Platform Science And 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

Data software & services

Size

251-500 employees

Accounting/erp Software

Oracle NetSuite

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.”

Andrew needed a solution that integrated seamlessly with his newly implemented ERP, NetSuite, while giving him and other spend owners within the business better oversight of company-wide spending. With Airbase, that’s exactly what he got.

“We found Airbase, an all-in-one solution that marries well with our ERP system, to provide the detail we were looking for. Centralizing all of the tools we previously used into one system, with real-time visibility into spending, means we can better manage and control spend both within and outside of the finance team.”

Consolidation — how it helped.

With Airbase and its intuitive design, Andrew doesn’t have to spend excessive time onboarding his employees across multiple systems.

“We no longer have to onboard and educate across four or five legacy finance tools, which would vary depending on payment methods, spend use cases, or vendors. Instead, we have one central tool to manage it all.”

Beyond onboarding, Platform Science has streamlined its approval workflows by consolidating its tech stack into one comprehensive spend management platform. Now, Andrew and management alike can easily manage users, spend controls, and approvals all in one place.

“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.

“We cover significant trade show marketing expenses, as well as inventory purchases that we need to make, with Airbase. Airbase is really the central piece that facilitates all of those payments.”

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.

“The vendor management tool means folks are able to self-serve information and see how much they’ve been paid instantly. A lot of those pesky questions, and detail chasing, have disappeared for our accounts payable team as we get more and more folks on that vendor portal.”

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.

“We are using the virtual cards — we get to set the rules around those transactions, making sure they align with how we want to map spend before they flow into our GL. Not just from an accounting standpoint, but also a budget perspective.”

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.

“The onboarding experience also served as a vendor and spend clean-up exercise, ensuring the spend we migrated over was what the business actually needed at that point in time and also making sure that we continually monitored it once it was actually live within Airbase. That really added value for us.”

Amortization schedules work very well for Platform Science, allowing them to have a truer insight into cash flow and spend control as well as saving them money on the number of NetSuite seats they need.

“We use the amortization schedules which allows our users in Airbase, especially the accounts payable team, to be able to attach and create amortization schedules without going into the ERP system. That’s a much more expensive seat to have than creating and pushing those rules from Airbase.”

Airbase allowed Platform Science to get rid of a handful of single-point expense management tools and streamline all of their functions into a consolidated spend management platform. Saving them time, money, and reducing their volume of low-value data entry and manual tasks.

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.