Cornerstone Research

For years, Cornerstone Research managed candidate reimbursements entirely in-house using a writable PDF form. Candidates completed the form after their interview, the recruiting team reviewed and approved it, and the accounts payable (AP) team handled payment — a slow, manual chain that was already showing its cracks before hiring volumes took off.

Then the volume started to explode.

Cornerstone Research began hosting recruiting career fairs at universities near each of its offices — Berkeley, Stanford, and schools in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. These events brought in as many as 50 candidates in a single weekend. Days later, a batch of expense forms would arrive at the AP department all at once.

Manuel Palafox, who leads the accounts payable function at Cornerstone Research, described the compounding challenges his team faced.

Every candidate was a new vendor. AP had to create a vendor record in their ERP system for each one. Payments went out by check — and checks frequently got lost. By Palafox's estimate, roughly 15% of checks went missing, triggering a cycle of candidate inquiries, cancellations, and reissuances. Legibility was another ongoing problem: even after moving to a fillable PDF format, candidates would often handwrite their submissions, and AP couldn't read them.

The AP team grew from three people to four just to keep pace, but the manual overhead kept growing with it.

When Cornerstone Research began evaluating dedicated reimbursement platforms, Palafox had a clear requirement: the solution needed to actually support standard payment methods — ACH and check — rather than routing payments through prepaid cards or other funded balances.

That turned out to be harder to satisfy than expected.

The first vendor they evaluated was a partner integration offered through their existing expense management platform. It seemed promising, but when they looked closely, the only payment option was a prepaid card that Cornerstone Research would have to fund in advance. If candidates didn't spend the full balance, getting the money back added yet more administrative work. That wasn't going to work.

The second vendor nearly got the business. Cornerstone Research got far enough to almost sign a contract — until a demo revealed that the ACH and check payment options they'd been promised weren't actually available.

The third vendor had the same gap.

Reflecting on the three failed evaluations, Palafox described the pattern that kept repeating — vendors promising standard payment support that didn't hold up under scrutiny:

At that point, a Cornerstone Research team member ran a fresh Google search, found Reimbi, and scheduled a call. The demo changed everything.

What stood out in the Reimbi demo wasn't just that the payment options were there — it was the completeness of the candidate experience. Palafox described watching the demo from the candidate's perspective as the deciding moment.

For the AP team, the implications were equally clear. With Reimbi handling the candidate-facing workflow and payments, AP no longer needed to:

• Create new vendor records for each candidate
• Manually review and process paper or PDF expense submissions
• Handle inquiries about missing or delayed checks
• Reissue lost payments

The balance notification system was another unexpected highlight. Palafox could configure alerts to notify him when the Reimbi balance dropped to a specified level, making it easy to manage replenishment without monitoring the account constantly.

Cornerstone Research signed on, and the first payout was issued in August 2024.

The impact on the AP team was immediate and substantial. Where reimbursements had once required end-to-end involvement — form collection, vendor creation, data entry, check printing, and payment follow-up — the team now simply reviews and pays the Reimbi invoice.

The 15% check loss rate that had plagued the old process is gone. Candidates receive their reimbursements digitally, with no checks to get lost in the mail and no follow-up calls to the AP team to track down missing payments.

In the year and a half since Cornerstone Research implemented Reimbi, Palafox has not received a single complaint or question from the recruiting team about a candidate having trouble with reimbursement.

When it came time to renew, Palafox checked in directly with the recruiting team members who use Reimbi most. Their response: everything was working great.

About 80% of the candidates Cornerstone Research reimburses are recent college graduates applying for entry-level analyst positions — people who are often funding travel out of limited personal savings. The speed and reliability of Reimbi's reimbursement process is a tangible benefit to that population.

Implementation was straightforward and stayed on schedule. The primary task was configuring access levels for the recruiting team — a process that took less than two weeks from environment setup to the first live payout. When a permissions issue was identified early on, Palafox resolved it directly in the platform without needing support.

For Palafox, the Cornerstone Research experience reflects something simple but rare: a product that does exactly what it said it would do in the sales process.

After three failed vendor evaluations where promised capabilities didn't hold up under scrutiny, finding a solution that delivered as demonstrated — with zero ongoing issues from either the AP team or the recruiting team — was exactly what Cornerstone Research needed.