Likelihood to Recommend Airbase is suitable for companies that don't have very many legal entities. The features for multi-entity companies are inefficient, often requiring the user to look at only one entity at a time. That, coupled with requiring the company to prefund money into an Airbase account in order to use a physical corporate card or virtual card can be burdensome. Prefunding requires that you maintain cash in Airbase in order for the credit cards to be used, which in reality, is more like a debit card. And when using multiple entities, you have to have money in separate accounts. Therefore, you have to constantly monitor if you're balances are sufficient. There is a feature to auto load funds when the balance reaches a certain threshold, however, the loading of funds takes 5 business days. It was almost impossible to predict at what point wallet loads needed to be initiated, and therefore required a significant sum of cash to sit in Airbase accounts. There were instances where significant costs would come up, and our employees were unable to pay for them because the cash ran too low before the wallet load was completed.
Read full review I am new to customer-supplier portals in my career. I use several different ones in my current role, including Ariba and
Tipalti . To be honest, I don't really enjoy the user experience of any of them. I can see how larger companies may benefit from their services but for my current role submitting invoices on them and filling out vendor information requests seems somewhat clunky to me. When I'm in Coupa, the easiest, most non-clunky process for me is when I'm successfully connected with a customer who has successfully created their purchase order and I can easily upload my invoice to said PO. To me, emailing customer invoices directly to the customer from our invoicing system seems like the easier route of delivering an invoice. I suppose it is helpful and reassuring to know that an invoice has been successfully uploaded into a company's system rather than waiting to find out if your emailed invoice made it to the correct department for payment processing.
Read full review Pros Uploading receipts is seamless and easy! I hardly ever have issues with this and the doc reader seems to work very well. Being able to see who needs to approve my reimbursement requests and adding notes/comments to reach out for questions or bump them as a reminder is a great feature. Email notifications are helpful and timely of knowing when an approver has approved my reports. Read full review Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation. The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration. We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group. Read full review Cons The Airbase Invoice date syncs with the accounting system's current month date if the previous month is closed. Split expenses and attendees' departmental expense recording. We are currently collaborating with Airbase for a different look and applicability of this functionality. More filters to be added into the report creation and export. Read full review Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal. I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process. Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Airbase is a great solution, especially for smaller companies without an ERP that has an AP module. If an ERP was implemented, Airbase would be less valuable.
Read full review Usability See previous comments about some UI/UX features that can be improved: - Can't see full merchant name or approver in the desktop "Reimbursements" screen - Can't see or filter expenses by "Purpose" as a user - Receipt mgmt and submission in app could be less clunky
Read full review Reliability and Availability Over the last 3 years, we've only had one major service issue that rendered Airbase unusable for us for about 24 hours. That said, they navigated the SVB bank crisis very well and made sure funds were available during that time.
Read full review Performance Pages load fairly quickly - there are times where clearing the cache is necessary for the platform to function correctly.
Read full review Support Rating The customer support offered by Airbase has been top-notch; we could not have asked for anything more. They were accommodating during the onboarding process. They have always been quick to respond to any issue that we have faced. We get the sense that they are well-run and organized company.
Read full review Online Training Very effective training, fully educated admin users who were then able to train other users.
Read full review Implementation Rating The Airbase team was very helpful in importing our .csv files from our previous system. They provided a great overview of the system for the rest of the company and everyone got up to speed quickly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose Airbase for the virtual cards and cashback. Having complete control over our software spending via virtual cards was important to us for several reasons, including security, audit, budgetary, etc. We knew it had functions for expenses and bill payments, so we thought we would switch to them, but we were slow to do so. We would have switched sooner if we had known how good these functions were and that they were better than their counterparts.
Read full review Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.
Read full review Scalability It is very scalable among different departments in one company. We have not tried to use it yet with multiple entities so I cannot speak to that experience.
Read full review Return on Investment With Airbase, we are able to cut down on costly late fees with total insight into spending limits With approval workflows, we're able to cut down on uneccesary spending that can plague a budget With Airbase's Support Team, we feel like true partners Read full review It has allowed for proper processing of expenses tied directly to the proper LOB and GL Codes Has taken the guesswork away and allowed for the proper budgets to be hit and reconciled Ease of use has led to mass adoption and more prompt processing of expenses Read full review ScreenShots