Anybody using Bill.com OR Tipalti for AP automation? Can you speak on any challenges you faced with either whether they were solvable or not? We are trying to decide on which AP Automation service will be best for us.

Bill.com has some... limitations to how it works. Though apparently one of them has gotten better (how it handles POs)

Would you mind telling me how it handled POs?

I am not entirely sure - it came up on a client and someone went "oh it does this now"

I read somewhere that it had issues with POs created in NetSuite so I was wondering if there was any related issues that anyone would be aware of

It syncs POs from NetSuite into bill.com now to allow for 3 way matching The big problem is you can’t change the rate. So if the PO was for qty 10 @ $2.00 but the invoice from the vendor is for 10 @ $2.50 you have to update the PO in NetSuite. Re sync. Then you can enter the bill

There’s also stampli now that’s a huge favorite in G2. Looking at it in more information tomorrow.

Just coming across this thread now. I came across PayEm that seemed to be a bit better than Tipalti and Bill. They seem to have support for multi-entity and multi-currency. Bill seems good just for simple use-cases. Anytime POs are involved it won't work well. I'd say the same goes for Tipalti.

Yes we struggle ALOT with Bill.com

@nsAI If you don't mind me asking, what are the biggest struggles with Bill? We are implementing as we speak.

@Tim Chapman Like Moe said it does NOT work well with POs. They have updated it recently so you can now match Bills to POs, but it's not great. You can only update the Qty on the Bill in Bill.com and not the Rate or Amount so if the PO was written for Qty 10 @ $2,00 each, but the Invoice comes in as Qty 10 @ $2,50 a piece you cannot update that until you fix the PO, re-sync with Bill, then you can enter the Invoice. There is no real 3 way match or connection between 3way matching and the approval process. Approvals are mostly manual so they need to be intitiated by the A/P team and the approval routing is usually manual The incoming queue is usally full of a bunch of garbage like email signature jpgs or png files that aren't invoices. You don't have the email thread with the incoming email so if there was anything in the email that was important it's lost and only the invoice itself is loaded Also TONS of sync errors. Also you can't change/customize the integration so if you have custom fields or anything other than straight native netsuite it's not supported by Bill Also you cannot sync Vendor Prepayments between NetSuite and Bill Vendor setup isn't great, things like Terms and other settings don't sync over to Bill. Now you have to reconcile 2 A/P aging's as their can be discrepancies between what Bill shows as the A/P aging and what NetSuite shows Bill.com does NOT respect locking periods in NetSuite only CLOSING periods. So if you Lock A/P in NetSuite you can still post Invoices into a locked period (which leads to Sync errors). Only once the period is fully closed does Bill.com reflect that. You can delete invoices that are in closed periods in Bill.com (crazy!!)

Please add anything you are comfortable with sharing, this is great information.

First you have to ask yourself - what are you trying to automate with AP? What is your goal? Is it to automate payments and transactions or simply have OCR capabilities to make placing invoices in easier? Do you want approvals to be done inside of netsuite or outside of netsuite - is there a concern on licensing costs? What about people - are they going to adapt easily to a new system or prefer to live inside of netsuite? are the functional heads going to approve invoices? or is approval governed by finance and accounting?

@Tim Chapman my recommendation is if you purchase items that need to be received and are posting item receipts in NetSuite then you will struggle using Bill.com If just using non-receivable POs or invoice without a PO then you should be okay Also best practice is to only work from one system...don't try to process Bills in both NetSuite and Bill.com as it will cause confusion and sync issues. The approvals throws a big wrench in things and adds a lot of license cost so everyone in the org can approve bills if using Bill.com for that, but it is hard to do approvals in NetSuite when entering bills into Bill.com

We do hundreds of PO's a week all linked to item reciepts.

Would not do bill.com in that situation.

The OCR cost per invoice is what drove us away from Tipalti. We do a ton of invoices which are all linked to PO's/ and IR.

Not worth doing Tipalti. I think your big criteria is going to be 3 way match.

What ap solution would you reccomend?

I like anything that is "built in" netsuite to eliminate sync errors

Have you tried Netsuite’s ap automation? Squareworks is a good bet for controls as well because you will use netsuite 3way match I believe. I haven’t used zone and co.