This is the third post in our 6-part series based on a white paper with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in association with U.S. Bank that examines the growing use of automation to manage corporate T&E.
In 2023, 84% of travel buyers surveyed by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) said their business travel spending increased, and 33% said the increases were significant. With the cost of business travel soaring, companies are looking for ways to reduce the time, effort, and money they spend on travel. An end-to-end card, expense, and T&E management tool helps organizations gain control of their corporate travel spending, manage travel more cohesively, and even generate savings—all on one unified platform. Here’s how.
Table of Contents
The New T&E Management Requirements
Businesses are outgrowing manual, disjointed, or opaque expense management, reimbursements, and approvals. Instead, organizations now require integration, both in terms of backend data and the user experience:
- Unified data, so that organizations have control and visibility across travel spending, reimbursements to employees, and payments to vendors.
- Simplicity of use, so that employees, finance, and travel managers don’t need multiple logins and subscriptions for payment, expense, and booking travel.
With an end-to-end expense, card, and travel management platform, organizations can gain control of their overall spending, manage employee travel, and generate savings through one cohesive system:
- Program administrators can easily manage cash flow, monitor employee purchases, and integrate travel and expense data into HR and accounting systems.
- Accounting teams gain greater visibility into card purchases and can set up automated workflows for creating and approving expense reports.
- As employees make reservations, the system provides negotiated rates on flights and hotels, and employees can earn points and incentives for booking these and other items with preferred travel partners.
- A unified platform eliminates the need for preapprovals for travel and may eliminate manual expense reports.
- By automating these processes and integrating them into a single solution, organizations can streamline the approval workflow, saving time and reducing administrative burdens.
>> Related: New Forrester Study: 240% ROI Achieved with TravelBank <<
The Benefits of a Faster Reconciliation
Establishing a unified platform doesn’t just help with the day-to-day aspects of booking and managing travel. It also provides better visibility into cash flow. If it takes a month or two to tally all your travel expenses, it’s impossible to get a read on what your organization has to pay, what you owe, and how that affects other financial outlays. It needlessly delays decisions about hiring, about corporate acquisitions, about R&D spending, and many other monetary decisions.
It’s also stressful for employees, who may be on the hook for thousands of dollars in expenses. If you have a slow reimbursement cycle or there are any discrepancies in an expense report, they may not get their money back for weeks or months. That’s a drag on employee morale and can even lead to turnover.
User Experience = Compliance
Employee adherence to T&E policies stems from a good user experience – a carrot that entices them to use modern and intuitive tools instead of getting frustrated and booking travel on their own.
Integration is the key: a modern front-end travel management experience must be seamlessly connected with the back-end T&E process, including preapproved spending rules, vendors, and travel contracts.
The benefits? As employees book travel, the platform provides negotiated rates on flights and hotels. As they incur expenses and upload receipts, the transactions are automatically categorized. You could even eliminate expense reports for approved purchases, or reduce approval chains. To what lengths would an employee properly book a trip if they didn’t have to submit a manual expense report after?
All told, this Forrester study found that a user-friendly interface improved the operational efficiency of managers and end users by 15%. And within three years, these efficiency gains totaled $56,000 in value for a 1,000-person organization with 300 travelers.
Read the entire series with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services >