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.
N/A
Visa Spend Clarity
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Visa Spend Clarity offers a suite of end-to-end spend management solutions to empower businesses of all sizes and levels of complexity to control spend, maximize visibility, and optimize cashflow. it is designed so that with it, financial institutions can deliver payment and spend management technology to help to increase card spend, improve customer retention, and differentiate their service.
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.
It is well suited and, I guess, is a primary role for remote or distributed teams - especially when you know a person not well to trust him in managing local costs was agreed to pay. If you work with contractors with irregular payments, it will suit you as well cause of immediate card transfer, but it may be limited by your local KYC policy. It is not typical to pay payroll costs with it because it is focused mostly on operations with virtual card balances, so it is less appropriate for it. So it works best for remote teams.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
It is mostly focused on virtual visa operations. In general, all cash flow controlling suits easily can start from Excel or Google Colab integrations and evolve even to Sungard or WSS. It depends. Visa Spend Clarity is about your flexibility "to have your own bank in a pocket" - open sub-accounts, set limits, and reconcile costs actually made by your contractors or employees. We should see it wider and include Uber, Booking, Airbnb, and Flow interactions to make it a really fast process for your contractor from your "Yes" to contractor "Done". The Visa Spend Clarity is not exactly about your money (costs). It is more about your ability to start acting faster even if all details of cooperation with a person are not agreed upon, but as soon as possible, discuss critical details or add maneuver to your decision-making while limiting financial risk with reasonable limits.
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.
Some possible positive impacts of Visa Spend Clarity include increased transparency of spending habits, more effective budgeting and money management, and improved overall financial health. Additionally, Visa Spend Clarity may also lead to more strategic and informed decision-making when it comes to using credit.
On the other hand, some possible negative impacts of Visa Spend Clarity include feelings of anxiety or guilt associated with credit card spending, as well as the potential for overspending if users are not careful.
Additionally, Visa Spend Clarity may also lead to financial arguments or conflict if users are not on the same page about their spending habits.
