When submitting an expense through Airbase, its ability to read receipts and auto-fill in the information makes the process very easy. Additionally, as a manager, having clear visibility into what has been approved and where it is at in the process makes sure my team is confident they are reimbursed on time. Typically submitting expense reports is something the team dreads submitting due to the amount of time it takes to submit everything, but Airbase's user experience is top-notch. Finally, it is very helpful to be able to see the total amount you have been expensed to manage your own bills that are being charged on a personal card for business expenses.
I wish it was easier in Airbase to create a full "expense report" of all expenses for a single trip at the same time rather than needing to submit each expense one by one. This would help understand the cost of each trip for both the employee and their manager.
The biggest problem Airbase is solving for my team is reducing the time it takes to submit expense reports, which frees up their time to be productive in their work. It also provides an easy format for me as a manager to view all expenses in one place and understand what each fee entails.
Ownership and credentials for recurring cost are at your fingertips. No more worries about rogue recurring costs. All spending (recurring or ad hoc) and vendors are easily managed via dashboard. Limits and approvals are simple to set which allows 100% control and no unexpected legacy charges since credential ownership is tracked (with audit capability!) Airbase physical cards work just as well as competitors but Airbase has a more robust level of charge visibility and easy to use card management. BTW, a very good thing: physical card transactions are NOT integrated into accounting via journal entries (some of you accounts will greatly appreciate this).
Airbase plays well with Xero. Decent integration with the general ledger and bank reconciliation. Drilling down to Airbase initiated transactions is standard procedure and links are provide for each transaction (virtual card or otherwise). Airbase can be accessed with a click of a button in Xero - however, it would be great to have the transaction link as a click-through as well (recently requested).
Airbase enables a complete view of spending (other than payroll). Ownership of vendor relationship, credentials, and spending limits have been key in helping our clients manage costs. Very often, a company doesn't know what it doesn't know in terms of what employee signs up for recurring costs/charges. When an employee transitions, recurring costs can continue for months for vendors/software/subscriptions that are no longer used or needed. Managing and auditing these costs through Airbase has helped us fine tune expenses - and most importantly - avoid "cost surprises."
Airbase helps manage all our employees' interactions with the accounting department for company costs. This includes expense reports, invoice approvals, and corporate credit card spending. The controls Airbase provides over card spending are fantastic. We haven't had a spend management platform before, and Airbase makes it easy for employees' to request a one time card (i.e. "I need a credit card number to order business cards.") or recurring expense (i.e. "LinkedIn is charging me $99 for Sales Navigator. Can I use the company card instead of requesting reimbursement"). In both cases, the card can easily be suspended or stopped if the vendor tries to auto bill us beyond what's been authorized. Having the capability to do that without disrupting our other usage has been helpful. The interface is intuitive, and the system even collects receipts for all spend. It interfaces with Netsuite to an extraordinary degree, including direct links to individual transactions going in both directions. For expense reporting, users have an app on their phone they can use to take a picture of each receipt as the spending occurs. The receipt is coded in real time and accounting has immediate visibility into the charge amount and the department it impacts. Managers can have expense requests linked to Slack for instant approval of expense reports or credit card spending requests. On top of all this, we get the highest rate of cash back of the providers we surveyed at the time with no commitment.
While Airbase provides a great platform, it can slow down from time to time. The least attractive aspect is their cash management. A payment initiated today will not reflect in our available balance for 5 business days. By contrast, a payment made to our previous corporate credit card provider was reflected in 1 business day. ACH payment initiated on the Airbase platform have the same lag time. While it's provided significant administrative time savings to our staff, I can't say our vendors have been as happy with the change. In some cases, we are still manually initiating ACH payments from our from our bank instead of dealing with the lag time. While expense report charges are grouped in Netsuite based on the day they come in, each line item generates a separate approval request to managers. That said, Airbase has been very responsive to feature requests and shares roadmap items. Releases are frequent with new features being added regularly.
The biggest benefit is in adding controls to our corporate credit cards. Prior to implementing Airbase, we had a single card number that practically everyone in the company had received for one reason or another. We were being auto-billed for services we had not used in months. All credit card receipts were being coded by the accouting department staff and reconciled. However, some charges were mis-coded as vendors had provided services to multiple departments. Airbase allows us to push all reconciliation to the users who are responsible for the purchases. They reconcile the charge with the receipt and ensure that each expense is justified each month. If an employee leaves, there's a clear trail for accounting to either re-assign that expense review to another employee or determine it's no longer needed so the card can be cancelled.
I love the mobile app (so easy to use and submit receipts while I'm on the road) and how easy it is to email my receipts to Airbase, which can then be auto-populated and submitted for reimbursement in less than a minute. I don't need to create Expense Reports as a "container" for my receipts, which has always been a pain in other systems I've used, like Expensify, SAP / Concur, and even Brix. The receipts are then reviewed and approved by my manager and AP one at a time, so I get my reimbursements way faster than I have with other systems. This makes for less interest payments on my personal credit cards!! I also like the Virtual Card feature. Previously, it has always been a hassle sharing a credit card across a team or asking a manager or executive for their credit card details for recurring or one-off purchases, not to mention not very secure (often, people are emailing credit card numbers and CVC codes or attaching pictures of cards to texts, etc.). The Virtual Card feature makes it much easier, FASTER, and safer to set purchasing limits and make approved purchases without a lot of steps and red tape. Finally, I LOVE seeing the total amount to be reimbursed, highlighted in orange in big numbers at the top right of the screen, so I know where I stand at any given time. Other systems I've used, it was difficult to tell what reimbursements were still pending and how much overall, especially since they were grouped by expense reports.
The "Request a Reimbursement For" pop-up screen when you first open / log in to Airbase on your desktop browser is annoying. I log in for different reasons, sometimes just to upload a receipt or to check the status of approvals and reimbursements, and the first few times, it took me a minute to figure out I just needed to close that window. I just want to login and do what I need to do. A small nit and very right-hand centric critique: When in the Approved tab on the home page, I would prefer the "Search by Vendor" field to be on the right vs. the left. For some reason it throws me off and I feel lost when what I really want is the Unpaid / In Progress / Paid buttons.
As a frequent business traveler in sales, Airbase is a gem. Expense reports used to be so painful for me and I would let them languish for weeks, accruing interest charges on my personal credit cards because I hated logging in to previous systems and having to split hairs to create expense reports, map receipts to reports, itemize hotel charges, etc. Airbase is so simple and FAST and actually pleasant to use (good UI). I haven't had an interest charge or a late payment fee on my personal credit cards in the 7 months it has been rolled out at our company. I also don't spend as much of my nights and weekends trying to enter a bunch of receipts--I can quickly scan them in the mobile app as I travel, or email them to Airbase using the designated Airbase email address. While other systems do these things too, I always had issues with the emails getting lost or not being routed correctly, or the UI to scan a receipt on the fly required too much manual entry.
The ease of Airbase's UI compared to previous old, clunky expense management tools we've used makes submitting, reviewing, approving, and tracking an expense feel easy and not something employees dread. Also, Airbase's Slack integration is extremely useful for managers approving expenses, resulting in employees receiving reimbursements very quickly and efficiently.
Being able to submit multiple reimbursement requests from a single UI will be helpful as an optimization, but the current experience is great as is and we don't have major dislikes.
Airbase is helping companies run efficient expense management, approval, and budget tracking process. As a manager, it makes it easy for me to review and approve expenses quickly, and as an employee, I have a peace of mind that I'll be receiving reimbursement quickly. Airbase's UI is modern and feels like using a consumer application, which is a breath of fresh air.
Airbase gives a full view into expenses in real-time for both accounting and for budget owners. They have an easy to use tool that didn't require much training and has received very positive feedback from all users. Additionally, and most importantly, every Airbase team member we've interacted with has gone above and beyond to make us as successful as possible - the initial sales representative, our implementation manager, our customer success manager, and even the CEO scheduled a meeting to gather feedback after we were live. Their level of service is impeccable and rare. Airbase is not a typical vendor - they are a partner who values feedback and truly wants to build a robust solution to address all existing pain points in spend management.
They are still a newer company so there will be growing pains, however, their team is extremely responsive and helpful so any small bugs or issues we've run into have been addressed quickly.
Prior to Airbase, we were using one system to process AP, one system to process payments, and managed corporate credit card accounts separately. We wouldn't have a real-time view into our expenses as the card transactions weren't uploaded until month-end. It was also very difficult to control who had access to our corporate cards and to track down the owner of any unexpected charges. Now all of our spend is consolidated into one place and much easier to manage and control.
Airbase has been implemented in our organization to manage, track and report employee business expenses, and it has lived up to our needs; it has allowed us to achieve tighter and more transparent control of corporate costs. One of the best things we have seen in Airbase is their architecture for approval flows; they are set up so that each team is automated in their approval flows while at the same time prohibiting bypassing controls, thus causing a high level of confidence that each employee is accountable for their expenses.
The only thing I don't like is that it is limited only to purchase request and approval; it would be great if it covered more of the purchase cycle, save us more work, and we would cease paying other add-ons to make it possible. Although it has a mobile application, it is not as optimal as the web application.
One benefit we found from Airbase is that it provides excellent protection against fraud and possible erroneous charges by allowing us to enforce corporate expense tracking and management measures. The approval flow has helped tighten expense control and ensure that the procedures and guidelines are adhered to, achieving high confidence and making each employee more accountable for their purchases. It helps us to confirm that payments are secure and do not exceed certain thresholds, which allows us to optimize the approval process, take measures to avoid excesses and take better care of the organization's assets.
Ive used other tools in the past (concur,expensify etc) this is BY FAR the most user friendly. Easy UI on web and mobile. Charges from company card show up quickly
Occasionally uploading photos from mobile gallery can be clunky. I wish I could upload the photo in the moment and have the app link it to the charge on the company card once it shows up
We've got lots to do and not wasting tiny on expense management means I can focus on high value tasks. It's also very streamlined to approve charges for my team