13 features that prove Airbase crushes it for accountants.

During my time as an accountant at a publicly traded company, I experienced first-hand the frustrations of being buried under a mountain of never-ending, repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming work. My team spent a lot of precious time:

• Doing variance analysis for each GL account to catch errors from improperly coded transactions.
• Finding missing recurring monthly entries.
• Tracking down missing receipts, invoices, and supporting documentation.
• Accruing expenses.
• Explaining policies to employees, and much more.

I wasn’t providing as much strategic value as I envisioned or was capable of because of these demands on my time. The demands on our hardworking team were exploding as our business grew. Even with a variety of software solutions, Excel templates, and drafted policies and procedures, I was still drowning in this manual, time-consuming work. I thought to myself, is this really the only way? At the time, I thought it was.

The Airbase difference.

When I first saw what Airbase was able to do — consolidate and automate all non-payroll spend, including bill payments, corporate cards, and expense management — it blew my mind. I thought, why did this not exist a few years ago? How is this solution not in every accounting and finance team’s tech stack? The massive opportunity to completely change the way corporate accounting teams work and free them up to provide strategic value to their companies was immediately obvious to me.

After going deeper into the product, it was clear to me that Airbase was built to satisfy the exacting needs of accounting teams. Its workflows and tools automate our everyday tasks and eliminate much of the pain of the month-end close.

Here is a baker’s dozen of ways Airbase demonstrates its prowess at handling the unique needs of accounting professionals.

1. Managing the entire lifecycle of spend, from request to payment, to syncing to the GL.

Accounting teams are constantly thinking about the entire end-to-end process of managing spend. That’s important because you have to expect that, at any time, an auditor may wish to review your books and examine the entire lifecycle of your spend processes. You need to ensure you have the necessary visibility and controls in place from the moment spend is requested to the point where the journal entries are posted to the GL.

From one simple dashboard, Airbase can answer the questions an accountant must always be prepared for: What was this spend for? Where is the supporting documentation? Who approved it? How was it paid for? When was it paid? Where is the transaction in the GL? I can finally answer all these questions quickly and easily with Airbase.

2. Assisted reconciliation.

Reconciliation is painstaking and often frustrating. However, in Airbase’s survey of 745 finance professionals, 55% said they still manually reconcile bank accounts, and 36% said they manually reconcile credit card statements.

Airbase takes the pain out of reconciliations by effortlessly fetching up-to-the-minute GL data, cross-referencing transactions, and swiftly detecting any inconsistencies.

You just have to examine the reconciliation report to view the reconciliation entries between Airbase and your GL, including timing disparities, transaction amount variations, synchronization errors, omitted entries, or manually created GL entries.

This accelerates the reconciliation procedure, lets you clean up errors with ease, and puts you on the path to a much faster close.

3. Automation of transaction coding.

Automating transaction coding is a game-changer for accountants. The accounting team is responsible for properly coding transactions to the correct GL accounts, which forms the basis for keeping the books accurate. This process takes a lot of time, it’s very tedious, and, depending on how many GL accounts you have, can be very confusing. When it comes to AP, it’s not just your team that you are relying on to correctly code these transactions but also all of the business groups across your organization who spend company money.

Reducing errors.

Accountants worry about errors, and miscategorizations are a frequent type of error that plagues them. Miscategorizations can confuse budgeting, create friction, must be corrected, and can even require a restatement of the financials. With Airbase, you can set virtual and physical card rules that automatically code vendor-specific expenses to the appropriate GL account. And employees don’t have to guess which GL account is the right one when submitting for an out-of-pocket expense or requesting a PO.

Airbase shows only the necessary GL categories to employees based on their departments, so the selection is simple and straightforward. Once coded and approved, transactions are automatically synced to the GL with a simple click.

Automated transaction coding saves a significant amount of time, frustration, and effort for both accounting teams and employees who need to spend money to grow the business.

4. Automated amortization.

Pre-paying for an expense is common practice, and when I was in corporate accounting, it was standard practice to manage all these pre-paids using Excel. I would have to amortize each of these expenses each month, create the transaction posting, and track when each expense was fully amortized.

This process is error-prone and time-consuming. The difficulty compounds when you have many separate expenses with different amortization schedules — and this is just another task you must complete during month end.

Airbase automates this entire process by marking expenses that are pre-paid and amortizing them using a straight-line method while prorating the first and last month. These entries are scheduled and posted automatically to the GL without any need for Excel sheets and manual entry.

Transactions using virtual card, physical card, or bill payment (including paid outside Airbase) can be amortized at the individual line level. AP teams can set amortization at either the header or line level, and for NetSuite users, even apply specific NetSuite amortization templates to individual lines without leaving Airbase.

5. Audit-ready platform.

Airbase understands that accountants need an audit trail for everything they do. After all, it’s not just that a procedure was followed, it’s necessary to have evidence of compliance too. Whether for internal or external audits, having full audit trails that show all approvals were secured and all necessary documentation collected all the way to the transaction level is essential. The enormous amount of time and resources that are required to prepare for an audit are significantly cut with a spend management platform like Airbase.

An automatic audit trail.

Airbase was designed with these audits in mind. As card transactions take place, the relevant documentation is added to the transaction file in real time, so it’s ready whenever you need it in Airbase and directly in your GL.

Receipt compliance can be built into all your card transactions and reimbursement requests, so employees never forget to attach a receipt. This frees up accounting teams from the uncomfortable role of policing their colleagues — instead, the system enforces receipt compliance by notifying the employee automatically.

When everything you need — requests, approvals, purchase orders, invoices, payment details, tax, and other supporting documentation — is kept in the same platform and available at any time, you can focus on other parts of the audit process.

Airbase syncs all these details to your GL and also provides a transaction URL that’s embedded in the GL posting, which makes accessing this information for each transaction quick and easy for all internal and external stakeholders.

6. Invoice email context.

Airbase understands that documentation and transaction details are sometimes captured outside of an invoice or PO. These details are often contained in email communication — important details that provide users with an understanding of the purpose of the expense and who the spend owners are, and sometimes additional terms and documentation. This context can be necessary when approving an expense, in the event of an audit, or to make payments correctly.

With Airbase, even the emails with an associated spend request are captured once forwarded, as well as all supporting documentation. Your approvers can better understand what they’re approving and the accounting team can actually understand the overall context of that spend and rest assured all the information is captured in preparation for an audit.

7. Consistent policies and rules built in.

Every finance team establishes its policies and procedures and then expects, or at least hopes, that they are followed. Those that pertain to the finance and accounting team are easier to enforce but in the case of AP and employee expenses, these policies and procedures apply to employees spread around the globe.

With Airbase, consistent policies and workflows for all types of spend are built into one consolidated system, reducing the need to train the finance team and employees on multiple policies and processes.

With Airbase, anyone can request spend without needing to memorize an expense policy. The system knows who needs to approve the spend, who needs to be informed, and what information and documentation is required depending on the type of spend. Airbase lets you tailor your policies to meet particular requirements by different subsidiaries, departments, or business groups.

With Airbase’s Guided Procurement module, all requests are routed to required stakeholders like InfoSec, Legal, and IT, and those teams can review documents right in their own business systems, such as Ironclad or Jira. Relevant information, documentation, and approvals seamlessly sync from these systems back into Airbase.

Whether for a virtual card, physical card, purchase order, or out-of-pocket expense, the policies and rules are consistent and automatically enforced with an intuitive interface that any employee anywhere in the world can easily use.

8. Spend visibility through observers.

One of the biggest problems facing accounting teams is driving visibility of spend across an organization. In today’s dynamic work environment, various teams are often working in tandem on initiatives that spending is tied to, and keeping everyone in the loop on progress is key.

Accountants are often called upon to produce ad hoc reporting on expenses for these different initiatives, department heads, or even leadership. These requests disrupt accounting teams’ workflows and can come at the expense of getting other work done. With Airbase, those who are responsible for managing their budgets have on-demand access to the spending information they need.

Beyond approval workflows, which Airbase automates and streamlines, you may also want to give visibility to certain business groups across the organization on the spending status. For example, the Legal team might want to be aware of spend that’s happening for new vendors in order to review their contractual details. Or, you may want your CEO or CFO to have visibility into all spend over a certain dollar figure.

The Airbase observer policies allow organizations to make sure that the right people are kept up to date on spend that is relevant to them in an effective automated solution, with no developer assistance or coding required.

9. HRIS integrations.

Manually provisioning and deprovisioning employees from the tools they need for their jobs is not only extremely time-consuming but it also opens your organization up to enormous risk. With Airbase, this process can be automated through integrations with 29 of the most popular HRIS solutions — which means your company will save time, reduce errors, ensure compliance, and reduce risk. Additionally, all spend from a departing employee can be transferred to another employee in your organization to ensure continuity and keep critical services from falling through the cracks.

10. W-9 collection and tax reporting.

Tax compliance is a key responsibility for accounting teams. Because most companies outsource work to contractors, freelancers, and services that require special 1099 tax reporting, remaining compliant can be complicated. It takes a lot of time and effort to collate all of the necessary tax documentation related to contractors.

Airbase automates W-9 collection, which gathers the necessary tax information from your vendors. In Airbase, its collection can be set as a condition of payment so that the vendor is motivated to submit the form.

Before, I would have to go back and manually get all this information from vendors. But through Airbase, I can collect the W-9 and Airbase will conduct a tax validation of that vendor not only in the U.S. but also globally. Making the forms and validation as part of the vendor onboarding process gives me what I need to report to tax authorities through 1099s. I have all the information in place, which improves the efficiency and effectiveness of my tax reporting.

11. Touchless expense reporting.

Everyone hates expense reporting — sorting through the piles of receipts, trying to remember the correct category for a transaction, far too much manual work. Not to mention waiting for reimbursement!

Airbase makes it radically simple to reimburse employees around the globe.

Employees simply have to take a photo of a receipt or email it to a dedicated inbox. Then Airbase takes over, with AI-based OCR technology that extracts the relevant information and completes the relevant fields such as Merchant Name, Transaction Date, and Amount. Generative AI also fills the expense memo field with an expense description and purpose, and auto-categorizes each receipt.

Reimbursement flows directly into an employee’s bank account, based on information they’ve set up in Airbase. Remote employees with a non-U.S. bank account can be paid directly from your U.S. subsidiary.

12. Sync handling for bill payment failures.

If a bill payment fails or needs to be cancelled, manually adjusting or reversing the GL entry is a hassle nobody enjoys. For NetSuite users, Airbase automates the reversal of failed payments by creating and syncing reversal ledger entries. That means you don’t have to make manual adjustments or reversals for payment failures after syncing, preventing reconciliation issues, saving time, and ensuring accuracy.

13. Automatic invoice processing.

Manually processing invoices is another task that feels like it never ends. With Airbase, processing is automated, drastically cutting time and effort.

Invoices can be submitted through a dedicated inbox, or uploaded into Airbase. From there, once approved, you can initiate payment immediately or schedule for a later date.

These 13 features are evidence that Airbase truly was built with accountants in mind. The time saved can truly transform the role accountants play in their company. Let Airbase show you how, first-hand — contact us for a product demo.