5 Best Practices for Corporate Travel & Expense Management

The ROI on business travel is high. However, if the expenditure on employee travel is not managed efficiently, it can cost the company huge sums. This is where systematic corporate travel and expense management can help control corporate travel expenses. Read this article to learn the 5 ways to limit these expenditures with the help of an efficient expense management:

Business travel is imperative if companies want to make it big in this new competitive era. It is essential to close deals with clients and keep the cash flowing. However, companies must spend to reap the returns of employees travelling. Sometimes they even spend massive amounts on corporate travel, but if not done diligently, it might end up costing companies more than the returns they get. This is why expense management is important, especially for small business travel expense management

Despite the myth that business travel expense management is easy, the truth could not be farther. There are too many stakeholders involved at each step, complicating the process. Usually, by the time a travel request by an employee is approved by their manager, HOD, and finance department, the prices for hotel and flight bookings rise or are sold out, resulting in payment of higher prices, costing more than what was originally planned.

In summary, outdated practices are the most significant factor contributing to inefficient employee expense management, costing the company dearly. Let us, therefore, look at some of the ways corporate expense management can help control these overreaching costs:

Overspending with regards to business travel often occurs when there is a lack of an umbrella vision concerning the company’s finances. In the absence of real-time data, there is easily a blind spot created with respect to the spending trends of the company. It further hampers informed financial decisions being employed, instead causing the company to take these decisions retrospectively when it is already too late.

Real-time reporting makes it possible for businesses to identify out-of-budget bookings and flag them timely to avoid overshooting the budget. With the help of travel expense software, companies can make the most of flexible real-time reporting that evaluates travel spend data by breaking it down to each employee, transport mode booked, type of booking, as well as cancellations. This information is vital for deciding and tracking the business travel budget owing to data-driven decisions.

One of the key elements of efficient expense management is clearly communicating the travel policies to the employees. Informed employees are the primary pillars of employing a proactive business expense management solution. When the employees are educated on the company’s travel policy, which includes the approval processes, reimbursement guidelines and exceptions, they are better able to adhere to it. The following questions must be answered with respect to this issue-

• Is each employee aware of the company’s travel policy?
• How is the company’s travel policy communicated to the employees?
• How frequently is the travel policy communicated?
• How often is the travel policy updated?

The answer to these questions will help build a robust travel policy while also enabling you to identify the gaps in employees’ travel policy knowledge. It also allows you to check the policy performance and review it accordingly. All of this can be simplified by employing a travel expense management software that not only easily communicates the policy but also allows you to customize it, and helps the company meet the employees’ business travel needs, thus ensuring compliance.

Business travel involves cancelled client meetings, extended conferences, and delayed conventions. This implies that even the plans made in advance can falter, necessitating the need for complete flexibility. Corporate travellers seek options that accommodate flexibility in the face of possible delays and cancellations.

An intelligent online expense management software should be able to factor in refunds, ensuring more flexibility in total costs. This is important because it grants business travellers much-needed peace of mind when their travel plans are subject to change. Furthermore, this ensures that the travel admins are able to keep track of and take control of the company's overspend.

When business travel bookings and expense management is done through different platforms, it can ensue chaos. Two different platforms make the management of the travel budget and the act of tracking expenditure complicated. This can directly result in employees overshooting the budget, leaving your company’s travel budget in disarray. This process is tedious for the employees who have to make bookings on a separate platform and then upload the invoices in another for reimbursement claims and for the travel admins who have to log into different portals to download each individual’s invoice for reimbursement and tracking. This is where the use of business travel and expense management software becomes detrimental.

Hence, finding a one-stop solution like myBiz for all your business travel-related needs is only reasonable. A product that simplifies collection of invoices, expense reporting as well as hotel, ground transfer, and flights bookings. Such a travel and expense management system can collect real-time data to generate consolidated reports that can assist in decision-making to control travel spends.

In the absence of an automated expense reporting system, travel admins have to drudge away auditing each expense report, ensuring that all the expenses are in compliance with the company’s policies, thus wasting valuable time that can be used more productively. Manually managing expenses can also be full of errors. These fallacies can emerge from safekeeping invoices, entering the data into spreadsheets, reaching out to approvers, tallying expenses, and more. While paper receipts often run the risk of fading over time, they can also be easily lost. This calls for a dire need to automate with the help of an expense management solution. An automated system can set up approval flows, ensuring smooth functioning, but it can also enable direct uploading of scanned receipts to the online expense management system. It can additionally make sure to integrate the travel policies to ensure that each expense filed is free of any violations, offering greater transparency and control over the budget.

Corporate travel expense management can ensure that companies can control overspend. This applies to larger corporates where expense management is mandatory for administering the expense reports of several employees simultaneously. However, it is even more important for SMEs that often struggle with unorganized expense management. This is where the free expense management solution by myBiz can come to the rescue to help better manage travel & expense management for higher savings. Learn more about myBiz's free of cost solution to efficiently manage official expenses here.

 

Q1. What is expense management?

Ans. Expense management intuitively delivers smart solutions by tracking the expenses of a company. It ensures that the expense receipts submitted by business travellers comply with the company’s travel policies and are aligned with the budget allocated to the employee grade.

Q2. What are business travel expenses?

Ans. Business travel expenses include the employees' expenditures when they are on a business trip.

Q3. What is travel and expense management software?

Ans. Company expense management software is designed to help streamline and automate expenses related to business travel, like hotel and flight bookings, travel reimbursements for business trips, and more.

Q4. Can a travel and expense software accurately manage the employees' travel expenses?

Ans. Yes, expense management solutions accurately manage the employee's travel expenses due to automated processes that integrate real-time booking data with expense reports.

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