Top Hat Automates Global Accounts Payable Operations & Royalty Payments

HQ Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Customer Since 2018
Industry Education Marketplace

“It’s about leveling up the finance team from being the people that code invoices and pay people, to actually being real drivers of business success and topline growth.”

—Nicholas Corradino, Senior Financial Analyst—Revenue Operations, Top Hat

“Make Education Better.” This idea was the key to the creation of Top Hat—a revolutionary company that was built to reinvent the teaching experience. Top Hat’s interactive, cloud-based platform had one mission: to utilize the technology students were already bringing into the classroom—smartphones.

Championing professors and institutions alike, Top Hat believes in engaging students both inside and outside the classroom—a goal that propels them to create easy-to-use tools built to gamify lessons, create next-generation interactive textbooks, implement on-demand assignments, and securely administer tests. Now, more than 2 million students at 750 of the top colleges and universities in North America rely on Top Hat for a better educational experience.

And the key to success? Strong collaboration with frontline educators and the internal mantra, “work smart.”

When Nicholas Corradino began his role as the Senior Financial Analyst—Revenue Operations at Top Hat in September 2017, “working smart” needed to be applied to payment operations. At the time, Top Hat didn’t have a dedicated resource managing Accounts Payable. Instead, it fell to Corradino to manage the entire process. As he states, “I had to deep dive to figure out what was wrong. Everything had to be signed off by our CFO and CEO, and it was all manual.”

Corradino quickly realized that in order to keep up with Top Hat’s growth, something had to change.

“I sat down with our director of finance—AP Automation was my first big project. We didn’t want to be wasting anyone’s time.”

It was a top priority for Corradino to outsource and automate as much as possible. Top Hat had already implemented NetSuite OneWorld as their ERP, and now they needed to adopt a compatible payables solution that would improve speed of processing invoices and making payments, tracking payments through to completion, audit trail access, and approval visibility for the CEO and CFO.

Plus, their current royalty payment process for professors was unnecessarily convoluted.

As Corradino states, “We pay over 500 professors, five times a year—all at the exact same time. I didn’t want to be doing that manually, it’s a waste of time and resources. That’s where Tipalti came in.”

With three global entities based in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, Top Hat was consistently making payments in various currencies. “With multiple currency payments and multiple entity structures, Tipalti accelerated ahead of the competition. It was an easy win.”

And for Top Hat and Corradino, the ROI was significant, “Before it was printing out the invoice, inputting that invoice into NetSuite, printing the check, placing the paper check on the pile, getting it all signed by our CFO and CEO. Now, everything is digital.”

With Tipalti, not only was Top Hat’s finance team thriving, but payees were happier too.

“We onboarded an author to Tipalti and made the payment on time, and he actually sent a $400 top hat to our CFO. It’s a testament to Tipalti—leveling up that game and not making payments a worry anymore!”

So what’s the future for Top Hat? It’s all about scaling, having a lean and efficient operation, enabling their team to provide better customer service, and continuing to “work smarter.”

“When you can really show your value, you can prove that you’re making a difference in the process.”

And for AP? “Anything that can be automated should. We want Tipalti to be the single source of truth for our payables.”