Staying competitive in language services today means having the ability to respond to shrinking project timelines and profit margins. Ensuring an adequate and around-the-clock supply of linguists and other translation professionals is key to both factors. This means that sourcing and retaining talent from around the globe is a must, not an option. This is the reality for language services teams that want to be competitive and successful, and it poses some unique challenges, particularly when it comes to paying linguists and other translation professionals across geographies, currencies, and tax systems.
Managing global payments often represents a setback for dynamic, growing organizations because of the complexity involved. For many, expanding outside of national borders has caused a stream of hard costs: from more domestic overhead to the need for increased communications and high transaction costs.
Financial regulatory compliance, transaction security, and end-to-end transparency and oversight of these operations are some of the concerns language services organizations have, whether they are language services providers (LSPs) or internal localization teams. Delays caused by the need to conduct and validate taxation research, correcting human errors such as missing banking information or misspellings, along with multiple tedious and repetitive tasks, have long been sources of frustration for language management teams, all while speed and efficiency are paramount to their business success.
To alleviate concerns and be more cost-effective, LSPs and localization teams need a finance solution with built-in regulatory data and sophisticated automation, including reporting capabilities, issue flagging, and AI supported by machine learning. Dynamic organizations can benefit immensely from an integrated accounting and payments system equipped with self-monitoring, payment alerts, and other communications that help users stay in control.
Tipalti has these capabilities and much more; today, they are helping many language service teams, like RWS, United Language Group, and The Language Group, to name a few, remove the complexities and concerns surrounding global payments.
Tipalti collaborates seamlessly with Phrase, the global leader in cloud-based translation and localization management software providing localization managers the tools to streamline their workflow efficiently. This integrated approach significantly minimizes manual tasks through best-in-class automation.
“Tipalti and Phrase deliver unparalleled control over your entire localization ecosystem,” says Jason Hemingway, Chief Marketing Officer at Phrase. “Automate payments to linguists and localization experts with Tipalti while consolidating and managing all your translation projects effortlessly through Phrase’s AI-powered translation and localization technology.”
Minimize Manual Tasks, Maximize Translator Satisfaction
Managing global payments manually can often set organizations back, given the sheer number of tasks involved, many extending far beyond regulatory and currency management. Payment delays caused by errors due to manually keying in payment data are commonplace within these repetitive tasks.
Errors include misspelled names, incomplete routing numbers, misplaced decimal points, and other common data entry errors. Tipalti set out to change all that with a smart global payments system that puts humans in charge with minimal effort—and it even has AI capabilities with built-in machine learning, helping to minimize and, in some cases, even eliminate human-related errors. If a company’s fortunes mean acquiring a new large contract and adding a few hundred linguists in record time to meet service levels, the size of the account payables operation would not have to be a source of concern. Instead of hiring even one more person in accounts payable to scale operations, many language services teams opt to work with Tipalti.
This tool helps growing companies manage cash flow with transparency and efficiency. Tipalti can quickly and easily onboard 100, 1,000, 10,000, or more linguists, translators, and other contractors. In fact, with the Tipalti Hub, self-onboarding is just one way to simplify payments for a global workforce. If desired, the Hub can also be white-labeled or integrated into your company’s systems. All a translation professional needs to do is dedicate a few minutes and enter basic information and payment data. Tipalti’s system can quickly validate payment details against over 26,000 global rules, which helps dramatically reduce payment errors. Plus, Tipalti lets you pay service providers in 196 countries, 120 currencies, and six payment methods, which makes it the top payout solution for growing global teams.
“Our linguists love the visibility provided in Tipalti’s self-service AP platform. Plus, using Tipalti has helped us cut down our payment processing time from up to two weeks to about a day. With Tipalti, we can now make mass payments in multiple currencies to thousands of translators and interpreters located throughout the world in minutes, with confidence that we are avoiding compliance issues and payment errors,” said Toni Tornell, Vice President, Corporate Finance and Controller of United Language Group
Tipalti also offers many outstanding reporting and auditing capabilities. And if there is something specific that a company might need, they can count on customization. For example, if a language services operation merges with a language tech provider, the system can be adapted to meet changing needs, no matter how dispersed the talent.
To help the many language services teams in its client portfolio pay suppliers worldwide while reducing costs and overhead, Tipalti has eliminated the challenges of operating across multiple accounting systems, taxation schemes, currencies, and payment apps.
“From currency exchange, onboarding interpreters, and managing risk and compliance, we can trust that Tipalti handles our entire payment process smoothly. Everything is now streamlined, and we have better cash flow visibility, which has helped us make smarter business decisions. At the same time, our interpreters have access to know exactly how much and when they’ll be paid, without reaching out to our team, helping us save a ton of time on managing our growing number of interpreters. These insights also help improve our relationships with our contractors by affording us the opportunity to provide a better, more seamless end-to-end experience,” said Giovanni Donatelli, Managing Partner of The Language Group.
To learn more, please visit tipalti.com, and please feel free to check out the Tipalti + ULG success story here.
About Tipalti:
Tipalti is the only company handling the end-to-end payment workflow for high-velocity language industry businesses across the entire financial operations cycle: onboarding and managing global linguists, instituting procurement controls, streamlining invoice processing and approvals, executing payments around the world and reconciling payables data across a multi-subsidiary finance organization. Companies can efficiently and securely pay thousands of linguists, translators, or other suppliers in 196 countries in their own currency within minutes. Thousands of companies, like RWS, ULG, and The Language Group use Tipalti to reduce manual payments workload by 80% and accelerate their financial close by 25%. For more information, visit tipalti.com.
