Airbase headquartered in San Francisco offers a cloud-based accounts payable and spend management solution, and combines a pre-approval system with corporate cards, allowing users to manage the entire AP spend process in one place.
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JAGGAER
Score 6.8 out of 10
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JAGGAER is a procure-to-pay provider in the higher education and government sectors. JAGGAER eProcurement and strategic sourcing customers gain access to suppliers on a scalable, customizable platform. The JAGGAER SaaS-based, source-to-settle solution provides unparalleled visibility, insights and recommendations to procurement leaders and suppliers. The result is a fluid supply chain driven by spend analysis, contract management, and an accounts payable solutions.
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.
As a purchasing app, it is excellent. I cannot speak to its usefulness in the AP area. it may be less useful in a different environment, such as manufacturing. For research and healthcare use, it is excellent. Also, we use Banner as our ERP. SciQuest is well versed with integrating with Banner. Users with a different ERP may experience less pleasant results.
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.
Source to settle: Although we did not purchase all the new applications in the suite SciQuest made, what we did use, worked and worked nicely. With SciQuest you can get a turn-key system.
I love the way SciQuest rolls out changes, measuring customer feedback, and rolling out major changes 3 times a year. Like clockwork you know what to expect ahead of time, deciding whether or not you need a particular enhancement (if optional), having plenty of time to make adjustments in business processes if needed, and/or user-base announcements.
I was always astonished to see both clients and potential clients come to the conferences. SciQuest would allow the "mixing" of clients and potential clients, apparently unafraid of any negative commentaries the potential clients might get. That has always been impressive to me as a techie myself.
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.
Their existing pricing model for the number of Suppliers onboarded or removed has been a little disappointing as there are times when suppliers do have to be switched out.
They have greatly helped in making UNSPSC updating easier, but I would like to be able to get an extract with a delta that would make it easier for us to update our ERP as this information needs to be stored on both sides.
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.
Simplified and user friendly system that has been implemented across our entire institute and with all of our vendors. We really like this program and it works well for us. Changing to another program would be a significant time investment and hassle
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
There is a 3 month learning curve and then the features are easy to use. My AP team processes 400 invoices daily through the system. The things to watch for are vendor billing mistakes (no/incorrect PO number, information discrepancies) and buyer purchase request inconsistencies. Those are part of AP anyway so maybe it is what it is. The Sciquest AP software performs as designed some improvements needed. In our system I have documented a list of 60 improvements that could increase throughput up to 50%. Those improvements include making the AP records GUI format more customized for AP purposes, and improving the QC tolerance functionality, which can be laborious to sync (Match).
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.
They have had only a couple of very quick occasions where they were down for 1-2 minutes. One time they had a problem adding attachments. Very Reliable!
Having used SciQuest for over five years and having their competitors, SciQuest offers the best user experience and integration between vendors and ERP.
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.
They usually respond to medium-to-low priority issues very quickly, and high priority issues almost instantly. Their support team is knowledgeable and responsive. Their Supplier Enablement team is very good and is a feature that most of their competitors don't have. The company makes a serious effort to maintain good relationships with their customers.
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.
We had an internal project manager who was well versed in PMI methodologies. I think the implementation would have gone far less successfully, or may even have failed entirely, without her. She was able to do all the things a project manager is supposed to do, and in an ordered and organized manner.
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.
Again, our SciQuest system integrates with Banner. Banner does have a way to create, approve and report on POs. However, the SciQuest product is so much more user friendly, so the learning curve is very steep. Also, SciQuest gives us a lot more detail in our reporting and PO history, which is helpful when trying to remember what happened 6 month ago
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.
Highly reliable remotely hosted PTP solution that interfaces with our remote OCR vendor and with university sited operational servers. Twice a year over the last 3 years a SciQuest/OCR system file handling or network problem occurs that gets fixed within a day.
Customers seem to be fine with selecting requisition items and having them pushed back via carts to a legacy system.
Converting one's legacy ERP system to a SaaS solution may prove to be too much of an overhaul in regards to converting to a new set of rules which do not fit exactly with current business processes. The inability to enhance in great detail is also a drawback for customers coming from a highly modifiable system.
