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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Zoho Expense
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Zoho Expense is online expense reporting software, tailor-made for businesses worldwide to automate expense report creation, streamline approvals and make swift reimbursements.
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.
Zoho Expense is wonderful when you have a distributed or remote team or workforce that needs to submit expenses reports throughout the month into a single software and approval system. Zoho Expense does make it easy to train, onboard, and use all of the end-user features for submitting and generating expense reports.
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
Probably the easiest Zoho Application to setup, which is to say quite easy. No user has complained about it being difficult. Admin staff like it as well.
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 only reason I give Zoho a 9 is because of the issue with the Chart of Accounts skewing every time I export/import. I believe this is due to the fact that I use sub-accounts and Zoho cannot differentiate. Still hoping. :)
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.
I've used Concur in the past for managing and submitting expenses. When comparing what I know about Zoho to Concur, Zoho seems to be a more simplified tool focused on simply managing expenses, inputting, tracking, submitting and getting reimbursed. Based on what I know, Zoho gets the job done with no frills.
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.
