Webinar Transcript:

Lindsay:
Hi everyone. My name is Lindsay Hudner. I am also a member of the customer success team and I work alongside Kate. I’ll be covering our expense management reporting and Core Insights today.

Kate:
Perfect. Thank you Lindsay. Before we kick this off, would love to know how often you are using reporting in TravelBank today. So poll is going to pop up here if you’re using it multiple times a week, once a week, once a month, or never. So maybe this is going to be your first look into insights. Seems like a lot of people are using this multiple times a week, which is awesome and we have a few logging in once a week and once a month. And then the people that have never used it really excited to give you a chance to check this out today.

We would also love to know what is the primary reason you’re using our reporting. So another polls popping up is that to track travel spend. If you’re using TravelBank only for travel or you’re identifying policy violations, this could be on the travel or expense side. If you’re using it for your month end close year end close or if there’s another reason, definitely enter that in the chat so we can know why you’re using it. Definitely seems like it’s extremely helpful for people when you’re doing your month-end close. So when Lindsay jumps into the expense side of the reporting, that will be very helpful for, she’ll be able to tackle a few of those things so you know exactly how to get some month-end close information there. Alright, so for those that are using our reporting today, you can definitely see how this is saving time. For those that have not used it yet. One of the biggest benefits is with the reporting, you’re going to save two to five hours a day By having all this centralized reporting. It’s going to increase your visibility by monitoring your spend, your compliance and travel trends in one friendly dashboard.

With Core Insights, you’re going to be able to view your data instantly. You’ll access it by clicking Core Insights. In the bottom left-hand corner, you’ll see a travel dashboard when you first log in and then you’ll also have access to nine of our commonly requested reports if you are on this webinar. But you use Premium Insights, not to worry, you still have access to all of these reports within Premium Insights. Premium Insights just gives you enhanced travel and expense dashboards. You’ll have access to over 50 in-depth reports for both travel and expense as well as being able to generate custom reports. But as I mentioned, these Core Insights ones are nine of our most commonly requested reports that you’ll just have access to.

As I mentioned, we will start today with our travel portion. So when you first log in, one of the first dashboards you’re going to see is going to be your travel booking dashboard. This is going to give you a view into what’s been spent versus budgeted against your policy. So you’ll be able to measure your gross bookings over time. How we really want to use this is track your trends to measure against your year over year to better forecast budgets. A lot of people are in forecasting stage right now for 2024, so being able to see exactly what you spent on travel this past year will be beneficial. We can see exactly what time periods you were over budget and then we can take measures to reduce costs. So maybe you were traveling for a conference in Q one that you might not be having in 2024 Q one, so you’d be able to know that we wouldn’t be spending as much over that time period. You can also refine your dates and that way you can notify teams if they’re close to maxing out budget and ask them if they could push that meeting maybe to the next quarter or the next month. Just to minimize the spend.

This travel bookings dashboard is extremely powerful as we’re going to be able to see what has been spent by airline. Your airline partners will have corporate loyalty programs. What that is is you are getting points into two buckets. The traveler is still going to be getting all of their frequent flyer points. We know that’s important to them, but as a company you would also start getting points back. So you can use those points for quite a few different reasons. Getting upgrading flights for maybe you have a c-level traveler or you have a candidate coming in that you want to be able to upgrade their ticket. Those are all managed directly with the airline, but we can add that code into the backend so you keep getting those points directly through TravelBanks bookings. If you have those numbers and you have not sent it to us, please send those corporate loyalty program numbers to your customer success manager. If you’re not enrolled, you can also reach out to us so we can get you that information for it.

Similar, we’ll be able to see hotels spend by city. If we see that you’re constantly traveling to the same city, we want to start thinking about getting a local negotiated rate set up with one of the properties there and that way you can just get a little bit more savings. This is something our customer success manager can also assist with if you want to reach out to us. Another report on this dashboard is going to be booking 14 days in advance or less. So if you have some repeat offenders that are constantly booking at the very last minute, even though they’ve known about that trip, they’re going to show up on this dashboard, you’ll be able to have a conversation with them and see if you can get them to change their habits and book a little bit further out. We can also put this directly into your TravelBank policy so people if they’re booking less than 14 days, it will get flagged as being out of policy. Just gives you a little bit more control there.

Lastly on this dashboard we’re going to see our top spenders. I’m sure you know who your road warriors are, but this will make sure you know exactly what they’ve spent and what they’ve saved. So if we need to improve any of their booking habits to get them to book a little bit lower airfares book further out, that’s something that we can start looking at and building within the policy. If it’s not already in there, we’ll break out your flight hotels cars with different reports. So the first one we’re going to see is your flight list. This is going to help a lot to know not only what’s been spent for flights but also help with duty of care. You’re going to be able to see when people are taking off landing, what airports they’re going to if they have a layover. So if there is anything that’s going on, you’re going to be able to know exactly where your travelers are. You’re also going to be able to see the receipts and download them directly. So if people say that they’re missing their flight receipt, you’ll always have access to that.

Few ways we want to use this report. Looking at that flight class, are people booking first class when they shouldn’t be? Are they booking one-way fairs when you expect round trip or are they traveling to an abnormal destination nation or are they constantly canceling flights? So just being able to get a little bit more visibility into what’s actually happening with their trips. We’ll also be able to see the advanced purchase date, which we’ve already talked a little bit about, but just making sure people are booking farther in advance. This report’s going to help us improve because it will show us exactly where we need to look at our travel policy. When it comes to cost thresholds alerts to reduce spend and prevent fraud, it might help us realize that we should have a few different policies if we just have one standard travel policy, breaking that out by employee status or department to optimize savings.

A lot of times your C-suite might be able to book higher fares than your lower levels. For example, we can also restrict basic economy flights. This is something that you can opt to turn on or turn off our support team or our customer success team can do this for you. If you see people are booking basic economy, it’s not always the best fare for business travel. If they need to make a change depending on the airline, they might just be at that full ticket cost. Sometimes you can’t even carry on a bag so then people are starting to pay to check their bag. It just ends up adding a lot more cost towards the end there. So just want to start thinking about maybe turning that off. If people are booking basic economy similar to the flight list, your hotel list will give you all information of where they’re staying, what the hotel name is, the location. So that will be a back to that duty of care aspect and of course telling you how much has been spent. We’ll give you access to your prepaid receipts. We’ll talk about that in a little bit once we jump into the platform.

What we want to look for in this report is there an excessive number of nights. So maybe somebody was only expected to travel for three nights and they tacked on some leisure nights at the company’s expense. You’ll be able to see how many nights they’re staying or if there’s abnormally high rates. Maybe they travel to New York during Fashion Week or to San Francisco during Salesforce Dreamforce conference when it is extremely expensive. So being able to see that and thinking for next year let’s try to book going to New York the week after fashion week or maybe a month later, we can also review our over budget amount for repeat offenders that are booking out of policy too. So we’ll be able to know who’s spending a little bit too much. How we can improve using this report is we can obtain the local negotiated hotel rates that I talked about, so we’ll be able to see what hotels you’re staying at.

So in this example we can see the Roxy Hotel if there is a good amount of room nights there, we’re going to want to take this data directly to the Roxy Hotel and say, can we get a negotiated rate here? Once again, that’s something your CSM can help with if we need to create additional policies. Same thing with the flights and if you do use TravelBank rewards, making sure that your travelers are aware of it. We can see how many rewards they’ve earned on this report and that not only gives them a gift card in their pocket, but it also helps for savings for you all so they’re not booking at the top of their budget, they are booking under it. If you do want to learn more about TravelBank rewards, just please reach out to us to tie together our flights and hotels.

Of course some people are booking cars. This report will also give us information on cost, trip length, your vehicle type. A couple things we want to look for last minute bookings, having people book a little bit further out as well as the car category and vehicle name. Are they booking an SUV when there’s only one traveler because that’s what they’re used to driving at home when they could be booking a cheaper economy car. Same thing with excessive number of days booked, making sure they’re not tacking on some leisure travel days, keeping their car for longer than you’d expect and it is typically more expensive if you’re dropping off and picking up at different locations. So we’ll be able to see if people are doing that and maybe be able to get them to just do pickup and drop off at the same location.

A couple ways we’ll use this report to improve our spending. So if you have a car discount code, say with Enterprise, that’s something that under your company settings you can just add in. If you have direct bill linked with it too, you can add that code in under your company settings. If you do not have a car discount program, that’s something you can just work with say enterprise directly to get set up and then put that code directly in your company settings as I mentioned. And then just educating your travelers on best practices to minimize cost. So whether that’s making sure they’re booking the appropriate car type, avoiding different drop-off locations if you have that discount rate with Enterprise or one of the vendors, making sure they know if they need to add insurance or not add insurance just so they’re not getting to the counter and signing off on every additional everything they want to throw at them for them to charge. So just making sure people know exactly what to expect.

The last report we’ll talk about on the travel side is going to be your travel transactions. If you are using TravelBank for expense and travel, you’ll also see all of this on the expense side. If you’re using TravelBank just for travel, this is going to be an extremely powerful report for you. One thing to note though is this is only going to be travel transactions for trips that are booked directly through TravelBank. If anybody’s booking outside of TravelBank, we will not get that information or the receipt in here. We’re going to want to check out if there’s missing receipts, incomplete or canceled bookings. We’re also going to be able to see the complete travel booking costs in itinerary for one individual. So everything will be in that one place for you.

How we can really use this is comparing if people are booking outside of TravelBank. So if you once again are using TravelBank expense, which Lindsay will jump into, we’ll be able to see if people are submitting expense reports with maybe a Delta trip but it was not booked through TravelBank. So for that duty of care aspect, getting all those corporate loyalty points back, making sure everybody’s booking within the centralized platform is going to be very important. So we’ll be able to tell that through this report. If you’re not using TravelBank expense today, this is something that you could compare to your credit card statement or to your ERP to see exactly what’s been charged in TravelBank versus what you are accruing on that side.

We also can use this to consider policy restrictions for budget flexibility. People are spending a lot more than you’d expect through this report. We’ll want to start putting in a little bit more, tighten up that policy a little bit more within TravelBank. So now that we know what these reports are, let’s jump into the platform and we can walk through each of these reports in a little bit more detail. So when you are in Core Insights, as I mentioned, you’ll click in the bottom left hand corner. If you’re using Premium Insights, these reports will be under your booking questions.

You’ll be able to search any of these reports by your department name or by booking date. Anytime you see these three dots you can download the full results. So if it’s easier for you to say sort through Excel or CSV, you could do that here and anytime in Core Insights you see this info icon, it will just tell you what the report is. Right. On this dashboard we’re going to see how much travel has been booked, what’s been spent, if you’re using TravelBank hotel rewards, how many rewards have been accumulated and then how much has been saved.

As we scroll down here with our pie charts, if we hover over, we’re going to see exactly what’s been spent and what percentage of the spend that is. So once again, making sure that since we do have a lot of Delta Airlines here, making sure that we have that Delta Airlines corporate loyalty program. So you’re still getting those points back, but we’ll want to do it for all those airlines anyways. Our hotels spend by city, very same thing we can hover over and seeing how much was spent within that city is what the hotels are going to want to know when they are getting a local negotiated rate set up for you. So this will just give you all the information they possibly need with each report too. You can click the header and it will change the sort, so either ascending or descending order or we’ll put an alphabetical order. So if you just want to see exactly who’s booking very, very last minute, we can sort that by who’s booking one day in advance. And same thing with our top spenders. We always have these toggles for you to be able to go to the next page or as I mentioned, you can download the full results.

Breaking out our reporting into flights, hotels, and cars is definitely what I see a lot of people doing just so they know exactly what’s being spent in each segment. So each of these reports you’re going to be able to sort by last name if there’s a specific traveler, you want to look at department when it was booked, what the date it was booked on, and then you can look at your travel start dates. This travel start date is going to be very helpful, especially if you’re using this for if you have an event coming up. So say in Q one you have a sales kickoff event, everybody’s traveling for it. The hotel might be asking for a travel manifest to know exactly when people are landing so they can staff their front desk properly. You can put in those travel dates and then at the very bottom here we can download that report and you can just send it directly to the hotel or to your events team, whoever might need those details.

Every report in core sites you are going to be able to download through this download full results button. It will always be in that bottom right-hand corner. We want you of course to know who the travelers, but we want you to know who booked the trip. A lot of people will book on behalf of other people so just you’ll know exactly who did it. So Tom, in this instance booked for Connor, we want to show you what the last four digits of the credit card was on. If you are people are booking on a ghost card through TravelBank, we’d expect to see the same last four digits here. Maybe there’s a couple that are different and it’s because perhaps the traveler put it on their personal card to get their own Amex points for example. So we’ll be able to get a little bit of visibility of who might be booking not on the corporate card when they should be.

We’ll be able to see department. A couple things to note here, your PNR and your airline confirmation, airline confirmation. If you’re going to say delta.com, that’s the one you’re going to enter there. The PNR is going to be for our agents. So if you reach out to them and they ask for the PNR, that’s what they’re looking for. They can still look it up, the airline confirmation, but just so you’re aware of what the difference is between the two. As I mentioned, you’re going to have all of your travel times, so we’ll give you the start time as well as the local start time. So if they are traveling to a different time zone, how far in advance they booked, we’re going to completely break down your cost so you know exactly how much you spent in the base fair, how much was over budget, how much was spent on taxes.

And then we talked about looking at the class of service. So seeing that everyone’s booking economy, which is what you’d expect. Or if maybe people are booking first class, we can get a quick look into that. We’ll continue to break down each of the segments. So from that duty of care perspective when people will be in the air, if they do have layovers, and since there are can be a few segments, we have a few options there, but at the very end is going to be where you can download your receipt. So any of these you can click, it’ll automatically download TravelBank automatically updates these for you.

Our hotels list has a lot of the same information as we saw on the flight list, so I won’t go as in depth here. We’re of course going to want to know again who the traveler is and who booked it. A few things very specific to this report though, we’ll continue to see the travel dates, how far in advance they booked, if they booked through the app or through an agent if it’s completed or canceled. This is a demo account, so we do sometimes see that errored in there. The hotel confirmation is what say the Hilton would need. That will be the confirmation directly with them, the rewards amount. Once again, if you have TravelBank rewards turned on, we’ll be able to see exactly how many reward points were accumulated from that booking for your traveler as well as how much was saved.

All your hotel details so you know exactly where they are from that duty of care perspective. But one of the biggest sections of this report here is going to be your rate type. So hotels have postpay and prepay rates, which we have directly in TravelBank. The postpay rate we will not have the receipt for. What that means is your travelers are putting a card in, put in a card at the front desk at the time of check-in. They need to get that receipt directly from the hotel. The hotel will not send it to us for postpay rates, so that’s why we don’t see a receipt there. For prepaid rates, we will upload that receipt so we’re just paying for it at the time of booking. So if you need that postpay rate, if you are using TravelBank expense, that’s going to get uploaded anyway with their expense report.

If you’re not using TravelBank expense, you’ll need to get that receipt. However else you’re gathering the rest of their receipts and our cars list is that third piece of travel here, a lot of that same information we just saw in the first two, but specific to our cars report, all that information will follow after our travel dates. Who our traveler is, as I mentioned, we want to see if drop off and pickup is the same. If they are different, it tends to be a little bit more expensive so we can reign in costs through having people pick up and drop off at the same location. At the very end here though is where we want to start looking at what type of car they booked. Did they book that SUV when they only needed an economy car. That of course would’ve been a little bit cheaper.

So making sure that there are booking that correct car type. You will notice we do not have the receipt tied to this report like we do with the flights and hotels. The reason for this is you do have to put a card down when you go to pick up your car. If you do have say direct bill, set up with enterprise and we have that information, it will just get direct billed as you normally do. But that receipt will need to be captured either in TravelBank expense or your other expense platform. However you’re capturing your receipts today.

This last section of travel transactions, then I’m going to pass it over to Lindsay. This report’s set up slightly different so you will see exactly when the transaction was created, how much it was for the last four digits. So once again, if we want to see people are not booking on the corporate card and they should be, your description will always have the information of the flight or the hotel or the car of who the traveler is, where they’re going, what that PNR is, the dates of their travel. You’ll have everything just in this description section so you can see it very quickly.

We’ll be able to see if it was completed or maybe it was canceled and then we’d be able to see our different booking types so we can see if it’s a hotel or a flight. And this will just be helpful. You can have all your receipts rate in that one report. As I mentioned, this will be for all prepaid hotels and for flights. Biggest difference of this report is you are now seeing your username at the very end versus the others we were seeing at the front of the report. And then the very last section is going to be your tag name. If you have your traveler select a reason for why they’re traveling, this tag name is going to populate here. We can download this report once again in the bottom right corner and then you’d be able to see how much you spent for client visits or for client X, Y, Z in that year. So as you are starting to prepare for budgeting for next year or if you need to bill it back to that client, you’ll have all that information just right at your fingertips here. So Lindsay, I will pass this over to you now and we can start talking about the expense reporting.

Lindsay:
Perfect. Thanks so much Kate. All right, so I’ll go ahead and share my screen here. So just to jump right into things, I thought we would do a review the expense portion in the same fashion that Kate tackled the travel section. So I’m going to do a high level overview of each report housed within court insights and then we’ll do a short demo. So the first area that I want to cover is the total expenses report. So this is the most comprehensive view of your spend on the individual expense level. So where this delivers value is you’ll be able to identify trends based upon that expense type, so reimbursable or non-reimbursable expenses spend by department, individual users. You can even track spend by custom fields or vendor. In addition to that, some clients use this to export this data and reformat it to upload into your ERP.

There are a couple of different ways you can do that within TravelBank. Some this total expenses report. Some utilize the expenses, export housed under company settings. Also TravelBank does offer a sync functionality for those that are utilizing QuickBooks Online or NetSuite. A benefit to this report for those using that sync is the fact that you can identify the transaction status and id. So calling out some key points of things to look for when running this total expenses report, you have the ability to monitor potential fraud and optimize costs. So certain things I want to call out are abnormal merchants. So if you see unusual vendors in that list that could highlight some kind of risky spend or spend that’s outside of policy. Unusually high costs are spending in addition to that, expenses that are submitted without receipts, especially if this is outside of your policy, you have an easy way to look at a glance to see expenses that have been submitted without receipts or those that are in draft without receipts to proactively manage your users and coach them around the policy and ensure those receipts are uploaded.

Additionally, you have the ability to identify excess spending or inflated cash purchases. So if you’re looking at things that are spent not tied to a credit card, where it runs a risk is the fact that they could expense it, get reimbursed and then return that item after the fact and you have no way of knowing that in the system. Alternatively, if you have your corporate card sink set in, the return would be flowing in through the credit card feed so you have more insight and visibility into your user’s behaviors as well as their spend. So knowledge is power. So in using this report, you’d be able to pinpoint just users that may frequently submit for reimbursements and instead encourage them to use that corporate card. And then additionally, because you’re having visibility into users, their overall spending habits as well as the company policy that they’re tied to, you could also adjust company spend limits by the category.

So that’s again housed under company settings and then being able to adjust the policy and then you can put an overall per expense spend limit. Additionally by that category you can have a recurring limit as well. So that could be daily, weekly, monthly or annually. So a lot of ways to proactively manage your spend and then gain insight into policy violations through this total expenses report, the total reimbursed report. So this is a great way to suss out expenses that are out of pocket. So this isn’t just for those utilizing ACH, but for those that are using both reimbursable and non-reimbursable expense types within the system, so you have the ability to gain access into reimbursement status and then also getting a sense of that approval workflow. So an expense report was created, the data was submitted, approved, and then as well as the date of that reimbursement piece.

So things to look for and utilizing this report you can isolate expenses that again, have missing receipts and send follow up to those employees, especially again calling out that risky spend tied to reimbursable expenses, especially if they’re not following policy. You have insight into this and are able to separate those that were out of pocket and reimbursable expenses versus those corporate card expenses. And then if you’re seeing frequent offenders in terms of your policy violation and receipts not being submitted, encourage employees to utilize TravelBank for one of its easiest to use features and the fact that you can use the mobile app to scan and upload receipts. Additionally, you can email in those receipts at receipts@travelbank.com to reduce errors and then also just avoid issues with manual entry. All right, so reports approved by finance. So this gives again a great view of that overall approval workflow.

I did want to call out that those that utilize the approval process, employee submit to manager, and then the manager fully processes the expense report. This wouldn’t necessarily apply in this sense, this is best used for those that have the employees that submit the expense report, their manager approves it, and then finance is the final step of the approval process. So a true benefit to this would really be is to cut down the work of the finance team. So identify what policies require the finance approval and see where their frequent offenders or if the approval process is taking a lengthy amount of time, and then also gain insight into the speed of that process and being able to say, okay, well this group housed under this policy, they’re really efficient, they follow policy. Perhaps I can take a step back and manage another group and focus my energy to save time and focus your energy perhaps around change management when it comes to those that have frequent policy violations or a lengthy approval process. So the goal in this is not only to have a overall view into that spend and approval process, but also being able to lighten your load a little bit and identifying areas perhaps as a finance person to be able to take a step back.

Alright, the next report that we’ll be covering is the credit card reconciliation piece. So this is really focusing on the credit card transactions that are flowing in through your credit card feed so you’re able to isolate your credit card charges and be able to perform your reconciliation. I did want to call out clients tend to do this in a couple of different ways you can utilize this report. Additionally, we do have an export housed under transactions in the manage tab. So if you have questions about this, definitely feel free to consult our help center or reach out to your customer success manager. But this is a great place to start in terms of managing your overall credit card spend. So things to look for, identify mismatched data points in your reconciliation process. So how you’d do this would be you’d export this credit card reconciliation report and then be able to compare it to a spreadsheet of your overall statement.

One piece of advice that I like to give clients is to look for that unique transaction ID that’s tied specifically to that transaction that’s coming into TravelBank. And then from there you’d be able to crosscheck what’s in your statement and ensure the fact that there’s a match or identify anything missing. And then the other piece of it is sometimes we all have them, we have those slackers that have those credit card transactions under expenses and transactions in the dashboard and they haven’t been actioned on. So this report also includes those. So you have the ability to highlight those individual users that are not submitting in a timely fashion in order for you to reconcile that credit card statement. So the real benefit here, not only beyond speeding up your reconciliation process, is identifying frequent offenders and providing coaching and training around the importance of submitting in a timely fashion.

Alright, and then the last piece I do want to cover here before diving into the demo are the reports created but not submitted. So managing your accruals. So this will give you a lot more insight into overall spend that hasn’t been actioned on is sitting in the draft format. So an active expense report or additionally those that have been rejected for policy violations. It’s important to use these in order to get a true understanding of your financial health and liabilities. And then again, this coaching piece that I’m talking about, so gaining insight into which employees that need a reminder to submit those expenses in a timely fashion. I’m going to call this out, but as you can see in this picture here, you have the ability to filter by status active or returned. So those uns uncommitted expenses as well as those returned are really easy to filter down in this report and being able to work with those users A to ensure that they’re submitting in a timely fashion, but also you’re proactively managing those that may have policy violations or not compliant, just tips to improve clarifying your policy with employees.

This is really important that employees understand the policy upfront and therefore it will save you time and effort and maybe eventually you won’t have to spend a lot of time in this accruals report because they’ll be submitting in a timely fashion, they’ll be following policy and being able to manage your spend more proactively as opposed to being in the weeds and talking to your users about submitting timely and following policy. The other piece that we hear a lot in customer success about is having frustrations about those not submitting the receipts with their expenses. So using the mobile app to scan receipts or emailing them into receipts@travelbank.com and then notifying employees if they have outstanding expenses as you work towards closing month end. So with that I am going to hop into the expenses demo. So here I am right here within TravelBank just calling out this total expenses report and I thought that it’d make the most sense to highlight specific fields that you may find to be valuable.

So you have the ability to filter by expense status, so on that individual expense level, but additionally that report status. So things that may be helpful to you would be the active expense reports. So those that have imported into the system are actively within TravelBank tied to a draft report, but they’re not submitted. Others that are important that I think that may be helpful to know about are submitted. So expenses that have been submitted for approval, there’s also those that have been approved and may be awaiting final processing by finance or partially approved if you have a multi-level approval process. And then paid is another one that I do want to highlight, especially for those utilizing TravelBank for reimbursements. You also can filter by expense created date, especially in understanding those that have been with us for some time. Being able to really streamline that data would be helpful.

So you have all the individual user information, you have information as to if this was synced through a credit card and which credit card specifically. This is helpful especially when you have users that have more than one card program or credit card tied to their account then when the expense was created or the data, the transaction. And then in addition to that, this vendor information would be helpful, especially for example, if you are just using TravelBank expense and you’re not using travel. If you want to get an overall sense of vendor spend category spend, this would be a really smart place to think about doing that. The overall amount of that expense, the status of the expense, the expense type category spend. Once again, you’d be able to quantify overall spend based upon expense category the policy that user is tied to. So this is a really nice one to have in this report because you’ll be able to identify not only the individual user, but the policy that they’re tied to. The policy dictates the approval process, but also those category controls that I called out. A recommendation would be if you do have users that are frequent offenders of policy, I would recommend that you make adjustments accordingly to that policy. You can even move those frequent offenders into a specific policy to impact their approval workflows in order to ensure compliance.

Other things that may provide value to you are the expense report status and then because I did mention the fact that people utilize this in terms being able to quantify custom field spending and then this sync status. So this applies to those utilizing QuickBooks online sync or the NetSuite sync. This is a demo environment, so it’s not live, which is to say that it’s not ready and then receipts. So you as Kate had called out, you can actually change the order of these to ensure the fact that you are seeing those expenses that may have not been submitted with receipts. Apparently at TravelBank we have a lot of frequent offenders here, but also for those receipts, if you click it, you have the ability to download those as well to continue here, the total reimburse, again, this is the best report to really filter through those reimbursable expenses.

So you get details in terms of not only when the expense was created, but also when the reimbursement was approved. The date category spend, so if you’re looking at where you’re having a lot of reimbursable category spend, this would be important to you vendors once again, which provides valuable insight into a frequent spend and perhaps maybe negotiating specific rates with those vendors. The link to the receipt, the status which would in terms of reimbursements would be paid again, an insight into custom field spend and then mileage the link to the mileage URL for the sake of time because your time is valuable. I’m going to skip to the reports approved by finance. Again, this is pertinent to those that have the approval workflow. The user submits an expense report, it’s approved by the manager, and then it flows over to finance or perhaps even a multi-level approval process.

The goal of this is to get an understanding of your overall approval workflow, which you can see submitted at, approved at. And then if it is a reimbursable expense, the reimbursement is approved at times. So if you’re running into issues with expenses, for example, being submitted and sitting with the manager and there’s a big lapse in time, this is a great resource especially in being able to gain insight. And then think about ways you can strategically improve your workflow to get a little bit speedier A and make your employees happier if you’re using this for reimbursements. But also time is money. And then also you can pinpoint by department. So if you have frequent offenders in a specific department, and then also pinpoint these expense policies, credit card reconciliation. So one thing I did want to call out is because a lot of clients utilize this for the reconciliation process.

Additionally, under this managed tab we have transactions here. You can also utilize the transactions export depending on your current needs. It does include the last four of the synced card in addition to that, the posting date. So if you want to export this information and then pare down the information based upon the posting dates within your statement range, that would be a really helpful place to start in terms of the reconciliation process. And then a field that I did want to call out that would be really important in the reconciliation process is this sync transaction id. This is a unique field that is tied specifically to the transactions coming in on your file feed. So if you’re doing a vlookup, you have the ability to check for missing expenses, perhaps duplicate expenses, which really does occur, but something that you want to keep an eye on.

So you have a proactive way of managing that spend and being able to account for all those transactions in TravelBank as well as in your credit card statement. And then jumping over to accruals. These are reports that are created but they haven’t yet been submitted. So you get the created date, the status, which is they’re actively tied to an expense report or returned. So for example, if you want to pinpoint those that were returned back to the user for updating and editing for policy compliance or just general changes, you can sort by those, the department name user information as well as the policy they’re tied to knowledge is power and being able to proactively manage that policy piece. So those are the key fields and reports that I wanted to highlight here. I’m going to jump right back into the webinar, just one moment.

And with that, this leads me into wanting to bring up another piece of reporting that we do have available to our users. It is a more robust tool, and this is called Premium Insights. So Premium Insights is a more robust reporting tool as I had mentioned before, and it’s essentially a way to visualize your data through dashboards as well as building your own custom reports. So something that Premium Insights offers is not only over 1,300 individual data points, so kind of the sky’s the limit here. We also do offer 50 pre-configured in-depth reports as well as customizable dashboards. For those of you that are joining that do have PI, I did want to call out the fact that this Core Insights reporting is also available to you within PI. So for Core Insights, it’s listed in its own individual folder within the save collections of PI.

That also does include the travel transactions report and then those travel specific reports, the flight and the hotel report, those can be found under the booking questions. So if you are following along and trying to figure out how to pull those within PI, that’s your best place to start there. Some callouts that I do want to share is the fact that not only do you have these pre-configured reports, and that’s actually a really smart place to start and looking at how they’re built or how they pull data. From there, you can build your own custom reporting. So some areas that we see a lot of is being able to analyze top vendors and your company’s expenses spend by category in addition to that, identifying highest vendors where they’re traveling, and then those overall expense submission timelines. So Core Insight scratches the surface. If you’re really interested in taking a deeper dive in your data and gaining insight into your overall travel or expense spend or managing it in a proactive way, or if you have some goals that are tied to data, please feel free to reach out to your customer success manager and we’d be happy to share this with you further.

The one last thing I did want to call out about Premium Insights, that is actually my favorite thing and something that is a differentiator between Core Insights and PI is the fact that you can automate alerts. So you have the ability to schedule hourly, daily, or weekly insight reports, and those are sent actually right to your inbox and you can view the data on the go. You also do have the ability to share it with users. In addition to that, you can set up trigger reports that are sent to your inbox based upon the fact of there is a certain exception picked up on within the report or a threshold has been met. So some really interesting ways to proactively manage and own your data in a thoughtful way to gain insight to your overall expense spending or travel spending. And certainly feel free to reach out to your CSM with further questions on this or Core Insights. We are also going to focus on Q&A here as well. And this leads me to our third poll question and it’s are you interested in learning more about Premium Insights? So feel free to share thoughts on that. You can share yes, no, or maybe just down the road. I’ll give you a minute to respond to that. And then from there we’ll jump into the Q&A portion.

Kate:
Yeah, it seems like a lot of people want to learn more so we can reach out as well.

Lindsay:
Excellent. Perfect. Thanks so much. And the customer success team will be in touch. So from there we request that you submit your questions into the Q&A module. It looks like we do have a few there, so let’s go ahead and jump in. Kate.

Kate:
Yeah, so this is a good question from somebody that’s just using TravelBank for travel, if the traveler gets a receipt at a hotel that includes a room service charge, how can I upload that? If you are using TravelBank just for travel, we will only upload the flight receipt and those prepaid hotel receipts as we saw. So if you do want to be able to capture those room service charges or any other travel related charges, we would definitely want to talk about maybe adding on TravelBank expense for you. So something that we can definitely have a conversation directly about. On the flip side too, if you are using TravelBank for only expenses, it’s really helpful to add the travel portion of TravelBank. That way you can really have everything in that one platform really from that duty of care perspective to know where your travelers are. But also we will upload those receipts for them so they don’t have to track down as many receipts as well. So a little bit easier for end users to have everything in one platform.

Lindsay:
Absolutely. And then I did want to make a call out, specifically proud of it is the fact that we were just ranked by US News and World Report as the best booking travel and expense tool. So the all-in-one piece is really convenient and I do find that my clients utilizing both travel and expense find it to be a lot more seamless and you don’t have to chase down receipts and even if you’re missing a receipt from travel that booked on TravelBank, you can always contact our support team and they can send it right over. So that’s definitely a win there.

Kate:
Absolutely. We do have some company specific questions that your customer success manager will reach out directly, but there is a question here, is there a phone number to call for questions and how do I find my customer success manager? So Lindsay, if you actually want to jump to that next slide,

Lindsay:
Absolutely

Kate:
You can reach out to success@travelbank.com. This goes to the full TravelBank success customer success team and we will get you in touch with your dedicated customer success manager if you’re not sure who they are. And then from there, depending on what your questions are, we can go ahead and hop on a call if needed or send you into the right direction.

Lindsay:
Perfect. Yep. And then in addition to that, if you’re just seeking general support, you can utilize the chat functionality. We do also have an email available to users, so depending on if it’s a expense or travel related question. So I think a great one-stop place to begin would be the success email, but we’d be happy to provide you with the proper resources additionally. Alright, and then we also did receive a question in terms of booking travel. Are you able to get the sales tax removed during or just after? So it depends. Also, I will say I did some digging into this and working with some nonprofit clients. It depends on the kind of booking you’re making, so if that’s associated with flights as well or if it’s associated with the hotel. Also tax exemption is managed on a state level, so the ability to furnish that tax exempt certificate upon check-in or having a specific relationship with the hotel. But from my understanding that we do not have the ability to manage that in an upfront fashion, but we’re happy to do some additional digging following that. Do you have anything to expand on with that one, Kate?

Kate:
No, this is definitely very specific to certain types of travel, especially more on that nonprofit side. So if there are specific questions around how your organization is using travel and specific needs like that, your customer success manager will be the best person to dig into that for you.

Lindsay:
Absolutely. Any additional questions? We have two minutes left here, so feel free to drop those in. Alright, so that concludes our presentation. Thank you so much for your time. And feel free to reach out to us at success@travelbank.com with any questions related to your account, Core Insights or premium insights. We’re here to help and look forward to working with you.