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Last updated Jun 1, 2023

How customizable forms keep teams moving, compliant, and informed.

Written by Keshav Zodey
3 minute read
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As companies grow, the number of stakeholders in the purchasing process increases, which makes approval workflows and oversight responsibilities more complex. At the same time, because compliance, audit, and security requirements can become more stringent, more information is required to ensure requests to spend company money are compliant. Airbase’s Guided Procurement module solves these problems by adding greater visibility into, and control over, all purchasing requests. Customizable forms are an integral part of this end-to-end guided procurement process. Stakeholders can configure request forms according to their unique business needs.

Agility, visibility, and compliance. 

Siloed teams and the resulting poor visibility into spend can have serious consequences. For example, when employees purchase and use technology without IT’s knowledge, a shadow IT ecosystem can emerge in a company. 

With the shift to a subscription model for a lot of software products, tools can quickly and easily be purchased without any IT involvement. However, these purchases typically lack the oversight to avoid duplicate licenses, and IT isn’t able to mitigate any potential security or compliance risks to systems they don’t even know about. To put this in perspective, a Cisco study found that the average number of cloud services CIOs thought they had running in their organization was 51 — but the average number they actually had was 730!

Another department that often needs to be in the transaction flow, especially for larger or customized contracts, is the legal team. Looping them in early is good practice and provides the necessary oversight to avoid problems later.

To increase visibility, companies often introduce complex purchasing processes that cross departments and functions. For example, a company could require that:

  • A representative from IT must enforce a security checklist that captures information around all spend requests from new software vendors, including a vendor’s SOC attestation.
  • Someone from the legal team needs to collect additional information so that they can conduct a legal review for requests over a certain dollar amount.
  • A representative from marketing ops wants to gather more information for marketing spend, such as renewal reminders, payment schedules, and cancellation terms, to ensure correct budget categorization and reconciliation.

The challenge is building an accounts payable process that captures all required information, ensures compliance, and doesn’t slow down employees.

Finding the right approach.

When approval processes can be customized to accommodate complex approval chains through Airbase’s Guided Procurement, nobody is overlooked. Intake forms can be configured to capture and disseminate all documentation to the right teams. Let’s look at how this could work in a typical virtual card request.

The administrator sets the parameters for when and where specific requests will be routed to additional stakeholders to capture the necessary custom information. The conditions could be based on any response given in the intake forms, such as:

  • Spend amount.
  • Vendor type.
  • Department.
  • Category.
  • Spend type.

For example, let’s say your company wants an IT team member to review all software purchase requests and capture the information required for their IT security audit, including the relevant SOC attestations. In that case, “Category” would be a condition that requires any purchases in a software-related GL category to go to a designated person in IT. The request form could include fields for the vendor’s website URL, the number of licenses required, security protocols, or other relevant information. If your IT team uses Jira, Airbase automatically creates a ticket with the information from the form for them to review in Jira. Once approved, the approval status syncs back to Airbase. 

If your legal team wants to review the contract for all purchasing requests with new vendors with amounts over $20,000, you could build a workflow with “Vendor” set to New and “Spend amount” set to over $20,000.

These workflows ensure employees request spend using one consistent, automated workflow and that all relevant stakeholders for that transaction are included in the process. The employee experience is intuitive — based on the criteria of the spend request they’re submitting, they’ll be asked for additional information as needed. The information captured in each workflow is stored in one place, which creates a consistent audit trail for all spend and enforces compliance company-wide.

To learn more about Airbase’s Guided Procurement module, contact us.

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