Giving Employees More Flexibility with Their Budget Saves You Money

It makes sense. The thought of doing away with company policy when it comes to T&E expenses probably makes you cringe as you imagine your carefully crafted budget blown in a matter of a few business trips and a careless swipe of the company card.

But it’s not about handing over the reins to your employees and declaring an outright free-for-all. Giving employees more flexibility with their travel budget is about handing over the reins with responsibility. You shift the focus from deciphering a dozen cryptic policies to a single and powerful goal: beat your budget.

TravelBank creates a predictive budget for every trip based on real-time market prices so you know it is accurate. Expectations are clear when the bar is set from the beginning.

Employees then submit expenses against the trip budget and visuals update to help them measure how they are doing against the budget at a glance. While the trip budget is broken into categories such as airfare, hotels and daily allowance and expenses are categorized accordingly, their overall spend is measured against the budget total.

Your employee has the power to beat that budget however they choose, and you may be surprised how crafty they get when the planning is in their hands.

Maybe your employee wants to fly business class. To fit this into their trip budget they opt to stay with a friend who lives at their destination instead of booking a hotel. Currently, forgoing the hotel for a 4-night stay in New York City will save around $1,500 alone, freeing up a large portion of the overall budget.

Typically upgrading a flight could be considered questionable; but it takes a lot of time to worry about all the rules currently dictated by common travel policies. With a flexible trip budget, an employee can fly business class if they like as long as they stay under budget, saving the company money.

Flexible trip budgets empower your employees to take responsibility. By letting employees own their budget, they adopt a “beat the budget” mentality. All of a sudden, saving money for the company becomes a common goal, which in turn will foster a positive culture around savings.