achieved.
Your company has a larger budget
Zip charges SaaS fees based on tranches of FTEs in order to grant access to all employees in an organization. ZIP knows a customer’s FTE count based on HRIS connections, and the pricing scales as your business grows.
Tipalti pricing is based on number of user licenses and allows for organizations to conduct partial procurement process roll outs; for example, in one geography, one department, etc. Some upper-mid-market organizations do not want a fully decentralized procurement process.
Zip’s pricing may result in waste post launch. Based on Tipalti data, even in the most decentralized companies, it is rare to see more than 20-30% of the FTEs involved in the procurement process. This means that Zip’s unlimited user pricing is actually overcharging the customer as they don’t need everyone to access it.
You need detailed purchase requisition forms for employees
Zip prides itself on having intuitive purchase intake forms that will increase adoption, but not training for employees. Similarly, Tipalti offers simple requisitions that increase uptake and spend under compliance.
However, ZIP asks requesters to fill out a variety of detailed questions, as the purchase request flows downstream, for parallel approvals by stakeholders, including legal, IT, and security.
Tipalti separates the purchase request from the vendor and contract requests. Typically, employees request the purchase, and procurement will open the vendor or contract requests, and they know how to answer the harder questions.
Tipalti allows you to submit a PR associated with an unregistered supplier, and then run interconnected parallel PR approval and supplier approval processes. The consult feature also allows approvers to involve legal, finance, IT, etc. when needed as a sidebar to the purchase flow.
Tipalti plans to release parallel approvals for the same record (e.g. Security and Legal reviewing a vendor simultaneously) in 2023.
What Customers Are Saying
The best practice is to have a purchase order first–the requisition needs to be approved before we receive the invoice. After we have a valid PO, we wait for the supplier to send us the invoice, and then we can match it to the PO and then make the payment. Tipalti has automated the entire process for us.
Henry Zhuang | Accounting Manager, Jumio
With [Tipalti], we successfully optimized the way we were handling procurement.
Yehuda Metzger | Procurement, Taboola
Automating procurement is an essential strategy to streamlining operations, saving money, and reducing manual labor. It helps an organization enhance accuracy and make smarter, data-driven decisions. This contributes to better business performance and competitiveness.
There are many options to choose from, so be sure to perform due diligence upfront, to avoid getting stuck with a stagnant platform. Implementing the right tools now means tighter controls in the future and a sharper competitive edge.
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