People who have ever been involved in travel expense reports know that business travel doesn’t necessarily mean business class flights and fine dining restaurants.
Employees, managers, travel managers, and finance teams take care of a lot of things to ensure travel expenses are within budget and comply with the travel and expense policies set by the organization.
Travel expense software makes managing daily fares, travel budgets, mileage reports, and travel expenses easy for everyone. In this article, we have listed the main reasons why companies need travel software to manage business travel expenses.
What Is Travel Expense Management Software?
Travel expense management software helps employees and managers streamline and automate all business travel expenses such as hotel expenses, flight reservations, and employee travel expenses.
Advanced travel expense management software also helps finance teams to gain real-time visibility and complete control over business expenses. Read on to learn how travel expense software can benefit your business.
Why Does Your Business Need To Use Travel Software?
Business trips are not only fun. This requires a lot of research and work from those involved even before the business trip. Such as:
- The travel manager or associate must first discover all the travel booking options included in the specific policy for their category.
- If an employee selects the travel booking option, the employee must be approved by their supervisor or travel manager.
- Once approved, the employee is ready to go on a business trip. He will meet and dine with many people to do business or build and maintain business relationships.
- Employees must retain all receipts during these visits to benefit from employee reimbursement.
- If employees lose their expense receipts or fail to report expenses on time, they will lose their business expense benefits.
In addition, there is a high probability of intentional non-compliance or even fraud in expense reports in the following cases:
- Your fee policy does not set the calculation framework correctly
- There is a sudden change in the business travel route
Travel software can help here.
Financial Automation Upgrades the data quality and Optimizes compliance
Automated expense management software offers many benefits for funding teams. The travel expense management software includes 24/7 inspection and control, resulting in more frequent and higher quality data collection and regulatory compliance.
People who have ever been involved in travel expense reports know that business travel doesn’t necessarily mean business class flights and fine dining restaurants.
The team members generally prefer travel expense software over legacy systems like spreadsheets. This not only keeps everyone on the same page as well as creates a single source of truth about financial data, it also cuts down the time spent on tedious manual data entry and reporting.
Employee satisfaction increases when finance teams believe in the accuracy of their financial data and can spend more time on high-value strategic business activities (e.g. analyzing Action Insight data). clearly, which further increases productivity and efficiency.
Let’s Have a Look at the Pros of Having an Expense Management Software
When you have easy-to-use and powerful travel expense software to manage your travel expenses, you can turn all those negatives into positives.
- Complete, real-time travel expense visibility: With automated expense reports, your finance team has real-time expense tracking to better understand your travel program.
- Employees do not need to prepay: Purchases of business trips should not require reimbursement by the passenger. Flights and hotels in particular can be expensive. When booking on a business travel platform, the company can pay off the monthly bill and passengers don’t have to pay for each trip in advance.
- Travelers don’t need to fill out expense reports: the right travel expense management software solution simplifies all-expense workflows through automation. The mobile app can scan receipts so passengers don’t have to manually enter data into expense management tools.
- Collect Invoices Quickly for Office Managers: When you incorporate your travel expenses into a company travel management system, you can reduce the number of invoices.
- Automatic purchase reconciliation: Expense data from scanned receipts and purchases with company credit cards can be reconciled automatically.
- Automatic Refund Approval: You should be able to automate your spending policy with rules so that food purchases or expenses at a certain price can be automatically refunded without needing a reviewer to manually review them.
- Faster refunds for passengers: Passengers can get their money faster with automatic refunds. And with consolidated business travel bookings paid for by the company, most passengers don’t even have to pay back.
The Bottom Line- Use Travel Expense Management Software to Scale Your Profits!
Your account team no longer requires documents. Employees no longer need to store and search for crumpled receipts. Managers will not worry about useless spending. And CEO can rest assured that the company is cutting costs and increasing profits—while making its employees happy!
Travel and expense software is a wise investment for your business and employees too!