Airbase vs Procurify for Commercial Solar and Energy EPC Firms

Development-stage costs, interconnection studies, permitting fees, site assessments, are low dollar and predictable. Procurement-stage costs, modules, inverters, racking, switchgear, are the opposite: high dollar, ordered against a schedule, and often placed before the project has a firm notice to proceed. Construction-stage costs are labor and materials that need to track against the estimate. Procurify's purchase order structure is built for exactly this kind of staged commitment, letting you see what's been ordered but not yet received or billed, which matters when a project's interconnection date moves and you need to know your exposure. Airbase handles the approval workflow well but leans more on bill-pay after the fact than on tracking open commitments before an invoice arrives.

If you run a smaller number of projects at a time and your team already knows which orders are tied to which job, Airbase's faster onboarding and simpler approval chains reduce the administrative load on a lean project management team. It works well when your biggest procurement risk is approval delay, not commitment tracking, and when most of your spend flows through a manageable number of equipment distributors and subcontractors rather than dozens of specialty vendors per project.

If you're running several EPC projects concurrently with different interconnection timelines, or if your finance team needs to report committed-but-unbilled spend by project to lenders or investors, Procurify's PO-centric workflow does more of that work for you. The tradeoff is more setup time up front: someone has to build out your project cost structure inside the tool so that a module order actually maps to the right job and cost code, rather than landing in a general equipment category.

A slipped interconnection date sometimes means reroute the order to a different project that's ready sooner, not cancel it. Neither tool automates that decision, but Procurify makes it easier to see, at the PO level, exactly what's committed and where, so a project manager can propose the reroute with real numbers instead of a phone call to the warehouse. Build this into your process deliberately: designate someone who reviews open POs against project schedules at least monthly, since equipment sitting unassigned in a yard is the most common way capital gets stuck.

Utility interconnection requirements change mid-project more often in this industry than in general construction, and a change order that adds switchgear or protection equipment needs its own approval path, separate from your original budget. Set up a distinct approval tier for change orders above a threshold you define, routed to whoever owns project profitability, not just whoever approves routine purchasing. This keeps a utility-mandated scope change from quietly eroding margin before anyone notices.

For an EPC firm juggling several projects, the monthly review that matters most isn't total spend, it's committed spend by project compared against the current schedule. Build a report, whichever tool you choose, that shows open purchase orders next to each project's latest interconnection date, so a schedule slip surfaces as a cash question immediately instead of showing up as a surprise when the invoice finally arrives months later.

A monthly finance review should show these items side by side:

• Open purchase orders listed next to each project's latest interconnection date, so a schedule slip surfaces as a cash question right away.
• Committed-but-unbilled spend by project, especially if lenders or investors ask for it.
• Equipment already ordered and sitting in the laydown yard while it waits on interconnection.
• Change orders above your approval threshold, with the person who owns project profitability named as the approver.
• Slipped orders that could be rerouted to a project that is ready sooner, backed by purchase-order numbers.

Electrical and civil subcontractors on a solar build typically bill against a schedule of values tied to project milestones, not a flat invoice like an equipment distributor sends. Neither Airbase nor Procurify is a construction draw management system, so if you're managing retainage or milestone-based subcontractor billing, keep that process in a dedicated tool or spreadsheet and use your procure-to-pay platform for the equipment and materials side, where a purchase order model fits more naturally. Trying to force milestone billing into a generic bill-pay workflow usually creates more reconciliation work than it saves.