Tipalti Testing

Pragya Yadav

According to their website: “Tipalti is the preferred payables automation solution for 3,000+ of the world’s fastest-growing companies.” which was rated as the #1 Payables Solution by TrustRadius. It lets businesses automate repetitive payables processes and save enormous amounts of time incurred in mundane activities.

This article discusses Tipalti, its features, usage, and how to test it. Additionally, we explore the role of AI and test automation in achieving greater efficiency and speed.

What is Tipalti?

Tipalti is a cloud-based global payment automation and management software designed to help businesses streamline their accounts payable and global payment operations. It is designed for companies of various sizes and industries, including e-commerce, advertising, manufacturing, technology, and services. Tipalti enables these businesses to manage a large volume of domestic and international payments easily.

It targets the challenges businesses face in making mass payments to suppliers, partners, affiliates, and freelancers across the globe. It helps solve the issues related to tax compliance, payment method preferences, and currency conversions. Tipalti streamlines the entire lifecycle of supplier management to POs, invoices, payments, controls, and reporting through automation.

Features of Tipalti

Here are the distinctive features of Tiplati that make it so popular:

Automated Supplier Onboarding: Provides a self-service portal for suppliers to enter payment details and preferences. It reduces the administrative burden on the payer’s side.
Global Payments: Allows sending payments in 120 currencies in 196 countries through six unique payment methods (US ACH, wire transfer, global ACH, PayPal, prepaid debit, or paper check). Your business can pay international suppliers through the preferred currency and method.
Tax Compliance: It has a KPMG-approved tax capability for the IRS. Achieve tax compliance by collecting tax forms from suppliers, validating the information, and preparing reports that simplify filing IRS forms.
Invoice Processing: Automates the process of invoice collection, matching, approval, and payment. Thus removing chances of human error and increasing efficiency and speed.
Reporting: The software offers detailed financial reporting and reconciliation features. It allows businesses to track payment status, manage cash flow, and maintain accurate financial records.
Fraud and Risk Management: Detects fraudulent activities and manages payment-related risks, ensuring secure transactions.

Who Uses Tipalti?

Tipalti has users in almost every industry: software, gaming, healthcare, banking, e-commerce, advertising, manufacturing, education, and many more. Let’s have a look at those:

Online Marketplaces: Platforms connecting buyers and sellers worldwide efficiently manage payments to their vendors, freelancers, or sellers.
Affiliate Networks: To automate commission payments to affiliates across countries in various currencies and payment methods.
Advertising and Digital Media: To pay publishers and content creators across the globe. Helps streamline payments, ensuring compliance and reducing administrative overhead.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Companies: To automate recurring payments, manage subscriptions, and handle vendor payments.
E-commerce Businesses: To manage cross-border payments to suppliers, vendors, and third-party service providers and maintain tax compliance.
Manufacturing and Supply Chain: Businesses use it for vendor payments, ensuring smooth operations and timely procurement of materials.
Non-Profit Organizations: To manage donations, grants, and payments to vendors and service providers across different countries.
Startups: Rapidly growing startups that expand their operations internationally use Tipalti to scale their payment processes.

How to Test Tipalti?

To thoroughly test Tipalti, you should run the below tests on the application:

Integration and API Testing

This tests how well Tipalti integrates with other systems (e.g., ERP, CRM, accounting software). They test that data flows seamlessly between Tipalti and these systems without loss or corruption.

Example: Check if invoice details entered into Tipalti are correctly exported to an ERP system. It verifies the correct initiation from Tipalti and the proper reception and processing in the ERP.

Regression Testing

Whenever updates are made to Tipalti or the integrated systems, regression testing is required to check that new changes do not break existing functionalities. Automated regression tests can be run quickly to cover extensive functionalities after each update.

Example: Automatically running the full suite of functional and integration test cases after a new version of Tipalti is deployed to ensure that existing features still operate as expected.

UI Testing

Check that Tipalti’s user interface is intuitive and works as expected across different browsers and devices. Automated UI tests simulate user interactions with the interface to check for issues.

Example: An automated script that navigates through the Tipalti platform, verifying that buttons, forms, and links are responsive. Also, any interaction should lead to the correct pages without errors on various browsers.

End-to-end Testing

Test scripts can simulate user actions to ensure that all operations, like adding suppliers, processing payments, or generating reports, function correctly as a complete workflow.

Example: An automated test script could simulate the process of a user entering supplier information, submitting an invoice, and then processing a payment. These end-to-end tests make sure that the workflow completes without errors.

Performance Testing

Automated performance testing assesses how Tipalti performs under various loads. It is essential for processing large volumes of transactions or handling many simultaneous users.

Example: Using a tool to simulate hundreds of simultaneous payment processes to evaluate how the system manages high traffic and data processing loads. It helps in identifying any bottlenecks or performance degradation.

Security and Compliance Testing

Security tests automate the identification of vulnerabilities within Tipalti, such as susceptibility to SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), or data breaches. For example, SQL injection attacks can be attempted on Tipalti’s user input fields to verify that the system properly sanitizes inputs to prevent unauthorized data access. Since Tipalti handles financial transactions, it must comply with various financial regulations and standards.

Example: Automated tests that verify collecting and validating tax information from suppliers comply with IRS guidelines, ensuring that forms like W-9 or W-8BEN are correctly processed and stored.

Tools Supporting Tipalti Testing

Selenium: Open-source tool that automates web browsers. It allows testing web applications across different browsers and platforms through a choice of programming languages.
Postman: Widely used for API testing, allowing testers to send requests to web services and check responses, facilitating integration testing between systems.
SoapUI: Useful for testing SOAP and REST APIs, ensuring that different systems can successfully communicate and exchange data.
JMeter: An open-source tool designed for load testing and measuring performance. It can simulate a heavy load on a server, network, or object to test its strength or analyze overall performance under different load types.
LoadRunner: Offers detailed insights into system performance and behavior, supporting various applications. It helps identify and diagnose issues with scalability and reliability.
OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy): An open-source web application security scanner that helps find security vulnerabilities in web applications during the development and testing phases.
Burp Suite: A comprehensive solution for web application security testing, offering a range of tools to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps.
Cypress: A next-generation front-end testing tool built for the modern web. It provides fast, easy, and reliable testing for anything in a browser.
Puppeteer: A Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It’s beneficial for automated testing of web applications, including UI testing.

Role of AI and Test Automation

For integrating these testing tools into CI/CD pipelines, tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and CircleCI are commonly used. These platforms can automate the testing process by running tests every time a change is made to the codebase, ensuring immediate feedback on the impact of those changes.

Tipalti is focused on automating global payables to increase efficiency and speed. The supporting tools should also focus on the same goal. Test automation tools aid in this process and increase the speed and quality of the testing manifolds. Legacy test automation tools or the ones that use excessive programming code and scripting may defeat the purpose.

The test script creation and maintenance is a time and effort-consuming process. If you seek the help of intelligent tools such as testRigor, you can bypass all programming and maintenance hurdles. testRigor is powered by generative AI and lets you create test cases in plain English. Forget all scripting chaos!

Additionally, it does not rely on unstable XPath/CSS locators, which tend to change with every application update. It uses testRigor locators, where you can identify the elements using the text that you see on the screen. Here is an example:

login
click "Pay Bill"
click "ADD"
enter "testRigor" into "Company Name"
enter "175380001" into "Account"
enter "100" into "Value"
click "Pay"
check that page contains "Payment Complete"

This is the simplicity you achieve through testRigor, just plain English, nothing else. These tests use self-healing. If there are minor changes in the application, they will be incorporated automatically.

testRigor’s seamless integrations with ERP, CRM, test management, and infrastructure provider tools let you use a single tool to perform all your testing.

Tipalti uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to scan and process invoices digitally, and testRigor helps you write OCR testing steps in plain English as below:

open url "https://selectorshub.com/"
click "PracticePage"
scroll down until page contains "Learn XPath" using OCR
check that page contains "DevTools" using OCR

Here are testRigor’s top features to ease your Tipalti testing process.

Conclusion

The role of test automation and supporting testing tools is commendable in achieving testing goals faster and more efficiently. The choice of testing tools matters a lot. Analyze your testing requirements, delivery deadline, team’s skills, and budget before deciding.

If better testing tools are available that save you time and effort, why not avail them? Intelligent testing tools like testRigor help you maintain the efficiency and quality that Tiplati is trying to provide.