Airbase headquartered in San Francisco offers a cloud-based accounts payable and spend management solution, and combines a pre-approval system with corporate cards, allowing users to manage the entire AP spend process in one place.
N/A
Tipalti
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Tipalti automates critical financial processes to drive efficiency, including accounts payable, mass payments, procurement, and expenses, all on one global finance automation platform that grows with the organization, automating, de-risking and simplifying finance.
$129
per month
Pricing
Airbase
Tipalti
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Airbase
Tipalti
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
—
Pricing starts at $149 per month for the platform fee. Users can upgrade to Tipalti's more advanced capabilities as their businesses gets more complex.
The Tipalti pricing model is designed to grow with the user's company. Advanced features such as W-8 tax forms, international tax IDs, or multi-entity payables are available as needed.
We originally selected Tipalti based on their ability to manage multi-entity subsidiary AP management, but improvements to the software haven't been as great or as quick as we would have hoped.
I love how Tipalti has the early-payment offer option which allows payees to be able to accept or request their payment earlier than the due date. The early-payment offer option is also a good ROI for companies as a percentage of the fees deducted for the payee goes to the …
Airbase is suitable for companies that don't have very many legal entities. The features for multi-entity companies are inefficient, often requiring the user to look at only one entity at a time. That, coupled with requiring the company to prefund money into an Airbase account in order to use a physical corporate card or virtual card can be burdensome. Prefunding requires that you maintain cash in Airbase in order for the credit cards to be used, which in reality, is more like a debit card. And when using multiple entities, you have to have money in separate accounts. Therefore, you have to constantly monitor if you're balances are sufficient. There is a feature to auto load funds when the balance reaches a certain threshold, however, the loading of funds takes 5 business days. It was almost impossible to predict at what point wallet loads needed to be initiated, and therefore required a significant sum of cash to sit in Airbase accounts. There were instances where significant costs would come up, and our employees were unable to pay for them because the cash ran too low before the wallet load was completed.
The invoice processing element is far, far easier than manually inputting invoices are we were doing previously. The OCR is not perfect, but having it scanned in and ready for review saves a lot of time. The approvals process is fast and effective, and approvers can approve directly from the email without having even to log into the system. The audit trail function allows the finance team to see exactly who has done what to each invoice, and when. Payments, however, are where we see the most benefit. Vendor bank details are stored securely and controls can be put in place to ensure that any changes to vendor data must be approved. Once fully approved, invoices can be scheduled for payment either on a particular date or on the invoice due date, which ensures vendors are paid on a 'Just In Time' basis. All invoices and payments sync seamlessly to our ERP each day.
Uploading receipts is seamless and easy! I hardly ever have issues with this and the doc reader seems to work very well.
Being able to see who needs to approve my reimbursement requests and adding notes/comments to reach out for questions or bump them as a reminder is a great feature.
Email notifications are helpful and timely of knowing when an approver has approved my reports.
The Airbase Invoice date syncs with the accounting system's current month date if the previous month is closed.
Split expenses and attendees' departmental expense recording. We are currently collaborating with Airbase for a different look and applicability of this functionality.
More filters to be added into the report creation and export.
The report that provides the "Not payable" vendors does not work well for us, particularly because the sync to our ERP goes both ways, which means all of the employees also sync over to Tipalti and remain as Not Payable. So the list is very long, and I don't find a good use for it.
Airbase is a great solution, especially for smaller companies without an ERP that has an AP module. If an ERP was implemented, Airbase would be less valuable.
Tipalti developed a workflow us that has improved our efficiency in onboarding vendors and processing payments. They also ensure that we have all the required tax forms from the vendor before a payment goes out.
See previous comments about some UI/UX features that can be improved: - Can't see full merchant name or approver in the desktop "Reimbursements" screen - Can't see or filter expenses by "Purpose" as a user - Receipt mgmt and submission in app could be less clunky
The system is incredibly easy to use, with most tasks being completed in a small number of clicks. The user interface is very user intuitive and can be navigated very easily. Multiple payments can be made instantaneously and as the vendors manage their payable account we are able to ensure that payments are being sent to the right account. The advanced functionality for duplicate invoices ensures that we are not processing bills twice and we have found that in 100% of cases it has identified a duplicate bill.
Over the last 3 years, we've only had one major service issue that rendered Airbase unusable for us for about 24 hours. That said, they navigated the SVB bank crisis very well and made sure funds were available during that time.
The customer support offered by Airbase has been top-notch; we could not have asked for anything more. They were accommodating during the onboarding process. They have always been quick to respond to any issue that we have faced. We get the sense that they are well-run and organized company.
Since I also work in customer support, I often have to contact Tipalti's team with questions from our users. Tipalti's support team has always been exceptionally helpful and it was a pleasure to communicate with them. I have always received prompt responses to any inquiries and they are excellent at solving our customers' issues within a short time
The Airbase team was very helpful in importing our .csv files from our previous system. They provided a great overview of the system for the rest of the company and everyone got up to speed quickly.
We chose Airbase for the virtual cards and cashback. Having complete control over our software spending via virtual cards was important to us for several reasons, including security, audit, budgetary, etc. We knew it had functions for expenses and bill payments, so we thought we would switch to them, but we were slow to do so. We would have switched sooner if we had known how good these functions were and that they were better than their counterparts.
Previously, our Company housed all invoices and approvals in NetSuite. This was a very clunky process which often resulted in duplicated work. Approvals were obtained through email and attached as a file to invoice records in NetSuite. Whereas, in Tipalti, you can view the entire audit history by simply clicking into an invoice.
It is very scalable among different departments in one company. We have not tried to use it yet with multiple entities so I cannot speak to that experience.
Vendor onboarding has taken the responsibility from one person to the Vendor directly. This provides the vendor with the ability to enter their own banking information for payments and upload their Federal W9 form.
Vendors can upload their own invoices to the system, taking the possibility that our AP team did not receive an emailed or mailed invoice to upload. This also increases payment efficiency as the vendor's invoice is processed in a more timely manner.
AP can review invoices for accuracy and concentrate on how to code an invoice, rather than be a paper pusher or a data entry clerk. AP doesn't spend time searching for invoices that might be a duplicate, the system will communicate this on the software review process and if AP has uploaded by email the same invoice multiple times, an email will be sent to AP to indicate that the invoice was not uploaded due to duplication.
