BILL vs Tipalti for Building Material Distributors

For example, distributors commonly offer 1 to 2 percent discounts for paying within 10 days instead of the standard 30, and that discount disappears the moment finance is working through a stack of invoices reactively instead of proactively. BILL surfaces discount terms on an invoice and can flag the window in your approval queue; Tipalti does the same but within a broader configuration setup. Either way, the fix is the same: someone needs to review new invoices against their discount terms within a day or two of receipt, not whenever the pile gets worked down.

Annual purchase rebates from manufacturers depend on hitting a cumulative volume threshold, and that tracking almost never lives inside an AP platform; it lives in a spreadsheet, a rebate management tool, or your distribution ERP. Say you're 8 percent short of a rebate tier with six weeks left in the year, neither BILL nor Tipalti will flag that for you. What they can do is give you clean, exportable payment history by vendor, which is the raw data a rebate tracking process needs and often doesn't have in an easy-to-pull format.

A building materials supplier's vendor list usually spans large manufacturers with standard net-30 terms, regional mills with tighter cash needs and shorter terms, and the occasional international supplier for specialty materials, insulation components or specific hardware, with entirely different payment expectations. Payables days in building materials distribution tend to run long because of established trade credit relationships with contractors and manufacturers alike¹, but that average hides real variation by vendor, and a platform that treats every vendor's terms as interchangeable will get some of them wrong.

A distributor processing hundreds of purchase invoices a month can't route every one through a single approver without creating a bottleneck that slows payment across the board, which then jeopardizes the very discount windows and vendor relationships the business depends on. Both BILL and Tipalti support tiered approval limits, so routine, lower-dollar restocking orders can clear with one sign-off while larger or unusual purchases still get a second look.

Set those tiers based on actual invoice data rather than a guess: pull six months of purchase invoices, look at where the bulk of the dollar volume actually sits, and set the low-touch tier high enough to cover routine restocking without requiring a second signature on every single order, or the tiering won't reduce the bottleneck it was meant to fix.

Some building material suppliers run vendor-managed inventory programs with their own upstream manufacturers, where invoicing is tied to consumption rather than a traditional PO. That billing pattern doesn't map cleanly onto either platform's default invoice workflow, so if VMI arrangements are a meaningful share of your purchasing, confirm with either vendor how consumption-based billing gets entered before assuming your current process will translate directly.

A distributor running multiple branch locations often has different purchasing managers at each one, and a single company-wide approval chain either bottlenecks every branch on one person or gives every branch manager the same authority regardless of how much they typically spend. Set approval limits per branch or per role rather than applying one blanket rule, and revisit those limits at least once a year as branch volume shifts, since a limit set for a smaller branch two years ago can quietly become a bottleneck once that location grows.

Building material demand is seasonal in most regions, with spring and summer volume well above winter. Piloting a new AP platform during a slow month tells you almost nothing about whether it holds up when invoice volume triples. If you can, run the pilot leading into your busiest stretch rather than during your quietest one, so you find out whether approval routing and payment batching actually scale before you're depending on it during the season when a slowdown costs the most.

A short checklist before you commit to a platform:

• Review new invoices promptly so discount windows are acted on instead of lost in an approval queue.
• Track rebate thresholds in a spreadsheet, rebate tool or ERP, and export payment history by vendor to feed it.
• Set payment terms vendor by vendor, since large manufacturers, regional mills and international suppliers differ widely.
• Set approval limits by branch, and pilot the platform heading into your busiest stretch rather than a slow month.