Coupa vs. Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud

Suitable: Simple indirect procurement. Low cost; short cycle implementation. Less Suitable: Complex procurement scenario requiring serious vendor collaboration. End-to-end integration. Direct Material Procurement, especially when planning, quality inspection, and other miscellaneous activities are involved, requires handling various special statuses and updates to meet industry- or country-specific requirements.

Incentivized

In our case, sales and use tax are a must-have. With the recent change and continuous change in tax law, companies find it harder to comply with tax without a system. In our case, managing thousands of customers with thousands of tax codes - city tax, state tax, zone tax - proves to be a challenge. We need a system to minimize any exposure with federal and state tax law, and certainly protect us from an audit.

Incentivized

• Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation.
• The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration.
• We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group.

Incentivized

• They are good at updating the tax tables with all the new sales tax law changes
• They are good at charging the correct sales tax amount as long as the software is set up or configured correctly
• They are good at following up at sales tax correspondences

Incentivized

• Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal.
• I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process.
• Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP.

Incentivized

• The admin portal needs work - I cannot simply add and remove users, and have to create a case support. I think this is a low-hanging fruit Sovos is working on to resolve.
• The UI could be improved.
• The sync does not always happen instantly and sometime can take up to 24 hours.

Incentivized

I love using coupa but i'm not the decision maker in this regard.

Incentivized

-Could be easy or hard to use depending on corporate policies and compliance. At times, errors and cryptical message associated with them could drive users mad.

Incentivized

-Support is generally speaking OK (not great). The user community is quite active, and the response time is acceptable. I would certainly hope there's more user-generated content (like in SAP, Oracle, and Linux, etc.), but I suppose Coupa is still not large enough, and the incentives are not yet there.

Incentivized

For the most part, the support team is responsive. However, with the recent switch from a legacy server to S1 server, Sovos created a problem for us. We simply can't upload a tax certificate. I logged a case with support, and they could not help, so they escalate to their senior technician. All in all, it has been more than 7 days, and they could not resolve a "simple" issue.

Incentivized

The employee that trained me was not particularly interesting in teaching me but they were not a Coupa employee.

Incentivized

Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.

Incentivized

I have used sales tax tables in the past and they are a lot more accurate as long as the configuration is done correctly up front. I have also used Avalara. Avalara has a more consumer friendly interface and better reporting function

Incentivized

• It has allowed for proper processing of expenses tied directly to the proper LOB and GL Codes
• Has taken the guesswork away and allowed for the proper budgets to be hit and reconciled
• Ease of use has led to mass adoption and more prompt processing of expenses

Incentivized

• It saved us a lot of time and money but eliminating the manpower needed to process manually ourselves
• It helped reduce the time needed to follow up and resolve sales tax correspondences
• It helped reduce costs and time to register in new taxing jurisdications

Incentivized