How to effortlessly track business travel expenses

Are you finding it difficult to track and manage business travel expenses at your company? You’re not alone!

As a finance manager, if you have employees travelling to numerous different cities, your finance team will be frantically trying to track down countless receipts and invoices from flights, hotels, ground transportation, and restaurants. As travel expenditure varies from month to month, without the right tools in place, your organisation risks facing a lot of time-consuming manual work and potential errors. Put simply, when your team has less paperwork to deal with, they can focus on higher-impact initiatives.

In this article, we’ll take you through some practical steps that will help you save time and automate your expense management processes

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Did you know finance teams are losing up to five weeks per year in inefficiencies because of repetitive tasks that could be automated, according to Moss’ “State of Finance Digitisation” report?

To avoid losing time and create an efficient process for expense management, you’ll want to set up a travel management platform to book travel and analyse travel-related spending, plus an expense tool to manage business expenses in general.

Let's dive into why you need both of these systems, how they work together, and how to choose the best options for your needs.

1. Choose a travel management platform that offers all the functionalities you need

A travel management platform can drastically reduce manual work in several important ways. First, travel managers won’t need to book business trips on behalf of travellers, who can instead book the options they want within company policy. There’s also less back-and-forth when it comes to approving trips. Travel platforms like TravelPerk offer customisable approval workflows, making approvals transparent and automatic.

Online travel management platforms reduce manual effort on the finance team’s side as well. There should be no need for employees to pay upfront and request reimbursement. Rather, the platform should offer consolidated monthly invoicing. This can shave dozens of hours of hassle off your normal manual process if you’re used to wrangling hundreds of invoices at the end of every month.

Key features to look for in a travel management platform

Easy self-booking with a built-in approval process

The ability to integrate your company travel policies directly into the platform

Consolidated monthly invoicing

Reporting tools that simplify how you manage travel spend

A large inventory of travel options at competitive prices

24/7 customer care support

Integrations with your expense management platform

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2. Choose a top-rated expense management platform

Along with a travel management platform, you’ll also need the right expense management software. This will help your team manage other office expenses outside of travel. Different people may be responsible for various purchases at your company. With numerous types of expenses flying around, it’s wise to have a single dedicated platform that can streamline expense management all in one place.

Expense management tools are aimed at reducing manual data entry. For example, many platforms offer functions like receipt scanning or credit card transaction importing. These allow travellers to easily record expenses on the go, rather than waiting until they get back from a trip.

You may want to look for an expense management platform that speeds up approvals and reimbursements. The software should also offer features that help you manage your work as a team, with appropriate access levels and task delegation.

Most importantly, when it comes to saving time on expense management, whatever system you use should have a direct integration with your travel management platform of choice. This way, you’ll gain better visibility over your travel spend. Since data is shared between both platforms, you’ll also benefit from greater accuracy, which will make your expense reconciliation process a lot easier.

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Key features to look for in an expense management platform

Receipt scanning

Credit card transaction importing

Corporate card reconciliation

Expense approval workflows

The ability to delegate access and tasks to finance colleagues

An intuitive platform with no learning curve

Integrates with your travel management platform

Tips for choosing the right expense management tool

“I would recommend a finance team consider a holistic view of their entire tech stack and what they want to achieve from their expense tool before they go to market.

It’s essential to ensure the expense tool integrates with existing systems — critically, their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, but also payroll platforms and their chosen TMC (Travel Management Company) if they travel a lot. This will make the lives of the finance team members much easier for reconciling expenses.”

— Clare Mackey, Partner Manager at TravelPerk

3. Integrate and roll out your chosen platforms

The last step is to start rolling out your travel management platform and expense solution. Depending on the size of your organisation, the travel and expense management companies you choose might offer to help onboard your employees and teach them how to use the software.

There will be several important to-dos during this process.

Launch your travel management platform:

Add all travellers and admins to the platform

Create company travel policies for each team, cost center, or department

Enable dynamic budgets, so you can to create real-time budgets that match the destination’s pricing

Set up approval workflows

Launch self-booking with all business travellers:

Add all users and admins to your expense management software

Create approval workflows, so employees can add expenses to the system and managers can approve them

Notify business travellers of the new software and train them on how to use it

Finally, it’s time to set up your expense management automation by integrating both platforms. Provided the two solutions have a direct integration, you could choose to either bring the expense management platform data into your travel management platform, or vice versa.

If you bring your travel management platform data (the amounts spent on flights, trains, rental cars, and hotels) into your expense management platform, you’ll be able to analyse and report on all employee expenses in one place. Or, you could pull travel-related expense data into your travel management platform to get deeper travel analytics insights.

Now that you’ve successfully set up both solutions, you’ll soon see how streamlined (and quick!) expense management automation for business travel can be! You’ll save a lot of time for everyone involved, reduce manual work, improve policy compliance, increase spend visibility, and begin collecting accurate, real-time data, so your company can make more informed financial decisions.

How to effortlessly track travel expenses and gain clarity in your expense management process