Automating Global Suppliers Across Borders

Globalization has led to globalized businesses, and the rise of globalized business has led to always-on and, hopefully, real-time status of payments and other functions that are crucial across currencies and time zones. That leads to the necessity of payments taken across a variety of methods and with far-flung reconciliations.

Tipalti is moving to help foster supplier payment functionality that stems from the cloud, with an eye on supply chains that need more robust communication and reconciliation as complexity comes into play.

Most recently, the firm said its Tipalti SuiteApp had achieved “Built For NetSuite” status, which means that, through integration with the latter’s SuiteCloud platform, accounts payable functions are automated and streamlined. The bill payments can be made across wire transfers, international ACH and cards, among other options. In addition, the Tipalti SuiteApp now lets NetSuite’s OneWorld customers bring automation across their own supply chains.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder of the firm, stated that the need for payments and payables automation has become a timely one, as firms find that their traditional ERP systems “drop the ball at a certain point,” especially with the eventuality of the integration of new links in the supply chain and onboarding of new entities. “The task,” he told PYMNTS, “is to remove the human operation, the manual operation” of such tasks, and bring them into arenas where speed and accuracy are not mutually exclusive. That’s key, especially in the event that expanding firms must work with country-specific regulatory and compliance issues, as well as the ever-present, ever-shifting sands of currency conversions.

The pain points necessitating such automation, said the executive, come when a firm has at least 10 percent of its daily ebb and flow coming from cross-border transactions. “If you’re small enough or you have an administrator or two,” said Amit, “you’ll manage to get by,” but larger entities must juggle things like monitoring tax compliance across forms as disparate as W-9 and VAT filings and also keep an eye (obviously, affecting payroll) on compliance issues that include, for example, blacklists.

The impact of systems such as Tipalti’s on cash flow, said Amit, can vary by country, with important variables including speed to payment — same-day or next-day transactions — with the ultimate realization of benefits from early payments, including, for example, rebates.