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Platform Science: An on-the-road company travels light with Airbase.
Andrew Duncan
Controller at Platform Science
Platform Science is a business-to-business telematics and trucking fleet management company based in San Diego, California. The company’s core enterprise technology enables fleet communication, safety, productivity, and compliance through the efficient and reliable transfer of telematic data between vehicles, drivers, and fleet managers by leveraging cloud-based software, hardware, and network devices and services.
- Eliminated multiple tools, consolidated tech stack, and saved on extra NetSuite seat licenses.
- Improved visibility and control that led to savings on subscription spend.
- Saved several hours every month on vendor management.
Industry
Size
Accounting/erp Software
The winding path to Airbase.
Andrew Duncan, Controller at Platform Science, joined as an early accounting hire and was tasked with bringing accounting operations in-house, which included re-evaluating and deploying new tools in the AP tech stack. Single-point solutions, such as Bill.com, Expensify, and Teampay were not providing the support for vendor and expense management that Platform Science needed.
“There wasn’t a lot of visibility around spending unless we did a lot of very manual, head-down work to consolidate and reconcile data from a handful of tools. That was problematic — we were trying to make quick decisions on spend management, especially as a startup.”
Consolidation — how it helped.
With Airbase and its intuitive design, Andrew doesn’t have to spend excessive time onboarding his employees across multiple systems.
“The previous task of going into each decentralized system and updating spend controls, rules, and requirements as the business was growing was extremely manual and prone to error. Even adding and removing users was an annoyance. Now, within Airbase, you build the environment, the controls, the user permissions, and can self-manage spend in one location across all spend channels.”
On-the-road expenses and large inventory transactions.
Platform Science representatives often attend trade shows and other marketing events which can incur on-the-road expenses. Separately, the company procures inventory from a variety of suppliers. Andrew shares that Airbase has effortlessly supported every type of transaction, helping him manage varying spend.
Furthermore, international vendors are no problem for Andrew, who easily makes “all of those international payments through Airbase.” Andrew shares how vendor communication channels have been refined through the vendor portal, with Airbase automating many of the details that previously involved a string of back-and-forth communication.
Approval workflow benefits for ever-changing teams.
At Platform Science, teams are growing and that requires agility and flexibility across systems. Employees requesting spend approval may not always be requesting from the same approvers. However, easily customizable approval workflows within Airbase are flexible and keep Andrew, and his management teams, in control while still allowing spend to happen efficiently.
“Airbase is pretty dynamic. We’re hiring — teams, roles, and responsibilities are changing. Because Airbase integrates with our HRIS, those changes do not feel burdensome. They are automatically updated in Airbase while maintaining the same approval rules.”
Andrew explains that teams are predominantly using virtual cards to carry out spend, which provides spend owners autonomy to make purchases within the confines of their budgets. It also provides comfort to management that spend is approved, within policy, and accounted for in their financial plan, minimizing surprises along the way.
Post-implementation spend analysis and new savings.
Platform Science took advantage of the Airbase onboarding process to do a “spend clean up” — a choice that can add a little time to implementing Airbase but is generally considered a best practice. Now, the system prevents inefficient spending, “being able to renegotiate or kill subscriptions” and save on zombie spend, for example.
With a particularly travel- and inventory-heavy business, expenses can be changeable and large in scale. With Airbase, managing large-scale, sometimes international, expenses and AP processes is no longer a challenge.
