Business travel is vital for organizational growth, allowing employees to interact with prospects and customers effectively. Organizations incur high travel expenses to send employees to faraway locations. Travel expenditure comprises transportation and accommodation costs besides food, local transportation, and other miscellaneous expenses.
Travel and expense process simplifies business travel management in companies where employees undertake frequent business travel. It covers multiple steps of business travel, from travel requests to business travel expense reimbursement. Creating a dependable and smooth corporate expense management process is crucial to streamline business travel.
What is travel and expense management?
Recording and processing business travel expenses are the primary aims of travel and expense management. It enables organizations to save tax on business travel because the travel expenses are deductible. Effective business travel and expense processes must ensure:
- Meeting business goals through travel
- Creating business travel approval workflows.
- Approving and reimbursing company travel expense claims
- Analyzing expense reports for ROI
- Developing and implementing a travel and expense policy
- Recording, tracking, controlling, and monitoring travel expenses
Corporate expense management improves the audit readiness of the organization by storing receipts to support business travel expenses. An efficient travel and expense process should facilitate the addition of multiple employee roles and authorizations. It must allow the individual access to various functionalities according to employee levels.
Travel and expense management helps businesses control expenses and prevent expense fraud. It boosts travel policy compliance by setting expense limits for transportation and accommodation for different locations and employee levels.
5 Stages in the travel and expense management process
Efficient travel and expense management is crucial as corporate travel represents the second-highest controllable expense. An efficient travel and expense process helps improve ROI and maintains the organization’s financial health. These are five stages to enhance the travel and expense management process.
1. Identify priorities for all stakeholders
A business trip involves administrators, travel managers, line managers, finance teams, and business travelers. Knowing the priorities of each stakeholder is crucial to set up travel and expense management process.
- Each business traveler has defined business goals. They need convenient transportation and accommodation to be fresh and productive during a business trip.
- Line managers require a smooth approval process and practical travel policy for seamless compliance.
- Travel managers should have access to an automated travel management platform to speed up travel booking with the assurance of the best deals.
- Finance teams should be able to generate travel spending reports for travel cost optimization.
2. Automate booking process
Using a SaaS-based travel management platform allows self-booking by accessing preferred travel suppliers. It improves compliance with travel policy guidelines.
Travel booking automation reduces the workload on travel managers and elevates employee travel experience. The platform allows finance teams to get real-time analytics of travel spending.
3. Configure approvals and travel policies
Online travel management platforms like Paxes allow travel policy configuration besides automation of approvals. It will streamline travel management by expediting approvals and reducing policy deviations across employee levels. Automation of travel and expense policies will also reduce expense deductions by avoiding unpleasant situations.
4. Enhance the expense report submission process
Employees hate to spend hours creating expense reports after returning from a hectic business trip. Online travel management solutions automate expense report creation and submission. The online platform enables employees to capture receipts and upload them to the system through the app while on the move.
5. Streamline expense approvals and reimbursements
Travel managers can set auto-approvals for certain expenses that are within policy norms to avoid approval delays. Creating an appropriate approval hierarchy will eliminate confusion, as the claim approval process will be smoother. Automating travel expense reimbursement will boost employee satisfaction.
Why travel and expense management can be challenging
Corporate expense management can be stressful and time-consuming without a clear travel and expense policy and the involvement of manual processes. Employees may commit errors while manually filling out expense report formats. They must keep track of their expenses by physically preserving paper receipts.
Approvals can take long time if the expense reports have travel policy deviations. It will cause a lot of back and forth, delaying the final reimbursement. The stress of approving expenses within specific timelines can cause missing grave errors or fraud. The outdated travel and expense process does not enable visibility on travel spending. It impairs the ability of finance teams to optimize travel costs and take policy decisions.
Conclusion
Corporate expense management is a vital aspect of business travel regardless of the number of employees undertaking regular business travel in the organization. Analyzing, tracking, monitoring, and controlling travel expenses is a challenging task. SaaS-based travel and expense management solutions like Paxes eliminate manual processes and streamline company travel expense reimbursement.
Automating the travel and expense process helps integrate travel policy into the travel management solution. It boosts the ability of finance teams to track, monitor, and control travel expenses. Travel managers can set spending limits for employees and ensure a smooth travel experience for employees by expediting approvals and reimbursements.
Travel And Expense Process FAQs
What makes up business travel expenses?
Business travel expenses comprise the cost of transportation, accommodation, and food when an employee travels for sales, project work, training, customer service, meeting, or trade exhibition.
What is the standard business travel expense process?
The business travel expense process involves expense report creation, submission, approval, and reimbursement.
How does a self-booking tool benefit business travelers?
Business travelers can save time by eliminating approvals while using a self-booking tool. They can book their preferred travel choices for a better travel experience.
How can a business ensure seamless support for employees?
Some automated travel management platforms allow 24/7 support for employees while traveling. They can receive periodic travel and weather alerts besides access to emergency support through the smartphone app.
Why is it crucial to have in-depth visibility into travel expenses?
Finance teams and travel managers can effectively track, monitor, and control travel costs of employees, departments, and teams with in-depth visibility.
