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How GMG EnviroSafe successfully balances employee self-booking and financial control with TravelPerk
Managing high-volume business travel with no centralized spending controls
- No visibility into bookings made with separate credit cards
- “We relied on travelers to handle the “financial piece” — it would take days to reconcile, file receipts, and confirm that hotels were appropriately booked,” says Ryan Sumblin, Head of Accounting at GMG EnviroSafe. Employees booked trips with separate credit cards, making it impossible to gain any type of top- or low-level visibility into how much the company was spending on travel — until the bill landed on Ryan’s desk.
- Lack of flexible travel costs and overwhelming manual processes
- The company’s travel policy capped airfare costs at $600 and accommodation at $250 per night. Since employees travel all over the country and prices vary by location, these caps meant they didn’t have the flexibility to keep travel costs low.Meanwhile, Ryan also mentioned how difficult it was to track complicated travel expenses — for example, if employees traveled to multiple destinations — without any automation.
- Balancing employee autonomy with accounting control
- “We take pride in offering opportunities to young people who are new to the workforce or fresh out of college, and we trusted all of our employees with a corporate credit card and book their own travel arrangements,” says Ryan.“I didn’t want to take away that sense of self-responsibility, because I truly feel like it empowers them,” he continues. However, the struggle to track and keep costs down and find a more efficient way to manage bookings and expenses was growing day by day.
TravelPerk’s plug-and-play platform combined with stellar customer service: The perfect recipe for creating a travel management program that does the heavy lifting
“There are plenty of travel options. If people can't find something on TravelPerk, then they're really just not used to traveling because it's really easy.”
Ryan Sumblin- Head of Accounting at GMG EnviroSafe.
Employees maintain autonomy, while the accounting team has regained control over their workload
- Huge reduction in manual workload
- From start to finish, TravelPerk’s automations have helped GMG EnviroSafe reduce its mounting manual workload. “I've used other travel platforms before, and those implementations were a lot more tedious. I thought TravelPerk was really easy to integrate and implement” says Ryan. He goes on to say, “Now, each department’s team lead approves their team’s bookings. Approvals are needed only for last-minute, out-of-budget, or out-of-policy trips. But otherwise, they can go ahead and book the trip to get cost savings, and it just notifies their directors or direct support”.
- Enhanced travel program guided by data-driven insights
- Setting dynamic budgets for travel policies helps manage fluctuating costs, seasonal price changes, and varying provider rates. “Dynamic budgets have really made everyone more savvy, especially with all the options available in the strong inventory,” says Ryan.He continues, “From a financial standpoint as a very small accounting team, my goal has been to automate as many processes as possible and rely on reporting from the platforms to do the hard and heavy lifting.”
- Empowering traveling employees while improving financial tracking and management
- Before TravelPerk, it took the accounting team days to reconcile expenses. “Now, I can go through the reconciliation process in three hours, which is huge since much of our spending is travel-based. TravelPerk has made it so much easier,” says Ryan.They’ve also managed to save substantially on travel costs. “Since we implemented TravelPerk, we've definitely saved a lot of money. Those savings have shown themselves in our profit and loss statements for months now,” says Ryan. However, while employees still have autonomy with the self-booking platform, the accounting team has regained control over approval policies and workflows.
TravelPerk features that save GMG EnviroSafe substantial time and money
- Dynamic budgets
- A self-booking platform
- Automated approvals and processes
- TravelPerk Events
- Seamless integration with Expensify
- Advanced reporting
- “Plug and play” system
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