If you went looking for Airbase and landed on a Paylocity page, nothing is broken. Airbase is now Paylocity for Finance, the spend-management side of the same platform you already use for payroll. Here’s what the suite does, what happened to the old name, and how it touches the HR and payroll data your team runs every day.
At a glance
- Paylocity for Finance is Paylocity’s spend-management suite. Paylocity launched it under that name on July 22, 2025, built on the Airbase platform it acquired.
- Airbase was a San Francisco spend-management company founded in 2017. Paylocity agreed to buy it on September 4, 2024 for approximately $325 million and closed the deal on October 1, 2024.
- Five core modules: Expense Management, Corporate Cards, Accounts Payable Automation, Guided Procurement, and Headcount Planning.
- The connection to HR and payroll: Paylocity describes the suite as “grounded in the employee record,” which means expenses, approvals, and headcount plans use the same people data as payroll.
- Who it’s built for: Airbase’s platform was designed for companies with 100 to 5,000 employees, and Paylocity describes Paylocity for Finance as built into its HCM (human capital management) platform.
What Is Paylocity for Finance?
Paylocity for Finance is the part of the Paylocity platform that handles company spending that isn’t payroll. Paylocity’s product page calls it an “Autonomous Finance Platform.” The same page says it “brings accounts payable, procurement, corporate cards, expenses, and headcount planning together in one autonomous platform, powered by the employee record.”
That last phrase is the one to hold onto. In service businesses, labor is the largest input by a wide margin. It made up 55.1 percent of the services sector’s inputs on average from 2019 through 2023, against 27.2 percent in manufacturing, according to an August 2026 analysis in the BLS Monthly Labor Review. Paylocity’s pitch with Finance is that the rest of the spend, the vendor bills, the card swipes, the reimbursements, should sit in the same system, next to the same employee data. Paylocity’s October 2024 completion release described the goal as letting companies “manage all payroll and non-payroll spend through a single pane of glass.”
For an HR or payroll leader, the practical meaning is simple. The people who submit expenses, approve purchases, and get reimbursed are the same people whose records you maintain in Paylocity. Finance is a set of modules that reads from and writes to that record.
Is Airbase the Same as Paylocity for Finance?
Yes. Paylocity for Finance is the Airbase platform, integrated into Paylocity and sold under Paylocity’s name.
The timeline is short. On September 4, 2024, Paylocity announced a definitive agreement to acquire Airbase Inc. It described Airbase as “a modern finance and spend management software solution that combines bill pay/accounts payable automation, expense management, corporate cards and procurement capabilities.” The price was approximately $325 million, subject to customary adjustments. Airbase at that point was a San Francisco company founded in 2017. It had roughly 300 employees and more than 500 clients, averaging over 200 employees each. Paylocity completed the acquisition on October 1, 2024.
For the next nine months the product carried a transitional name, “Airbase by Paylocity,” which you’ll still see on Paylocity’s customer case studies. Then, on July 22, 2025, Paylocity announced the launch of Paylocity for Finance and said it had integrated Airbase into its HCM platform, the system that runs HR and payroll. Paylocity’s current product page doesn’t use the Airbase name for the product at all. Neither does its corporate reporting: Paylocity’s August 4, 2026 fiscal-year results release describes the company as “a leading cloud-based provider of HCM, finance and IT software solutions” and doesn’t mention Airbase once. The old airbase.com site is still live as “Airbase, a Paylocity Company,” and its note to existing Airbase clients says they keep their existing contacts and should follow Paylocity for Finance for release updates.
Airbase → Paylocity for Finance
Airbase became Paylocity for Finance in three dated steps, and the old name is still online.
The rail is one product. Only its name and its owner change from top to bottom.
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September 4, 2024
Paylocity agrees to acquire Airbase Inc.
Definitive agreement announced; approximately $325 million.
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October 1, 2024
Acquisition completed
Airbase becomes part of Paylocity.
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October 2024 – July 2025
Sold as “Airbase by Paylocity”
The transitional name. It still appears on Paylocity customer case studies.
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July 22, 2025
Launched as Paylocity for Finance
Airbase is integrated into Paylocity’s HCM platform, the system that runs HR and payroll. Paylocity’s product pages use this name from here on.
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Today
airbase.com is still live
It calls itself “Airbase, a Paylocity Company” and points existing clients to Paylocity for Finance for release updates.
Source: Paylocity press releases of September 4, 2024, October 1, 2024, and July 22, 2025; paylocity.com/products/finance; airbase.com.
So if you’re an Airbase customer, you didn’t switch products. The product switched names, and it now lives inside a platform that also runs payroll. The acquisition itself sits alongside Paylocity’s other corporate facts in our guide to who owns Paylocity.
What Paylocity for Finance Includes
Paylocity’s July 2025 launch release lists five core modules, and its product page presents them in the same order. The whole platform covers four areas (HR, Payroll, Finance, and IT), and Finance is the one you’ll find mapped out here. If you want to see how it fits beside the HR and payroll modules, our map of Paylocity’s modules and features covers all four.
Expense Management (Receipts, Reports, and Reimbursements)
Employees submit expenses from the same app they use for pay stubs and time off. Paylocity describes the module as “AI-powered, touchless expense reports”: receipts are captured by photo, transactions are coded automatically, and policy rules are applied before a manager sees the report. Reimbursements are paid in the employee’s local currency. Since the 2025 launch, this single expense solution has been the standard for all new Paylocity clients, according to the launch release.
Corporate Cards
Companies can issue Paylocity cards, physical or virtual, with spending limits and approval rules attached to each card. If your team already carries Visa, Mastercard, or American Express corporate cards, the launch release says those existing programs can be connected too, so every card transaction shows up in one place. Each transaction syncs to your accounting system for reconciliation. Paylocity’s product page notes the Paylocity Corporate Card is issued by Sutton Bank under a Visa license.
Accounts Payable Automation
This is the vendor-bill side, the accounts payable (AP) work. Invoices come in, get coded and routed for approval, and get paid, with the record synced to the general ledger. Paylocity’s launch release says the module handles vendor payments in more than 200 countries and covers vendor onboarding through payment. The controls matter as much as the speed. In the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 76 percent of U.S. organizations said they experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025, and paper checks were the most-targeted method, cited by 58 percent. It’s the capability Paylocity listed first when it described Airbase in its 2024 acquisition announcement.
Guided Procurement
Before a purchase happens, an employee raises a request. The request is then walked through the company’s policy: who needs to approve it, what budget it draws on, and whether a vendor is already set up. Paylocity describes this as centralizing purchase requests “with intuitive, policy-compliant workflows and visibility across departments.” For many mid-sized companies, this is a piece they’ve never had inside an HR platform.
Headcount Planning
Headcount Planning is the module that looks least like a finance tool and most like an HR one. Paylocity says it “aligns Finance, HR and Talent Acquisition” so that staffing plans can be built, approved, and adjusted against budget as headcount changes. It draws on the same organizational and compensation data that already lives in your Paylocity HR records, which is why it belongs in this suite rather than in a spreadsheet.
Spend Management vs. Expense Management: What’s the Difference?
The two terms get used interchangeably, and Paylocity’s own resource library has an article on the distinction (“Spend Management vs. Expense Management: What’s the Difference?”). The short version: expense management is one part of spend management.
Expense management covers money employees spend and get reimbursed for. Receipts, mileage, travel, a client lunch. It’s employee-initiated and usually small-ticket.
Spend management covers everything the company pays out that isn’t payroll: vendor invoices, purchase orders, subscriptions, corporate card charges, and employee expenses together. It’s the category Airbase was built for, and it’s why Paylocity for Finance has five modules rather than one. Expense Management is a module. Spend management is the suite.
Spend management vs. expense management
Expense management is one module inside spend management, and spend management is everything the company pays out except payroll.
Spend management the suite
Everything the company pays out that isn’t payroll.
- Vendor invoices
- Purchase orders
- Subscriptions
- Corporate card charges
Expense management one module
Employee expenses: receipts, expense reports, reimbursements.
Payroll
Not spend management. Wages, taxes, and benefits deductions run through the payroll module.
Source: Paylocity press release, July 22, 2025 (five core modules); paylocity.com/products/finance.
That framing matters when you’re reading Paylocity’s materials. When a page says “spend management,” it means the whole set of non-payroll outflows. When it says “expense management,” it means the reimbursement piece.
Where Finance Meets HR and Payroll
This is the part of Paylocity for Finance that matters most if you run HR or payroll.
Paylocity’s July 2025 launch release put it plainly. Because Finance is “built into the company’s HCM platform,” employees “can submit expense reports and spend requests in the same system they already use for payroll, time tracking, and benefits.” Managers get one task list for every approval, “whether for time off, expenses, or purchases.”
That isn’t only Paylocity’s framing. In a May 2025 write-up of Forrester’s HCM Solutions Landscape report, analyst Akshara Naik Lopez wrote that the HCM system “acts as the connective tissue between systems.” The same post says “the new HCM model now covers some aspects of spend management, such as expense management, bill pay, and corporate cards.”
Where Finance meets HR and payroll
Payroll and non-payroll spend attach to the same employee record, so an error in HR shows up in Finance too.
Two kinds of spend come in. One record holds them. Three things flow out of it.
Payroll spend
Wages, taxes, benefits deductions
Runs through Payroll, as it always has.
Non-payroll spend
Reimbursements, card charges, vendor bills, headcount plans
Runs through Paylocity for Finance.
One employee record
Name · pay group · direct deposit · position · compensation
Entered once in HR. Both kinds of spend read this copy. What is wrong here is wrong in both.
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The reimbursement rides the payroll run
An approved expense report attaches to the record and can travel with the next pay cycle.
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The headcount plan reads org and compensation data
No exported spreadsheet; Finance plans against the HR data HR is maintaining.
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One general-ledger export carries both
Payroll journal entries and non-payroll spend go to the ledger from one platform.
Source: Paylocity press release, July 22, 2025 (“grounded in the employee record”); paylocity.com/products/finance (“powered by the employee record”).
Three connections do most of the work.
Reimbursements land in payroll. An approved expense report doesn’t sit in a separate system waiting for a check run. It attaches to the employee’s record, and the reimbursement can travel with the next pay cycle. That’s convenient for the employee. It’s also why the payroll side has to be clean first: if an employee’s record, pay group, or direct-deposit details are wrong in HR, the expense side inherits the error. Our managed payroll work starts with exactly that record.
Headcount plans read HR data. A finance team building next year’s staffing plan needs current org structure, open positions, and compensation. In a separate tool, someone exports a spreadsheet and the plan is stale by the time it’s approved. Inside the same platform, the plan reads the HR data directly, and HR sees what Finance is planning.
One export goes to the ledger. Payroll journal entries and non-payroll spend both flow to the general ledger from one platform. Paylocity’s launch release names NetSuite, QuickBooks, MS Dynamics, and Sage Intacct as the ERP (enterprise resource planning) and general-ledger systems it integrates with.
None of this changes who does what. Finance still owns the accounting. HR and payroll still own the employee record. What changes is that the two teams are now working from the same record instead of reconciling two copies of it, and that puts a premium on the record being right.
Who Paylocity for Finance Is For
Paylocity described Airbase’s platform as “focused on the 100 – 5,000 employee segment of the market” in its acquisition announcement, and that’s still the clearest statement of who the suite is designed for. Below 100 employees, spend is often simple enough to run on a card and a mailbox. Above 5,000, a company usually has a full procurement stack inside its ERP already.
The practical fit is narrower than the range, though. Paylocity for Finance makes the most sense for a company that already runs HR and payroll on Paylocity and handles spend somewhere else. That usually means a standalone expense app, a card program with its own portal, or a spreadsheet and an inbox. For that company, the question is whether the version built into the platform it already pays for is good enough to replace what it has.
It’s a weaker fit for a company whose procurement and AP already live inside an ERP with its own workflow engine. Moving those out to Paylocity for Finance is a migration, not an add-on, and the launch materials don’t position the suite as an ERP replacement. It integrates with the ledger. It doesn’t become the ledger.
Questions to Ask Before You Turn It On
If Finance is on the table for your company, these are the questions to have answered, with your Paylocity contact and your accounting lead, before anything goes live.
Which accounting system does it sync to, and how? Confirm your general-ledger system is one Paylocity integrates with and understand what the sync looks like: journal entries, frequency, and who owns the mapping of accounts.
Who owns expense policy? The module enforces rules automatically, which means someone has to write the rules. Decide whether that’s HR, Finance, or both, and get the policy written down before it’s configured.
How are cards issued and who approves limits? Whether you issue Paylocity cards or connect an existing program, card controls are an approval chain. Map it before the first card goes out.
What does the approval chain look like for purchases? Guided Procurement routes requests to approvers. Those approvers come from your org structure in Paylocity, so if reporting lines are out of date in HR, requests will route to the wrong people.
How does reimbursement timing change? If expense reimbursements will ride with payroll, your payroll calendar becomes the reimbursement calendar. Employees will want to know that, and your payroll team needs to plan for it.
Every one of those questions comes back to the HR and payroll record. Get that right and Finance has something solid to stand on.
Summary
Paylocity for Finance is Paylocity’s spend-management suite, launched July 22, 2025 on the Airbase platform Paylocity acquired for approximately $325 million in 2024. Its five modules cover expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable, procurement, and headcount planning. What sets it apart from a standalone spend tool is that it runs on the same employee record as payroll, so reimbursements, approvals, and headcount plans use the people data you already maintain. That’s the opportunity. It’s also the condition, because the HR and payroll side has to be accurate for the Finance side to be worth turning on.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your Paylocity HR and payroll setup before you add another suite to it, that’s a conversation we have every week. Schedule a free consultation and we’ll take a look.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Airbase by Paylocity?
“Airbase by Paylocity” was the transitional name Paylocity used for the Airbase spend-management platform after completing its acquisition on October 1, 2024. On July 22, 2025 Paylocity launched the product as Paylocity for Finance, and its current product pages use that name. The Airbase name still appears on older customer case studies and on airbase.com, which now describes itself as “Airbase, a Paylocity Company.”
When did Paylocity acquire Airbase?
Paylocity announced a definitive agreement to acquire Airbase Inc. on September 4, 2024, for approximately $325 million subject to customary adjustments, and announced the completed acquisition on October 1, 2024. Both announcements were issued from Paylocity’s headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois.
Does Paylocity for Finance replace my accounting system?
No. Paylocity positions Finance as a spend-management layer that syncs to your general ledger rather than as an accounting system. Its July 2025 launch release names NetSuite, QuickBooks, MS Dynamics, and Sage Intacct as integrated ERP and general-ledger systems, and the September 2024 acquisition release listed Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and QuickBooks among Airbase’s existing integrations.
Is Paylocity for Finance part of the Paylocity HR and payroll platform?
Yes, according to Paylocity. Its July 2025 launch release describes Finance as a system “grounded in the employee record and tightly integrated with their general ledger,” and the product page calls it a platform “powered by the employee record.” Paylocity’s public materials describe it as part of the platform, not as a standalone product. How it’s packaged and priced for your company is a question for your Paylocity representative, not something this article can answer.
