Welcome aboard! How onboarding with Airbase represents a new beginning.

With our onboarding team’s help, getting up and running on Airbase is a straightforward process. But if you’re like most companies, you’ll bring some extra baggage to sort through — unhelpful GL categories, poor vendor records, unattributed cards, poorly maintained documentation, and incomplete expense policies, to name a few. Onboarding with Airbase is your opportunity to do a Marie Kondo-style overhaul to determine what you should keep, throw away, and reorganize.

The result is a clean setup and smoother processes, so your move to Airbase will truly mark a new beginning. This opportunity to cleanse your data will pay off many times down the road. In our experience, every decision you make during your Airbase implementation will have a net positive impact on your company.

Let’s take a look at the steps involved in an Airbase implementation and how your company will experience a positive ROI from each stage of the process. 

Administrative onboarding. 

This stage is generally the most time-consuming. However, it’s important to note that you set the cadence for onboarding — we can move as quickly or as slowly as you need. No matter your timeline, we’ll be in touch with regular meetings.

Before diving into your processes and policies, we’ll work together on a few key starting points.

• Know Your Customer (KYC). This is the mandatory process of confirming your identity, and it can be completed in a few steps. 
• Establishing the bank connection. You’ll need to provide banking information to connect Airbase with the funding account. 
• GL integration. This step will depend on the type of GL you have. We’ll provide instructions and ongoing support. 

Policy work.

In this initial phase, you define policies and procedures so they can be built into Airbase. That includes your:

• Accounting policies.
• Reimbursement policies.
• Approval chains.
• Information needed to be included in transaction workflows.
• User roles.

For fast-growing companies, many of these policies have been created on an ad hoc basis, which may have allowed employees to move quickly but will present problems as the company scales. 

Alex Kracov, Lattice’s former VP of Marketing, remembers that when he joined the company, “I could just tap the CEO on the shoulder and clear an expense.” ​That approach no longer worked as the marketing department grew and purchases increased exponentially — until they adopted Airbase. 

We find that many companies have created policies that cover the transactions they’ve made to date — but they haven’t looked ahead. This onboarding stage is the chance to consider how finance functions will scale. What will the approval chain look like once reimbursement requests cross a certain dollar threshold? What size of contract will require a review by the legal team? Should reimbursement requests always have a receipt?

Addressing these policies now will help you “set it and forget it” regarding accounts payable. Once the groundwork is done in this stage, Airbase can handle everything the future holds for your company’s spending. 

GL cleanup.

This is also a good time to review your GL’s organization. The structure and classifications that worked in the past may no longer be the best for a growing company. You also want to ensure data integrity as you move from one system to another, so that everything goes to the right place. 

Organizing vendor data. 

Next, you complete a Vendor Bulk Upload spreadsheet so all vendors can be transferred into Airbase. I strongly recommend collating all vendor data before the move to Airbase to make sure you’re getting rid of duplicate records and updating old information. In the long run, you’ll be glad you did this housekeeping! We’ve worked with companies who kept their vendor data in multiple places before Airbase, and this consolidation makes operations much easier going forward. I recommend using Airbase as the source of truth for vendor data, so you want it to be as clean and organized as possible. 

We upload the vendor data as many times as needed — we know it can take a few attempts to capture all vendors. 

Moving card payments to Airbase.

Because using Airbase’s corporate cards for bill payments whenever possible is a good practice, you’ll want to migrate all of your existing cards to Airbase cards. Paying by card provides opportunities to earn cash back — think of it as monetizing your AP. You’ll also enjoy the real-time visibility and GL sync of virtual cards.

To reach this state of spendlightenment, we’ll work together to identify which cards are used for each expense and eliminate any unnecessary ones. We then bulk-create virtual cards for you to use for bills going forward. 

Accounting checkpoints. 

Airbase works through your first monthly close with you to ensure it’s a smooth process. For Enterprise customers, we guide you through your first two closes with Airbase. 

We’ll monitor various accounting checkpoints and ensure the GL sync is working as it should. We’ll also continue to hold regular meetings and start planning the next phase — employee rollout!

Employee rollout.

Airbase works with you to implement a training program for employees and walks you through the many resources we have to help them get the most out of Airbase, including our detailed Help Center. 

Because you’ve done the groundwork and laid a solid foundation, rolling out Airbase to employees is actually extremely straightforward. The intuitive interface also makes it simple to learn. One G2 reviewer even confessed: “To be honest, I didn’t pay the closest attention to the Airbase training my company had. Miraculously, that’s how I knew how great Airbase was. Without thorough training or lots of follow-up questions, I was easily able to navigate Airbase and quickly complete my task. User-friendly, smart, and simple.”

When we introduce employees to Airbase, the message we want to convey is, “this will make your lives so much easier.” The accounting policy definitions, approval chain creation, and data cleanup completed as part of onboarding will also make the finance team’s lives easier going forward — no matter how quickly you grow.

Find out how Airbase makes life easier for everyone. Schedule a demo to learn more.