Mid-sized companies are often challenged with managing multiple tools and workflows across different functions and platforms, making it difficult for procurement, finance, and accounting – along with the rest of the business – to swiftly and efficiently move the P2P process along and minimize disruption and frustration along the way.
In a recent episode of AOP Introducing, Helen Mackenzie spoke with Thejo Kote, Founder and CEO of Airbase, about the importance of combining powerful digital capabilities with an intuitive user experience.
Airbase helps mid-size and early-enterprise companies tackle complex approval and accounting workflows and maximize company-wide adoption by simplifying purchasing to ensure compliance and smarter spending. This helps procurement stop uncontrolled spend, save time and money, and accelerate the end-of-month close process. Airbase offers a suite of products, including guided procurement, AP automation, expense management, and corporate cards, that help procurement scale with the business, and their collaborative platform syncs with ERPs and integrates with critical business applications.
“We are trying to find the right balance for companies in that mid-market and early-enterprise segment,” said Thejo. “The end goal is to really simplify how purchasing happens in the business from the perspective of every person involved in spending money on behalf of the business.”
Several years ago – Airbase was founded in 2018 – Thejo noticed a fundamental disconnect between the SaaS tools available and the needs of growing organizations. He saw this first hand in a previous role. As Thejo recounts, when that company “grew to be a mid-market company, it became pretty apparent that as we were growing, how we spent money and how we got visibility was really hard, really challenging.” At that time, he said, the business was using 6 different tools to manage spend. “That made it clear to me that this is definitely a problem.”
This realization led to the creation of Airbase. Since then, the company has evolved to address the very specific needs of mid-market organizations, which typically find themselves caught between more basic small business tools and overly complex and expensive enterprise solutions.
Airbase goes beyond just consolidating tools; it prioritizes the user experience for every stakeholder and takes an integrated approach to spend management. Complex approval and accounting workflows can pose difficulties for growing companies, particularly around adoption, and Airbase has developed their solutions with this in mind.
“We tackle all of the complex workflows and bring together a product that drives company-wide adoption because – I think procurement professionals know this – you can put all the tools in the world into a company, but if it is not used by the employees and the end users, the goals that you set for yourself cannot be met,” explained Thejo.
In addition to investing in a best-in-class user experience, Airbase differentiates itself from other P2P SaaS solutions with its ability to bring together all aspects of non-payroll spend into a single platform, which supports that end-to-end experience and reporting that growing businesses appreciate.
While having such a comprehensive product offering might be a lot to take on for Airbase – “sometimes it feels like we’re building four companies inside of one!” – the impact that this unified approach to spend management has can be quite significant. “We are the only ones that can actually deliver that at a level of maturity and that works for companies of that size … because we have this mature process orchestration intake product, we have an AP automation module, we have an expense management module, we have a corporate card product,” he said.
The results for clients, said Thejo, can be felt throughout their entire organization. Having a user-friendly, highly customizable platform that provides visibility and oversight that can scale and grow along with the business gives teams enhanced visibility and accountability, improved control, better insight for more informed decision making, and generally more streamlined processes and workflows.
“We bring the experience of having all of that in a single platform that results in a seamless end-to-end experience,” said Thejo. “It’s a single pane of glass with fantastic consolidated reporting, and an amazing close experience at the end of the month because every dollar is flowing through one single system.”
