Airbase or Procurify When You Resell Hardware to Clients

Before comparing platforms, split your vendor list into two buckets: internal tools your own team uses, like a PSA system, an RMM platform, or a password manager, and pass-through purchases made specifically for a client engagement, like network switches for a site refresh or a security appliance a client asked you to source. Internal tools rarely need a formal purchase order; a card with a spend limit usually covers it. Client pass-through purchases almost always need one, because a client's own finance team may eventually ask for the paper trail.

Most of the friction firms run into with either platform comes from treating both buckets the same way. They shouldn't be.

For internal tools, a card-first model like Airbase's is usually enough: an engineer or technician has a limit, spends within it, and the transaction routes to an approver only if it's unusual. For client pass-through purchases, you want a named approver, usually the account manager or engagement lead, who has to sign off before a hardware order goes out, because that person is the one who'll answer for it if the client disputes the bill later. Procurify's request-first flow fits that second bucket more naturally, since it asks for the client and cost center before it lets the purchase order move forward.

Ask a client's procurement team what they'd actually want to see if they audited a purchase, and it's usually three things: a purchase order number, a receipt or vendor invoice, and proof it was delivered or installed. Build your workflow around producing those three items without anyone digging through email. Whichever platform you use, the purchase order needs to carry the client's name and site, not just an internal project code, because that's what will make sense to someone outside your firm reading it.

Build the workflow so it produces these items without anyone digging through email:

• A purchase order number that carries the client's name or engagement, so the order can be traced to the right account.
• A receipt or vendor invoice that shows what was bought and what it cost.
• Proof that the hardware or license was delivered or installed at the client site.
• A named approver, usually the account manager or engagement lead, who signed off before the order went out.

Hardware and software vendors an MSP buys from repeatedly, the usual distributors and license resellers, should be set up once as approved vendors with standard terms, not re-entered for every client engagement. That saves the account manager from retyping vendor details under deadline pressure, and it gives finance one place to check pricing consistency across clients instead of scattered one-off purchase orders.

At month end, reconcile every pass-through purchase against the client invoice it was supposed to generate. A purchase order with no matching client invoice line is either unbilled revenue you're leaving on the table or a cost that should have been absorbed instead of passed through, and either way it's worth catching before the client relationship, not just the vendor relationship, becomes the problem.

Say your firm signs a new managed-services client and needs to buy a handful of monitoring and ticketing licenses inside that client's own environment within the first week, on top of the usual onboarding checklist. In Airbase, an engineer can get a card limit scoped to that client's vendor category the same day the contract closes, buy the licenses, and tag each charge to the client from the transaction screen, so the cost lands correctly the first time. In Procurify, the same purchase goes through a request that names the client and cost center before anyone buys anything, which is slower on day one but means there's a clean paper trail if that client later audits what you billed them for setup.

The difference matters most in the first 30 days of a new engagement, when you're standing up a dozen small line items at once and the client is watching closely to see whether your onboarding process looks as organized as your sales pitch promised. A firm that's still reconciling client-cost tags a month after go-live is telling that client something about how the rest of the relationship will run.