Coupa vs. Esker

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

I would recommend Esker based on the automation of invoice sending - it is very nice to have a tool that not only stores all of the contact info, but sends the invoices out as well. The tracking feature is great to have to see if the submission was successful. I do think that overall it could be much more user-friendly, but once you know what you're doing, it is not hard software to use.

Incentivized

• A consistent format is helpful because if you learn the tool once, then you should be set for long term success.
• Straightforward with some of the fields (not all), but for some pieces of work. It is easy enough due to the direct nature of the tool.

Incentivized

• Everything is electronic and every manager receives an email each morning telling them how many invoices they need to approve.
• It has completely removed paper form the Accounts payable process and automatically archives invoices for the mandatory period required by Inland Revenue.
• For monthly reporting there is visibility over what has not yet been included in the accounts and staff can follow with the tardy managers.

Incentivized

• With one particular customer I have had about 40 emails to be accepted as a vendor. With other customers before Coupa became horrendous I had no problems. As an existing Coupa user why do I have to create a new profile?
• I have been accepted as a user 3 times then a day later Coupa wants the same form filled again and again.
• Help is only on a chat line. You cannot speak to anyone and in my opinion they are not helpful. Their suggstions have gotten me nowhere. They refer me to talk with my customer to straighten out the problem. My cusotmer doesn't have a clue.
• I'm considering not to accept purchase orders that require invoicing through Coupa.

• We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
• PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
• Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.

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

Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.

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

They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Coupa fits within our desire to have best of breed systems delivering value to our organization. We generally work with true cloud providers that are available anytime, anywhere for our mobile workforce. We are pleased that Coupa is in our lineup of service solutions.

Incentivized

We investigated Readsoft early in our exploration of upgrade options. We were on Esker DeliveryWare, but the UI for Readsoft, at the time, seemed to be a little convoluted and geared towards exception handling and required tiered users. Also, Readsoft was more cost prohibitive and did not have a solution for our faxing. Though, as I understand it, they may have since found a solution for this issue

Incentivized

• The Sourcing Module has returned our investment 23 times on an annualized basis.
• We're now SOX compliant and as a public company, that's keeping us compliant with our corporate charter.
• Having one central invoicing location has reduced our AP calls significantly. Our suppliers now have visibility into where their invoice is in the payment cycle. We also have a much higher invoice-to-pay cycle.

Incentivized

• We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
• It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
• It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.

Incentivized