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

Your business needs scalability in an AP solution to meet your needs today and your expanded needs in the future. You will need software that processes a high volume of transactions or that can efficiently handle complex global payments for multiple entities or many geographic locations. 

Tipalti Multi-Entity supports a consolidated headquarter payer account with multiple sub-entities associated with it so you can manage all entities’ payables operations from a single Tipalti model, enabling each entity to operate with its own unique workflow and enabling you to manage a large number of entities. 

Tipalti lets you pay in 196 countries and 120 currencies without using third-party payment partners like in the case of Concur. Before every payment, Tipalti will screen suppliers against OFAC sanctions and other blacklists to prevent legal repercussions, including fines. 

Additionally, Tipalti allows your suppliers to choose a preferred payment method with options including U.S. ACH, global ACH , wire transfer, PayPal, check, or prepaid debit card. Concur only offers, check and credit card voucher payment options. 

Tipalti also offers advanced FX solutions including intercompany transfers, FX hedging, and Payee FX optimization to help streamline your global payments processes. These features are not available with Concur.

Lastly, with Tipalti 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.

Both Tipalti and SAP Concur can provide end-to-end accounts payable solutions from purchase requisition all the way through to invoice payment.  However, there are some gaps in Concur’s offering. 

Concur retired its supplier portal feature in October 2020 and instead uses vendor information from your ERP system in the payables process. Meanwhile, Tipalti helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labeled, multi-language portal, enabling faster, more accurate supplier data collection and verification. Tipalti automatically validates collected supplier payment data in real-time using 26,000 global banking rules to proactively reduce payment errors by 66%.

The supplier portal is accessible 24×7 and provides visibility into payment status , and sends proactive automatic payment status emails. This reduces supplier inquiry and questions like “where’s my payment?” further saving you time. Additionally, suppliers can choose a preferred payment method from a list of options. You can incent certain payment methods with early payment options that allow them to get paid before their due date and allow you to earn early payment discounts.

Both Tipalti and Concur offer similar invoice processing capabilities but some features that come standard with Tipalti result in extra costs with Concur. For example, line-level OCR data capture is not available in the baseline “Automate” invoice package. Tipalti also offers unlimited invoice approvers, whereas, with Concur, you may need to upgrade your package to allow enough approvers the ability to update coding on invoices.

Lastly, Tipalti handles the “last mile” of the payables process in-house, whereas Concur often relies on third-party payment partners for payment remittance. Tipalti is a licensed money transmitter and registered as a money service business with the ability to help you send funds quickly and securely across 196 countries in 120 different currencies.

Since AP involves direct access to cash reserves, it’s critical to institute proper controls and governance. 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. 20+ role-based permissions help enforce the segregation of duties by configuring who can initiate disbursements, fund accounts, create approval flows, run reports, and more.

The Tipalti Detect risk module is an internal network that proactively identifies and prevents potential ongoing fraud by proactively looking for patterns. Payers can block or suspend payees from receiving payments, identify blocked or suspended payees trying to create multiple accounts and get notified of suspicious payees.

Tax compliance is another crucial aspect, as manually collecting and validating tax forms from suppliers is fraught with legal and financial risk. 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, and W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports. At the end of the year, the system can also automate the submission of 1099s (through integration with Zenwork for eligible payees) to the IRS using the data from Tipalti. Concur does not have any built-in tax capabilities.

Concur has minimal global capabilities to help support your operations outside of the US.  International payment options are minimal. Concur’s only global payment option is credit card vouchers and it does not support payment methods that global payees might demand, such as PayPal, Global ACH, and wire transfer.

In order to facilitate global payments, you will likely need to work with a third-party payment provider such as NvoicePay, Paymerang, WayPay, TransferMate, AMEX, or others instead of handling all payment operations in a single, unified manner. If you are OK with the provided payment methods or working with third-party payment providers, Concur may be appropriate.

Concur provides limited vendor management capabilities and does not allow supplier self-service since its supplier portal was deprecated in October 2020. Therefore, vendor details and banking information must be manually uploaded or done through API instead of via self-service onboarding with built-in validations. You also lose the ability to digitally collect vendor W-8 and W9 tax forms during onboarding and the resulting easy generation of year-end 1099 and 1042-S prep reports. Your team will have to allocate resources to maintain the vendor master file, managing vendor requests, and tax compliance. This is not a scalable approach if you manage a large number of vendors. However, if your vendor list is small and not rapidly growing, Concur may be appropriate.

Concur offers leading travel & expense (T&E) software for corporate travel and employee expense report reimbursement. If your primary need is for a T&E solution than an end-to-end accounts payable solution, consider Concur as a potential partner.

Tipalti helps streamline the supplier onboarding process with a self-service, white-labeled, multi-language portal, enabling faster, more accurate payee data collection, and validation against 26,000 global banking rules to proactively reduce payment errors by 66%. The portal also helps to reduce supplier inquiry on payment status further saving you time. 

Concur provides minimal international payment options and coverage for your global suppliers. Tipalti makes supplier payments to 196 countries and in 120 local currencies for worldwide coverage with six different available payment options.

Tipalti helps ensure IRS tax compliance with KPMG-approved tax form data collection, validation and withholding calculations. Collect W-9, and W-8 tax forms, validate IRS and VAT tax IDs, automatically calculate withholdings and generate 1099 / 1042-S tax prep reports. 

Payables reconciliation takes time and can delay your financial close. With Tipalti, global payment remittance using multiple payment methods is automated and consolidated into real-time reports for more accurate and faster payment reconciliation, allowing you to accelerate financial close by 25%.