Most companies resume business travel as in-person meetings and live trade fairs make a comeback after a long hiatus. The return to normal is forcing organizations to adopt better travel management strategies. This improves the travel experience of employees for higher productivity and reduces travel costs to optimize travel spending.
Challenges faced by businesses in managing travel expenses
Manual data entry: In absence of a robust technological solution, data entry becomes a tedious job. With streams of corporate travel data, errors, inefficiencies, and a lack of real-time visibility into spending becomes common.
Receipt Management: Receipts add up to the cumbersome process of expense management. Accounts and finance department can get overwhelmed with a mix of digital and paper receipts.
Policy Compliance: Not every employee gets the memo to the travel policy or can ignore due to workflow boundations. This can lead to non-compliance, overspending, or the submission of non-compliant expense reports.
Approval Workflows: Delays in the approval process can lead to late reimbursements, impacting employee satisfaction and potentially causing financial strain on employees.
What is travel expense management software?
Travel and expense management software efficiently tracks business travel expenditures for effective expense management. It also facilitates expense reporting activities, reducing time for creating and submitting expense reports. The software solution can book travel and accommodation besides helping employers comply with Duty of Care obligations.
How does travel and expense management software work?
The software facilitate travel booking made by the employee, managers, or TMCs, and record the crucial data. It limits the travel booking as per the travel policy set by the organization. The software is capable of generating invoices, recording expenses, and analyzing them for reporting purpose. Additionally, to provide all round services, they can be integrated with other tools such as HRMSs and GDSs as well.
What does travel and expense management software include?
A travel policy is critical to enable employees to plan business trips without deviating from travel regulations. However, achieving total compliance may not be easy, except for an effective travel management program. Top corporate TMCs and travel managers are usually under stress to ensure smooth business travel while ensuring stringent compliance with travel policy. The need for advanced expense management software for small businesses, mid-sized companies, and large corporate organizations is driving the adoption of centralized corporate travel management platforms. There are multiple aspects of these software solutions that streamline the entire process of planning business trips, expense reporting, and reimbursing travel expenses.
The following features of the software solution help companies meet their travel and expense management goals.
- Expenditure limits for controlling travel expenses
- App-based booking facility to allow employees to book travel and hotels
- Facility for budgeting travel expenses
- 24X7 Duty of Care Support
- Ability to boost smooth travel with no disruptions
- Centralized system for expense report creation, submission, and reimbursement
- Round-the-clock access to inventories
- Smooth integration with other departments like finance and HR
- Easy integration with travel policy
SaaS-based travel and expense management software provides a feature to detect deviations from travel policy by flagging such expenses. Corporate travel managers can customize policies and fix rules to prevent duplication and forging. Software for business expense management offers employees the convenience of expense report submission through the app. Employees can attach scanned images of receipts and submit the report instantly for prompt reimbursement.
Features of travel and expense management software
Receipt Scanning: These software are equipped with the ability to capture and store receipts digitally. The act reduces reliance on paper receipts and issues related to them.
Expense Categorization: They provide automatic categorization of expenses based on predefined rules, simplifying the tracking and reporting process. They further enhance the cost reduction improving the overall efficiency.
Real-Time Reporting: Instant access to real-time expense reports and analytics, offering visibility into spending patterns and trends. Reporting helps in optimizing future expenditures and savings.
Mobile App Functionality: Most platforms come with mobile apps compatibility. These applications allow employees to capture receipts, submit expenses, and manage approvals on the go.
Integration capabilities: Seamless integration with other business tools, such as accounting software, HR systems, and travel booking platforms helps businesses to streamline the trip expense management processes.
Benefits of travel expense management software
A suitable travel and expense management software improves the efficiency of corporate travel managers while helping employees with autonomy in booking their travel and accommodation through an app. These are a few benefits of SaaS-based software for corporate travel and expense management.
1. Assist in travel manager’s job
The unified expense management software for small businesses and large organizations enhances the travel manager’s ability to handle multiple travel requests.
2. Streamlines travel management program
A one-stop travel and business expense management software streamlines the travel program by improving travel policy compliance.
3. Enhances visibility into travel expenses
The software boosts decision-making and reporting functions by enabling real-time visibility into travel expenditures. It helps analysis of business travel’s impact on the business.
4. Smoother and faster approvals
The advanced app-based travel and expense management software reduces approval time for business trip expenses and reimbursement to expedite the processing of reports.
5. Access to data analytics
Real-time expense reporting empowers finance teams to generate expense analytics without waiting for paper-based statements. Ideal travel management solutions like Paxes offer built-in analytics for granular insights into travel spending as per expense categories and employee levels.
How to choose a travel and expense management software
Finding the perfect travel and expense management software for a small business or a larger company can be challenging because of the myriad options. Know some key attributes to select a perfect software solution for your business.
- Comprehensive and customizable platform for travel and expense management
- Availability of instant technical and customer support
- Real-time employee tracking and alerts for Duty of Care compliance
- Greater travel policy compliance
- Seamless accessibility to SOTO airlines, regional and global LCCs
- Ability to integrate with the leading expense and HRMS programs
- A facility of a smartphone app with chat, messaging, booking, and cancellation features
Conclusion
Centralized travel and expense management software solutions help streamline the management of corporate travel and expenditure. Small, medium and large companies and TMCs can adopt efficient and comprehensive platform like Paxes to reduce costs and improve travel policy compliance.
Suggested Read: Top 9 Corporate Travel Expense Tracking Apps And Platforms
Travel And Expense Management Software FAQs
How does travel and expense management software help travel managers?
Business expense management is a critical job function of corporate travel managers who must ensure compliance with travel policy. Advanced AI-powered software solutions achieve cost efficiency and greater control over the travel management program.
What are the benefits of customizing travel and expense management?
Every company has different travel expense categories as per the job functions. Customization allows creation of specific expense categories. It helps establish tailored reimbursement policies according to the existing systems. Customizing expenses as allowable or unacceptable helps reduce instances of unnecessary approvals.
What is the approval process in expense management software?
The accounting department reimburses expenses following approval by line managers. The status of an expense report will change to approved or rejected, according to the manager remarks. The approved statement goes to accounts for reimbursement, and rejection will send a notification to an employee for resubmission.
How do business expense management solutions help employees?
Employees get easy access to the system through a mobile app to submit expense reports for approval and reimbursement. The app is helpful for bookings and emergency support.
What are the main objectives of business trips?
Employees travel on behalf of companies to grow businesses, service customers and attend trade fairs, conferences, and training programs.
How travel expense management software streamline the expense reporting process for employees?
The software provides easy expense capture, mobile accessibility, policy compliance check, automated expense management, timely reimbursement
