Although the pain points for finance shift each year, automation remains a constant challenge. Process complexity persists, and reports show that nearly 40% of finance teams spend the most time collecting receipts and manually filling out expense reports. This is closely followed by time spent on trends and data (31%) and credit card reconciliation (27%). However, according to IOFM, accounts payable is the most time-consuming finance function. Addressing manual finance processes requires optimal tools.
In this article, we look closely at Ramp and the top AP automation and expense management platforms. This includes key features, serviceable markets, strengths, and pricing, enabling your business to make a more informed decision, leading to a higher degree of success.
Tipalti
Tipalti is an award-winning finance automation solution that offers a holistic, end-to-end payment experience with corporate cards and expense management. The brand provides tools for insight across your entire enterprise with granular financial controls.
The employee-friendly solution offers both a physical and virtual credit card (as well as debit card) with tools that simplify the issuance, visibility, and reconciliation of card expenditures. Finance teams can manage card spend, expenses, and more from a single, centralized workspace.
Businesses can also earn cashback on every transaction. The system also comes with complementary tools for taxes, procurement, custom approvals, and AP automation.
Expensify
Expensify is a popular finance automation platform that helps businesses streamline accounting tasks like invoice management, receipt capture, and billing. The system uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology to extract the relevant data automatically and offers a variety of integrations with brands like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Sage.
The Expensify system also supports multiple currencies, making it a suitable solution for international business.
SAP Concur
SAP Concur simplifies accounting, invoice management, and expenses. It’s designed to help businesses balance the books and streamline cash flow. The platform provides simple tools that enable an organization to automate manual AP tasks.
Concur Invoice automates AP management for better efficiency, increased profitability, and more visibility into spending.
Users can book flights, hotels, and rental cars within the Concur platform, facilitating a seamless travel booking experience. The solution also helps to enforce company travel and expense policies, ensuring all expenditures align with corporate guidelines.
PayEm
PayEm is an intuitive and user-friendly AP automation, procurement, and spend management platform for global business. It’s a complete invoice-to-reconciliation solution that seamlessly syncs with your ERP.
The system offers automated payroll management, simplifying the process of paying employees across borders in multiple countries, with varying currencies and regulations.
The platform assists in ensuring tax compliance with local laws, labor regulations, and reporting requirements. Companies can book a free consultation with a PayEM product consultant and reach out to 24/7 support.
Spendesk
Spendesk is a finance automation and spend management platform designed to streamline accounting and provide payment methods for modern businesses. The platform automatically categorizes payments to the correct general ledger codes and captures over 95% of receipts on time.
The Spendesk system automates VAT extraction, expense account allocation, and receipt reconciliation. It allows users to track and manage expenses, including capturing receipts, categorizing spend, and running expense reports.
Spendesk offers physical or virtual cards that can be issued to employees, allowing for more controlled spend and real-time tracking of expenses. Companies can set budgets and spending limits for individuals or departments, ensuring total compliance and curbing misuse.
Honorable Mentions
- Divvy
- Emburse
- Certify
- Stripe
- Pleo
Is it time to get your expenses organized?
Don’t select a solution that only automates part of your journey. Tipalti takes a 360-degree approach to solving all of your AP problems.
Ramp vs Tipalti
What Does Tipalti Do?
Tipalti is an award-winning solution that provides tools for AP automation, procurement, corporate cards, and expense management across your organization. Finance teams can manage purchasing, payments, and spend from a single, centralized workspace, gaining real-time control and greater insight.
The system is an end-to-end global payables solution designed to help a business grow. The depth and maturity of Tipalti’s features place it well above other brands offering similar functions. Optimize everything from purchase requests to supplier management, invoice processing, expense management, and more.
Tipalti also offers physical and virtual credit cards (and debit cards) that simplify the control, issuance, visibility, and reconciliation of card expenditures. Plus, you can earn cashback on every transaction with robust security and granular financial controls.
Tipalti offers features like:
- Mass payments capabilities with tax compliance
- Procurement and purchase order management
- Tipalti Detect to prevent fraud
- A self-service supplier portal for easy onboarding
- Custom approval workflows with predictive AI
Tipalti Product Capabilities Overview
Tipalti improves visibility, efficiency, and scalability, minimizing headcount and manual data entry. The platform offers complete control over expenses, with the ability to consolidate transactions, enhance payment processing visibility, and leverage supplier management.
Tipalti Card is easy to set up, use, and manage, with automatic reconciliation of epayables and a total ERP sync.
Key features of Tipalti Card:
- Custom workflows based on process requirements
- Cashback on every transaction
- General Ledger codes applied to each transaction
- Spend limits, vendor limits, and pre-approved categories
- Fraud management with total control over spend
Tipalti saves a business time and money, processing transactions in six different payment methods across 196 countries in 120 currencies. The system also offers advanced FX solutions and quickly integrates with ERPs like Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, SAP ERPs, and Sage Intacct.
Tipalti Pricing
Tipalti uses a SaaS provider subscription-based pricing model. To upgrade from the Starter plan, you can add advanced functionality as your business grows.
What Does Ramp Do?
Ramp offers financial tools with a user-friendly interface that’s designed to grow with your business. The system provides accounting automation, procurement, spend management, and corporate cards.
Issue cards in seconds and gain total control in just a few clicks. The spend management platform offers unlimited 1.5% cashback on all purchases and provides features for a business of any size.
Ramp claims its customers save an average of 5%. The Ramp platform offers live support with a simple application process. Customers can access the full Ramp experience for free, with no personal credit checks or personal guarantees required.
Key features of Ramp include:
- Payment methods include physical and virtual cards, ACH, wire, and checks
- Slack integration to manage card requests, issues, and expense approvals
- Pays to 70 countries in 40 currencies using Wise (reimbursements)
- Multi-entity capabilities with custom fields in the GL
- Integrations with NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and other ERPs
Ramp Product Capabilities Overview
Ramp offers instant card issuance and spend controls by time, amount, category, and other real-time data sets.
There is a 1.5% cashback rebate with every purchase, with the ability to earn special partner rewards. A company can find and collect all contract owners in one spot, and sync transitions to brands like Xero with a one-click process.
Top product capabilities of Ramp include:
- Spend Control: Easily enforce expense policies, spend limits, approval workflows, and spend analytics.
- Expense Management: Mobile transmission, receipt auto-matching, AI-generated fields, and categories.
- Procurement: Capture spend requests in a single spot and loop teams in for approvals.
- Invoice Processing: OCR for both header and line-level with simple approvals routing.
- Seamless Workflows: Plug Ramp into critical forecasting tools and orchestrate ideal workflows.
Ramp Pricing
Ramp has three plans:
- Ramp – FREE – Control spend, automate payments, and close faster.
- Ramp PLUS –$12 per user/mo, billed annually – Scale internationally and manage end-to-end operations.
- Ramp Enterprise – (call) Manage compliance and security on a global scale.
Features of Tipalti vs. Ramp
Although both Tipalti and Ramp offer corporate cards, each system has unique solutions and different features for finance teams.Here is a glance at some of the critical differences between Tipalti and Ramp:
*Limited functionality | ||
---|---|---|
Supplier Management | Client-branded portal with supplier choice of preferred payment method, currency, etc., 26K+ rules validate payments, payment status updates, fee splitting. | Generic vendor portal for payment status, payer chooses payment method (not payee). Vendors can update contact info, SSN/EIN, bank account details. Payment sent, delivered, failed, returned, changed notifications. |
Tax Compliance | KPMG approved tax engine collect and validate IRS, VAT tax IDs, W-9, W-8BEN against +3,000 rules, 1099 and 1042-S prep reports, auto-calculated withholdings, and eFiling services. | Admins can add and store W9 information directly in Ramp and export that data for 1099 processing. |
Procurement | Integrated procurement to improve spend controls and reduce AP processing time. PO creation and real-time budget visibility. Fast implementation, integrates with Slack, Jira, and 30 other ticketing systems like Asana and Zendesk, contract interface to add and search contracts.
| New and developing feature with current limitations. Does not block matching bills to fully filled POs. POs created on Ramp not synced to your accounting system. No ticketing system integrations. No Amazon punchouts. No contracts module. |
Invoice Management | AI Smart Scan eliminates data entry with advanced data extraction on header and line level detail, AI-powered auto-coding of custom fields and expense accounts, plus managed services backup for accuracy. 2- and 3-way PO matching at header- and line-levels. Pre-defined approval rules or custom approval flows. | Supports PDF invoices only. Payers can upload directly or via email. Assign GL categories to vendors. Email and Slack DM notifications. Unlimited approvers. 2-way PO matching only – no tolerance thresholds or prepayments. |
Cards | Manage and reconcile card spend, gain visibility, and receive cash-back. Integrates with global payables automation, Tipalti Expenses feature, with automatic reconciliation.
| Corporate cards and expense management/reimbursements are the core competency. International reimbursements in foreign currency. Cards can be used internationally. |
Expense Management | Automated expense policies minimize fraud and ensure compliance with a mobile and desktop experience for easy expense filing. Expense transactions and global reimbursements are automatically captured,
categorized, and processed. | AI-powered receipt collection/matching, flags non-compliant expenses, and notifies employees of out-of-policy spend. Automate expense categorization with smart rules for any field. |
Global Remittance | Regulated MSB with MTLs across US. E-Money license in UK with FCA. Pay to 196 countries in 120 currencies, 12 payment methods (ACH, global ACH / eCheck, check,
wire transfer, PayPal, prepaid debit).
| Card, check, ACH & USD wire for international bill payment to 195 countries. FX local currency rails to 59 countries in 30 currencies. Partnering with Wise on foreign currency payments. Limited payment visibility. No payment approval workflows. No OFAC screening.
|
FX Solutions | Save time and money on currency conversions. Advanced FX solutions include intercompany bank transfers, FX hedging, payer FX, and payee FX. | None |
Reconciliation and Reporting | API integrations with major ERPs NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Microsoft Dynamics BC. PO and GRN reconciliation.Integration with other ERPs via pre-built connectors using no-code, drag-and-drop
Interface.
| API integrations with Netsuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero. NO PO, GRN, or instant payables reconciliation. File-based integrations with QuickBooks Desktop and other ERPs.
|
Multi-Entity | Manage multiple entities with different AP processes and workflows, gain a consolidated view. Instant reconciliation across methods, entities, geos, currencies, and payable workflows
| Generate payments for each entity, track card transactions, payout reimbursements, and bill payments for each entity from different bank accounts.
Sync to multiple entities within one batch. |
Corporate Metrics | Over 3.5k customers, $60B annual remittance, +$700M funding, $8.3B valuation. Deloitte 500 & Inc 5000 Winners 5-years Running (1 of 15 companies to be named to Deloitte’s Fast 500 five years in a row).
World-renowned customer brands like Amazon, Twitch, Twitter, Roblox, GoDaddy, and Applovin. 99% customer retention (10 years), 98% customer satisfaction. | Over 10k customers, $1.4B funding, $8.1B valuation. G2 Small Business Leader Winter 2022, G2 Best Results 2022, and G2 Best ROI Winter 2022. World-renowned customer brands like Quora, Barry’s, Webflow, ClickUp, and Betterment. |
Which Solution Works Best for Your Business (and Why)
Selecting an automation solution is an essential choice for finance managers and teams needing to scale quickly. Consider some of these common scenarios when choosing between Tipalti and Ramp:
When to Choose Tipalti?
When to Choose Ramp
What Our Customers Say
“I don’t think about FX or currencies anymore—we pay bills out of Tipalti and exchange them into any currency. That’s essential for a growing, international business.”
– Andrew Jenks, Senior Accounting Manager Lucidworks
“It took us eight weeks a year to process hundreds of royalty payments manually, and with Tipalti, it is now down to less than an hour. AP invoice processing is also automated, eliminating another 36 days a year of workload.”
– Nas Yaqoobi, Accountant Splice
“Our vendors like Tipalti because they get paid on time, and they can track when their payments are coming in.”
– Shawna Stewart, Staff Accountant Brooklinen
Save Time and Money with Accounts Payable Automation
Tipalti’s global AP teams survey discovered that nearly 50% of participants spend over five days each month manually processing invoices. Alarmingly, reports also show that around 35% of companies still don’t know how much it costs to process an expense report.
Many businesses continue to rely on manual methods to manage and approve expenses and invoices. This creates opportunities for a high rate of out-of-policy submissions, misuse, and even fraud.
Although Tipalti and Ramp both offer user-friendly expense management and credit card functions, AP automation and global payments are Tipalti’s core competencies.
Using an expense management platform that integrates with accounts payable automation allows a business to shift a significant amount of time from data entry to strategic finance, contributing value and reducing costs. It also helps a company generate a more precise audit trail.
An in-depth evaluation of AP automation and expense management software is required to decide which solution works best for your business.
Consider your budget, spending limits, regulations, and anything else that will factor into the types of tools your business will use. Due diligence and proper research will ensure your choice leads to continued success and healthy growth.
Ready to get your expenses organized? Get started with a customized demo today!