SeekOut and Airbase: Efficiency, control, and employee kudos.

Chris and SeekOut’s Senior Accountant, Collin Fredericks, were new to SeekOut when their VP of Finance selected Airbase. Collin describes a state-of-play that is fairly typical for fast-growing companies before implementing Airbase.

“Everything was manual. It was the Wild West on the front of corporate cards, bill payments, and expense reimbursements. We had little to no oversight on spend management, bad receipt compliance, and no integration with our accounting software. We had a spreadsheet that tracked all our bills and had to pay them manually by entering vendor details into the banking platform.”

The result was hours of painstaking work to code transactions and upload data to the general ledger.

“It was our best guess at what those transactions were without receipts,” Collin remembers. The manual process regularly took at least a day — for the card transactions alone.

Their growing company was swamping the accounting team, and they faced a big obstacle. “We did not have the budget for additional headcount,” says Chris. “So the goal was to automate as much as possible and get all those hours back, with the added benefit of improving internal controls and approvals.”

Dramatic time savings.

One task that Airbase automates is the reconciliation process. It automatically retrieves real-time GL data, matches transactions, and identifies discrepancies — all in a matter of minutes. The reconciliation report surfaces timing differences, transaction amount discrepancies, sync errors, missing entries, or entries created manually in the GL.

Both Collin and Chris give Airbase’s new assisted reconciliation feature top marks for efficiency. “The reconciliation tool has been a game changer,” says Collin.

Instead of the previous time-consuming process, reconciliation for all transactions is done in a record-breaking 30 to 60 minutes.

“I think during our time using Airbase, that’s one of our favorite features rolled out in the last two years,” says Chris. “We’re getting four or five hours back every month. It’s not frustrating. We’re in control.”

Another significant time saving has come from being able to easily message employees about any issues in their reimbursement requests.

“Keeping all of that communication in one place has been huge and saved us a lot of time.”

With messages being pushed to Slack and/or email, employees can sort out any issues quickly and easily from within their normal communication tools.

Monthly close gives for better visibility.

Prior to Airbase, the team simply didn’t have the bandwidth to do regular monthly closes. Now, the close happens each month in about seven days.

“Without Airbase, that’s not possible — it would be 10-plus business days.”

Delighting employees.

Chris is determined to protect SeekOut’s employees from time-consuming administrative tasks and the friction caused by having to learn new systems. This ethos is shared by the VP of Finance, and one reason he chose Airbase was for the intuitive user interface.

“Folks can get their login, go in, and they know exactly what they need to do with no training, no hand holding. That has saved us a ton of time,” says Chris.

Chris admits to being a little nervous that they’d have a lot of questions about using Airbase. “We were bracing for hundreds of questions, but instead there were almost none.” In fact, it was the opposite.

“We are getting unsolicited comments from employees about how much they love Airbase, how easy it is to use,” says Chris.

Positive ROI.

While Collin was not involved in the initial buy decision for Airbase, he says that “a positive ROI on spend management was a no-brainer.” In particular, the “user-friendliness [of Airbase], the implementation was minimally invasive, and the cash back that we get for card transactions contributes to a super ROI for us.”

SeekOut has been diligent in shifting as much spend from ACH to cards and generates more cash back than it pays in subscription fees for Airbase. This revenue plus the savings of an additional resource make that ROI even higher.

Seamless implementation.

When it came to the implementation, Collin recalls thinking that the most “daunting task” was going to be moving their corporate card spend into Airbase. In particular, he was concerned about the lack of visibility into recurring spend on cards.

Collin remembers, “There could have been five or six recurring subscriptions on one card, and we probably had 15 or 20 cards out there.” It was important to “organize that spend to ensure that we didn’t lose some of these important tools that people are using on the back end and being minimally invasive.”

“We had a really hands-on experience [from Airbase] with getting those cards set up, which was great,” Collin says.

“Our IT manager found it really easy to jump in as the spend owner and manage receipt compliance and recurring subscriptions. There’s a lot more visibility.”

The team has also been through another, more onerous, implementation. After adopting Airbase, SeekOut migrated from Xero to NetSuite, and once initiated, the Airbase component of this complex migration went off without a hitch.

“There was not a lot of lift on our end,” says Chris. “Airbase really took a lot of the onus off of us. One of the easiest pieces of the NetSuite rollout was getting Airbase plugged in because the Airbase team was just fantastic.”

Happy vendors, happy accountants.

Vendor onboarding was also seamless with very little manual entering of vendor details.

“Automated vendor onboarding feels like a non-negotiable now,” says Collin. “It’s such a nice feature that you can almost take for granted.”

“As invoices came in, we would send a vendor onboarding notice saying, hey, we’ve transitioned over to Airbase, which should be a better all-around experience. You should be paid faster.”

Vendor management has become easier for the team, ultimately saving even more time. When it comes to vendor payments, the team really appreciates the payment notification feature, which lets vendors know as soon as a payment has been remitted.

“Having that automated notification go out when payments are approved and processed has helped reduce the volume of emails in our AP inbox by at least half, slashing that administrative time even further,” says Chris.

Moving more payments onto virtual cards has also helped.

“It’s mutually beneficial,” Collin says. “We can make payments to them faster, the vendor onboarding is easier, and we get the cash back.”

With dramatic time savings, streamlined processes, and increased compliance and control, Airbase has helped the SeekOut team address significant challenges efficiently. Both Chris and Collin are excited about the Airbase roadmap and eager to add new features to their Airbase experience, especially the new Guided Procurement module.