No matter what type of change is being implemented at your company, change management conversations ensure that your employees are on board with what you’re putting into place. If you’ve already been part of a technology rollout at your company, you probably have some ideas of what works well for your employees and what may not work. Today, we’ll go over some things that we’ve seen that has worked very well here at TravelBank for our clients, but, of course, you know your company best.

So how do we start when you’re first introducing TravelBank to your employees? The earlier, the better. If they’re prepared for an upcoming change, they’ll be more open to it when the time comes to learn the new system. It’s also beneficial to make sure that they know why you chose TravelBank to partner with for expenses. If you’re coming to TravelBank from another expense platform, let your employees know what you like more about TravelBank and how it will help you reach your company goals. If you’re coming to TravelBank by doing expenses manually through Excel and paper expense reports, let them know what the value props of TravelBank drew you to the platform and to implementing an expense software, and really, of course, how the change benefits your employees. That’s going to be the biggest one, too.

So when you are moving to TravelBank, specifically from a manual process, one of the big things your employees will think about when rolling out a new program is, “What’s in it for me? Why are we doing this?” So understanding these key values will help you better communicate and get buy-in. So if you’re coming from a manual process, so we’re thinking about if you’re doing paper receipts in an envelope or stapled together, manually stringing photos of receipts together to create a PDF, inputting spreadsheets reimbursements by check or in payroll, your employees are going to see a dramatic and positive shift by coming to TravelBank.

First we’ll be able to see maximized productivity. They will be able to capture their receipts instantly, automatically generate expense reports, and populate critical data fields, which is saving time while reducing errors, also getting better visibility. So your end users as well as you as admins will be able to see transactions in one place through corporate card feeds. You’ll be able to track the status of submitted expense reports and admins will gain spend insights faster. So it’s really a win-win for everyone. Of course, an improved experience. So with TravelBank, you can submit expense reports, with one tap and receive reimbursement payments directly to your bank account. So just getting everything done a little bit faster there, there.

Now, if you’re coming to TravelBank expense from another platform, your employees are already going to be familiar with the digital experience. So TravelBank is driven by a customer-first mission. We’re constantly investing in our platform to meet the needs of our customers, and your employees will see a very big different experience from other systems. So switching to TravelBank is going to give your employees a modern experience. So it’ll be an intuitive platform that is simple to understand and gets more robust each month. Of course, maximizing productivity. So simplifying virtual card management by centralizing it within one system will be able to automate approval processes and reimbursements to reduce errors in employee expenses, and then, of course, just a better experience. So TravelBank offers in-house support and ranks higher in support and ease of use in setup than other systems. So once again, a win-win for you and your employees.

But really, what’s in it for your employees? This is what they’re going to want to know and how you can really encourage positive change management here. So first, they’ll benefit from having a mobile app, which allows them to instantly take pictures of their receipts, reducing the headache that comes with losing receipts. Our quick scan feature will automatically populate critical data from their receipt, including date, merchant transaction amount, and tip amount if it’s for a restaurant, for example, and ultimately, they can submit expenses faster with fewer errors and track the status of their expense reports.

We also have effortless reimbursements. So TravelBank makes it incredibly simple for your employees to be reimbursed very quickly. Based on your reimbursement schedule, so this is something that you have set, it is either a daily schedule, twice a month, or once a month, your employees can receive their reimbursements exactly on those schedules. So all they have to do is connect their bank account information directly in their profile, submit their expense report, have that expense report go through the approval system, and then the payment will be on its way to them the day that you choose. They can see their reimbursement as little as 24 hours via direct deposit if that’s the schedule that you’ve chosen. So it really is a very simple, fast process for your employees.

Your employees and you, of course, will also benefit from a corporate credit card feed. If you are using one of these credit card feeds, this is going to make expense reports even easier for your employees. The credit card feed will automatically load in transactions from their corporate cards, which will ultimately take away manual work. By having a consistent stream of charges, it not only provides visibility into the transactions that need to be expensed, but with TravelBank, the employees can automatically merge captured receipts to the transactions from the feed. So this allows them to submit their expenses faster with fewer errors. At the end of the day, that ultimately means that they can spend less time on their expense report and more time on other projects.

So while these are the big three things that your employees and you are going to benefit from moving over to TravelBank for expenses, we want to spend a little bit of time on how you’re going to coach each one of your users on, one, of course, the benefit of TravelBank and how they’re really going to use it. So coaching your teams on TravelBank will be very important, so you can get ahead of any questions or problems before they arise. The success of this rollout relies on changing old habits and understanding the new system. So who do we need to coach? Anyone that’s in the finance role in TravelBank, anyone in the admin role, your managers, your approvers, and, of course, your employees.

So as we coach and prepare for change… First, talking about finance. So the finance team plays a vital role, as they provide typically the final approval. Although they typically design the expense policy, they must also prepare for this change. They should know how they should review your policies and update prior to implementation, which you’ve probably already done or maybe you’re in the process of doing now. Finance needs to provide admins the expense policy as well, making sure that everybody has a copy. Also, be sure that finance understands how the approvals and the policy are actually built within TravelBank. So while the policy is written out, how it is translated into TravelBank, we just want to understand that tech feature of it. Of course, finance is going to be the top level support on enforcing these policies. So making sure that they are completely on board with this policy. They’re letting everybody know what it is and putting in that mandate, saying, “Hey, everyone needs to be following this expense policy that we have.”

When we start thinking about training and coaching admins during the implementation phase of TravelBank, there’s typically a few people that are involved, ranging from maybe IT all the way to the finance team, but one of the most important aspects that we want to define is who the admin team will be moving forward. So part of defining the admin team is also to make it clear that your employees know the difference between TravelBank as a tool and, also, your policies. So while TravelBank will be used for employees to submit expenses, the setup is still different from company to company, and your employees need to know what company policies are built in behind the technology. If they don’t know what policies are set, they’re going to just naturally have more questions than answers as they submit their expense reports. So get ahead of this by providing employees a copy of your expense report.

Taking this into consideration, you will want to be sure your admins are coached thoroughly on the expense policies and how it works for delegates, very similar to how we talked about with finance, and you’ll want to make sure admins understand how the integrations work and how approvals flow. This is part of that TravelBank setup, but just that will eliminate some questions as well. Then admin should share the policy with employees and provide additional resources for training. So quick recap on that admin one. Admin should understand the nuances of the expense policies. Admin should understand how the integrations work, the approval workflows, and how they can vary with considerations for delegates specifically, and then share the policy itself and resources available for TravelBank training.

Next, when we think about coaching, let’s talk about your managers. Managers are going to be your biggest asset when it comes to this rollout. They’re typically going to be the ones that are receiving questions from their team. They might be hearing frustrations or objections. They’re also going to be responsible for approving some, if not all, reports based on your approval flow. So admins should be able to rely on managers to approve, comment, or reject reports in a timely fashion, answer any questions on policy, and help enforce policies in the mandate to use TravelBank. The managers are going to be, just at the core, very, very helpful to you all in, as I mentioned, in making sure that their team and their employees feel equipped to use TravelBank, but then also that your managers feel equipped to answer any of their questions, that will help eliminate questions coming to you all as admins.

Next step, when we think about coaching, we want to talk about our approvers. So while managers in finance will do a bulk or a large majority of the approvers, you can also build in TravelBank conditional approvers that do not include finance or managers. They’re also going to need the following. They’ll need to follow the same coaching. So these conditional approvers can be if, maybe, you want approval to route to somebody if it’s over a certain amount of dollars or if it’s within a certain category. So no matter who the approver is, you want to be sure to hold them all accountable. When it comes to approving and enforcing policies, be sure that they all know exactly what policy violations look like and how to properly communicate the violations to the team members.

You want to make sure that all approvers are following the same process when it comes to approving, denying, and leaving comments on the report. This will make it so each level of approval is streamlined. We really do recommend having approvers return any report that has a violation versus than fixing it themselves. This is important for managers and finance to know as well. What this does is it helps teach the employee about the policy, and in the end, it will make less work for everyone involved since expense reports will become correct from the first submission. If approvers start editing it themselves, it’s just really not going to coach the employees of exactly how to do it. So we always just recommend returning the reports.

Of course, we want to coach your employees. So we talked about what’s in it for your employees and your end users, but how are they going to learn how to use it? They can get excited about all the features we talked about, but we want to make sure that they are coached on how to submit expense reports. So if you have a credit card feed, ensure they know what the credit card statement dates are, your expectations on when expenses will be submitted, and, of course, making sure they know your expense policy and have a copy of it. We’ve talked about that expense policy a few times, but it’s very important to share that out.

You also want to coach them on the ins and outs of TravelBank. So whether it’s a training or if you are providing them with TravelBank resources, but just so they know first how to check the status of their expense report and where it is in the approval flow. This is going to eliminate questions for admins and managers since your employees will know exactly who they’re waiting for for approval and where their expense report is sitting in that approval flow.

So we know the benefits for your employees, we know the benefits for you as admins, and we know how to coach everybody, but how are we going to communicate all this out? First, from the top down, rollouts are most successful, and the communication comes from the top down. That’s why we talked a lot about that finance role when it comes to coaching, making sure that they are the ones really enforcing this as well as your admins too. So employees need to know that this is a mandate across the company, and maybe you all won’t reimburse them if they don’t submit it through TravelBank, or maybe they’re going to lose company card privileges if they don’t use TravelBank expense. So really pushing that mandate from the top down.

We want to make sure we set a date. So set a date to clearly define when it is required to start using TravelBank. If you’re coming from another expense management platform, everyone will need to know the exact date to stop using that platform and start submitting expenses through TravelBank. If you’re coming from a manual process, just knowing when they need to stop doing how they did previously, submitting maybe just an Excel, whatever that looks like for you, and start putting everything through TravelBank. Typically, we see people picking a date that aligns with their next credit card statement as a start date. That will keep reporting very organized for your accounting and finance teams. If you’re not using a credit card feed and people are just submitting for reimbursement, we still do want to set that hard date. Just so you know, everything’s just flowing through TravelBank.

We also want to communicate policy enforcement. So we’ve touched on policy quite a bit right now, but this is very crucial. So one of the biggest assets of TravelBank to a company is being able to enforce your policy through control set within TravelBank. Employees, of course, need to know what that policy is, so be sure to share a written document of the expense policy with all your employees. This will ultimately eliminate questions. Also, be sure to let them know how out-of-policy violations will be handled and what to do if an expense report is rejected. Typically, when you are rejecting expense reports, this goes back to that coaching piece, putting in a note of why it was rejected. So making sure they know exactly that that communication will stay within TravelBank and that they’ll just need to edit their expense report and resubmit it through TravelBank if it is rejected.

With all that being said, though, I do want to call out that if you do not currently have an expense policy, that’s okay. You can utilize TravelBank reporting to help you build out a policy. So once that policy is built, we’ll want to come back to this piece of the communication and push that out to your employees. But just know that TravelBank reporting can help you create a policy and also revamp your policy if you need to make any tweaks.

We want to make sure everything is in writing. So sending out a memo to each employee and new employees as they join the company, explaining exactly who TravelBank is, what the policy is, the date they need to start using TravelBank, and all their resources available to them to learn the system. So whether those be trainings, training recordings, user guides, customer success office hours, we’ll talk about that in a second here. These are all points, along with the why statement and benefits we spoke about earlier, which can be rolled into a master frequently asked questions document. Employees can refer back to. This way, you also won’t have to keep repeating yourself. So if you just have it all in one quick document, then you can send out to everybody.

In-person communication is also really important. So if anybody may have missed the written communication, if they accidentally deleted the email, didn’t look at your internal wiki, wherever you’re storing it, reinforce everything in an in-person meeting, especially when we’re first rolling out TravelBank. This can be at an all-hands meeting or maybe a team meeting run by their manager. At the end of the day, it’s better to over-communicate this change so we can be sure that there’s no way anyone missed this, whether it’s the written communication or in person.

We also really want to communicate out those resources. So share all possible resources with your employees. You will receive TravelBank user guides during implementation, support articles, contact information, so making sure everybody has this information. You also really want to make sure they know who their internal resources are, so who they go to for policy questions, approvals, anything of that sort. Should they be going to finance directly, to the admins, to their manager? Because while TravelBank is the technology that we have, all of your approvals, your policy, your expenses, reports built within, there, of course, is that internal piece for you all that you want to make sure people know who to go to.

The biggest takeaway here, you should feel like you’re oversharing. So share that policy. Make sure you’ve set a date of multiple… Let people know that date multiple times, written communication, in-person communication. Definitely feel like you’re oversharing, and then everybody will feel very comfortable with this change.

So just like we want you to use your internal resources, we want to make sure that everybody knows who TravelBank’s resources are. So TravelBank does have a frequently-asked-question support site. That can be viewed right here at support.travelbank.com. We also have product support available via chat or email. So their email is support@travelbank.com. When users are logged into either the desktop or the mobile app, they can click chat with us, and they can be directed directly to our product support team. So our product support team will be there if they’re running into any challenges with the platform. They have a question around functionality of how TravelBank works exactly, so they can definitely go to our support team for that.

We also, of course, have our customer success team, so as admins and finance, you can reach out to your customer success manager, but we also have success@travelbank.com. Customer success managers are here. If you have any questions specifically around contracting, anything of the sort, our support team will also be here to assist admins with any functionality questions too. But just know that you also have our customer success team.

We also host customer success office hours. These are a range of topics for both end users and admins. So definitely be sure to sign up for any topics that interest you. We have that link directly here, info.travelbank.com/customer-success-office-hours. But we do send out reminder emails, and you will start to see some messages in the app letting you know what topics are coming up. But those are all live. So it’s a really great way to understand specific parts of the platform, ask questions to our customer success managers. For example, we’ve had office hours around submitting expense reports, setting up your expense policy. So definitely very helpful for, as I mentioned, both end users and admins alike.

So thank you all very much for joining us on as we talk about change management. We definitely know that it is a very big task to switch either platforms or roll out a new technology. So we appreciate all the time that you’re taking. If you do have any questions, definitely feel free to reach out to us. But really looking forward to seeing you and all of your users on TravelBank now and in the future.