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


Future-proof your business by leveraging the most advanced technologies in expenses, procurement, accounts payable, invoice processing, approval workflows, corporate cards, and more. Learn how Tipalti puts you in the driver’s seat.

In this guide, we’ll offer a comparison of Concur vs. Tipalti, examining key features like AP automation, procurement, invoice processing, expense management, corporate cards, approval workflows, and global payments. 

As your business expands, you need an automation system that will efficiently handle invoice processing and global supplier payments, reducing business costs; steering through any economic headwinds to optimize results. 

You can do this by using AP automation software to streamline the payables workload, including supplier onboarding and tax compliance, purchase order and invoice management, approvals, and payments. This workflow automation lets your company reduce routine accounting time and shift to higher-value strategic work. 

Scalability for handling a larger volume of complex supplier transactions and reducing future accounts payable hires are benefits of AP automation. You’ll also improve financial controls, reduce costly fraud, and reduce errors. 

Alternatives, like Tipalti and Concur, use ERP systems or accounting software integrations to eliminate manual processes from an AP workflow.

Which solution best meets your business needs? In this guide to Tipalti vs. Concur, we compare product functionality for each platform. We also highlight the differences to help you decide which software is a better fit for your company. 

What Does Tipalti Do? 

Tipalti is a provider of robust, cloud-based AP automation software. The intuitive platform is mostly used by midmarket companies, offering in-depth insights, dedicated customer support, and a universal solution to your burning financial needs.

Save your top talent for business growth.

Stop wasting skilled workers on monotonous, manual processes. Use them for innovation. Tipalti bridges the gap with end-to-end automation for various accounting tasks like invoice management, global payments, PO matching, reconciliation, and more. Sign up for a free demo now.

Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview

Tipalti’s AP automation, and global payments software provides purchase order management, self-service supplier onboarding, invoice management, and tax and regulatory compliance. Tipalti software improves business efficiency. The holistic platform also offers advanced tools for expense management, procurement, and corporate cards. 

Tipalti offers scalability to expand through internal growth and acquisitions while minimizing headcount additions. Tipalti software saves you money and lets you avoid the need to implement an on-premise system to perform the same functions, when you experience business growth.

A few of the top features include:

Global Capabilities

With multi-entity cloud architecture, Tipalti supports payables across your enterprise globally, including business units, subsidiaries, and divisions. Unlike key competitors such as Stampli, Bill.com, or Avidxchange, Tipalti provides enterprise-grade financial controls to protect your company from fraud risk and strengthen internal controls. 

Multiple Payment Methods

Tipalti supports multiple payment methods in 196 countries and 120 currencies, supplier payment status communications, payment reconciliation, and reporting. You can also decide whether to split or shift payment processing fees to payees, reducing your costs. 

Expense Management

The Tipalti platform provides advanced tools for expense management as well. Using a single system, you can bolster spend control and gain consistent visibility into what employees are purchasing. 

Finance teams can efficiently reimburse employees worldwide with a program that automatically categorizes expenses and integrates with your ERP. A business can also set spending limits within specific categories over pre-defined periods, ensuring meticulous budget control.

Corporate Cards

Tipalti offers both physical and virtual cards that simplify the issuance, control, reconciliation, and reporting of employee expenses. This facilitates payment management and shortens the window of time it takes to reimburse an employee; which is particularly important for a small business that may have limited staff. 

The Tipalti platform allows a business of any size to manage card spend, expenses, AP, even procurement, in a single, centralized dashboard.

Procurement

Compared to Concur, Tipalti offers advanced procurement management to help a business gain control over spend, gain visibility, and minimize risk. Modernize operations with a powerful, easy-to-use solution that manages all your purchases and foritrfies workflows. 

Using Tipalti Procurement, companies of any size can simplify intake, streamline supplier management, build custom approval workflows, establish a contract repository, speed up PO matching, and facilitate real-tiem integrations. 

Top Integrations

Tipalti integrates with all ERP and accounting systems, including:

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

Tipalti Pricing

Tipalti offers https://tipalti.com/pricing/ that are suitable for businesses of different sizes and complexity. The Starter package costs $129 / month and includes a set number of users and invoices and free local bank transfers with every invoice processed.

Add-ons to the platform include additional users, multi entity payables, and currency accounts. Upgrading to higher-tier packages gets you access to Tipalti Procurement and Tipalti Expenses can be added on as needed.

What Does Concur Do?

Concur provides cloud-based software for expense management, travel, invoice processing, and payment. Concur has a strong travel and expense (T&E) offering and is primarily a spend management platform. Businesses use the company’s invoice products for AP automation. 

Concur Product Capabilities Overview

Concur helps businesses manage their spend with expense management, travel, and invoice software. The invoice module provides functionality from purchase requisition through to invoice payment. Here are some of the top features:

Invoice Management

Invoice capture uses OCR technology and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to auto-populate data, followed by human validation to ensure the information from the header and line item level of the invoice is accurate before it gets processed.

A new feature has been introduced called the Invoice Payment Manager. This enables a business to batch schedule payments for a preferred time, and manually release payment for final approvals.

Concur Expense

This feature integrates with all of your expense data, so a business can effectively manage and control spending, wherever it happens. You can integrate travel spend, ERP, accounting, and card data into one system that manages the entire expense process, from request to reconciliation.

Payment Options

Once captured, the invoice gets routed for review and approval with the option to use a mobile app (iPhone or Android) for approvals. Once an invoice is fully approved, it can be paid via check or by integrating Concur with a payment partner solution.. 

Payment Partners

The Concur platform needs integration with third-party apps to provide payments functionality and access to a broader range of payment methods beyond checks. 

Concur payment partners include NvoicePay, Paymerang, WayPay, TransferMate, AMEX, and others.

Top Integrations

Concur integrates with ERP systems including:

  • SAP ERPs
  • Oracle NetSuite
  • QuickBooks
  • Sage ERPS
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Business Central (NAV)

Concur Pricing

Concur offers three packages:

  1. Automate: ~$2 per invoice average price (includes OCR, approvals routing, 2 and 3-way matching, check / ACH / credit card voucher payments)
  2. Insights: variable pricing (adds on personal data views, spend management alerts, line-level data capture to the Automate package)
  3. Optimize: variable pricing (add ons budget management, monitoring features, and consulting services to the Insights package)

Features of Tipalti vs. Concur

Both Tipalti and Concur offer software platforms for accounts payable process automation. Each software vendor offers features and solutions to streamline the payables process. 

Let’s identify and compare some of the differences between Tipalti vs. Concur:

FunctionalityTipaltiConcur
*Limited functionality 
Payment Methods
ACH, Global ACH (eCheck), Wire Transfer, PayPal, Check, and Prepaid debit card.
Check payments only. Payment partners are required for all other payment methods.
Global Payment Coverage
Payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies.
Requires use of payment partners for country and currency reach.
Touchless invoice processing
Invoice capture by OCR at header and line level, machine learning, managed services. 2- & 3-way PO matching, custom fields support.
Comparable capability
Procurement
Integrated PO management solution, helping streamline company purchases, improve spend controls, and reduce AP processing time.
PO creation, no Slack integration to accelerate approvals, no integrations with 30+ ticketing systems.
Supplier Onboarding and Vetting
Self-service supplier onboarding with a client-branded portal. Supplier choice of preferred payment method, currency; 26,000+ rules validate payments, screen against OFAC/SDN lists.
Vendor data is uploaded manually or via API; no self-serve onboarding capability; the supplier portal was retired in Oct 2020.
Tax Compliance
KPMG-approved tax engine, captures W8 & W9 tax forms, collects and validates IRS and VAT tax ID, 1099 & 1042 prep reports and calculates tax withholding. Automatically validates using more than 3,000 rules.
No tax compliance
FX Solutions
Currency conversions without the complications – save time and money on currency conversions. Also, advanced FX solutions – intercompany bank transfers, FX hedging, payee FX.
No FX solutions
Expense Management
Manage all employee spend in a single platform, mobile-friendly and desktop, global reimbursements, automatic reconciliation, compliance, and strong UX.
Comparable. Concur Expense is mobile-friendly, cloud-based tool to manage spend, with custom controls and AI technology. No global reimbursements.
Corporate Cards
Physical and virtual card solutions to streamline corporate spend, simplifying the issuance, control, visibility, and reconciliation of card expenditures.
Strong corporate card integrations.
ERP Integrations
Native API integrations with major ERPs (NetSuite, Intacct, and QuickBooks Online). Integration with all other ERPs via pre-built connectors using no-code, drag-and-drop interface.
Comparable ERP integration options, but no longer have native integration capabilities with NetSuite and require 3rd party connectors.

Which Solution Works Best for Your Business (and Why)

Selecting and implementing an AP automation solution that best fits your business will streamline your financial workflows and save time and money by making the payables processes more efficient. The following scenarios will help you select the right partner:

When to Choose Tipalti

You run a hyper-growth business that is rapidly scaling

You want to automate the entire accounts payable process, end-to-end

You want to strengthen compliance and controls while reducing risk

When to Choose Concur

You do not conduct any business outside of the US

You do not have a high volume of vendors

Your need if for a travel and expense management solution

Signs It’s Time to Switch to Tipalti

Concur software is not as efficient as Tipalti because it lacks some critical AP automation features. Below are a few reasons why you should consider switching to Tipalti from manual processes or a less robust AP automation system. 

1. You Want the Benefits of a Self-Service Supplier Portal

2. You need multiple supplier payment options and broader global payment coverage

3. You Need Help Streamlining Your Tax Compliance

4. You Have an Increasing Number of Reconciliation Challenges

What Our Customers Say

As we were growing, we did not want to keep adding more people to support outbound payments. The big focus was to streamline everything, and remove manual processes as much as we could.

Phil Newell | Director, Finance & Accounting IT, GoDaddy

Our AP operation was all manual processing. It was brutal—emails back and forth and trying to record routine documentation. We were scrambling to find information for 1099s. We needed a more customized solution.

Nancy Spencer | VP of Finance, Aceable

Our finance professionals were spending 70 hours per month processing payments—we needed a system that would add automation and efficiency to our operations.

Andrew Cole | Senior Accounting Manager, Uptake

Save Time and Money with Accounts Payable Automation

In our survey of global accounts payable teams conducted with IFOL, we found that nearly half of all respondents process invoices manually over five days each month. Payables automation technology lets your company reduce data entry time and shift more resources and team knowledge to strategic finance for achieving business revenue growth and cost reductions. 

When comparing the benefits of Tipalti vs. Concur, consider each system’s fit for your needs today and over the long-term into the future. Tipalti’s AP Automation solution helps you to streamline your day-to-day operations, rapidly scale and adapt to changing business needs, accelerate business visibility, and strengthen fraud, financial, cost, and cash controls.

Get started with a free demo of Tipalti today.

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