Airbase vs Procurify for Federal and Defense Contractors

Procurify's requisition model lets you require a contract or task order reference before a purchase request can be submitted, which directly supports the DCAA expectation that costs be identifiable to a specific contract from the moment they're incurred, not reconstructed later. Airbase can capture this data too, but as a field applied during bill entry or card transaction tagging, which puts more of the enforcement burden on your own process discipline rather than the platform itself. For a smaller contractor with one or two active contracts, that discipline is manageable manually; it gets harder to sustain as your contract count grows and different staff are entering purchases against different contracts.

Direct costs tie to a specific contract; indirect costs, G&A, fringe, overhead, get allocated across your contract base using whatever allocation method your disclosed accounting practices define. Neither Airbase nor Procurify determines this allocation for you, and it shouldn't, that's your cost accounting system's job, but whichever purchasing tool you choose needs to feed clean, correctly categorized data into that system rather than requiring manual recategorization of every transaction after the fact.

FAR Part 31 identifies categories of unallowable cost, certain entertainment and alcohol expenses, for example, and the DCAA expectation is that these get flagged and excluded from your billed costs, not caught later during an incurred-cost audit. Build a distinct category or flag for potentially unallowable spend into your approval workflow, reviewed by someone with cost accounting knowledge, so these purchases are identified and segregated at the point of purchase rather than discovered during a review months or years after the money is spent.

A DCAA audit will ask for the connection between a specific cost, its contract, its cost element, and its allowability determination, potentially years after the purchase happened. Before committing to either platform, confirm you can export exactly that connected record for a sample transaction without manually cross-referencing several systems, since a tool that looks efficient day to day but can't produce this cleanly is a real liability at audit time. Run this test with a purchase from at least a year back, not a recent one, since older records are where a weak audit trail actually shows itself most clearly and most often.

Test each platform against these points using a sample transaction:

• Can you export the contract line, cost element and allowability determination for one purchase without cross-referencing several systems?
• Does the request require a contract or task order reference before it can be submitted?
• Is potentially unallowable spend flagged in its own category and reviewed by someone with cost accounting knowledge?
• Can the tool handle cost-plus, fixed-price and time-and-materials contracts with their different documentation rules?
• Do subcontractor and consultant purchases follow their own path that includes a compliance review step?

A contractor running a mix of cost-plus, fixed-price, and time-and-materials contracts faces different cost rules and documentation requirements for each, and a purchasing tool that treats every contract the same way will eventually miscategorize something. Build your contract-line taxonomy to reflect these differences from the start, and confirm whichever tool you choose can actually route approval and documentation requirements differently depending on the contract type involved, not just tag the contract number.

Subcontractor and consultant costs on a federal contract often carry their own flow-down clause requirements and separate documentation obligations beyond a standard materials purchase order. Treat these as a distinct purchase category with its own approval path that includes a compliance review step, rather than routing a subcontractor invoice through the same workflow as a routine office supply order, since the documentation standard the government expects is meaningfully higher for these particular purchases.

Contractors handling classified or controlled work sometimes need purchasing records reviewed as part of a facility security assessment, and a purchasing system that can't produce a clean, exportable record by contract and time period becomes its own finding during that review. Confirm this capability specifically before committing to either platform if any part of your contract base involves this kind of oversight, rather than assuming general reporting features will be sufficient when the actual request comes in.

Related to this, if your contract base includes CUI or ITAR-controlled work, confirm where each platform's own infrastructure sits and whether that meets your data handling obligations, since a purchasing tool touching cost data tied to controlled work is itself part of your compliance boundary, not a neutral back-office system outside of it.