Webinar Transcript:

Jiadi:

Hi everyone, I’m Jiadi. I joined TravelBank as a data analyst nearly two years ago. I’m in charge of creating different reports and dashboards for our querying site and Premium Insights.

Dani:

Thanks, Jiadi. So taking a look at what we’ll be tackling today, first we’ll go over the value of adding Premium Insights onto your TravelBank platform. We’ll take a look at the dashboard itself, and how we can modify an existing report. Jiadi will then show us how we can create a new report. Then we’ll see how we can schedule alerts so you receive those reports sent directly to your email before moving into the Q&A.

All right, so for those of you who caught our last deep dive webinar, we reviewed Core Insights reporting in that session. As a reminder, Core Insights reporting is the reporting that is available to all TravelBank users. These reports in particular are found within the saved collections in Premium Insights with travel specific reports found under questions for bookings. For our CFOs and admins, Premium Insights takes your data to the next level.

It’s a data visualization platform that provides you with customizable dashboards and over 50 in-depth reports. If you’re not currently using Premium Insights, you’ll want to talk to your customer success manager about it as it is an add-on to your account. Premium Insights allows you to access raw TravelBank data, which can be aggregated to create your own reports and dashboards. You can easily click through data points in your dashboard to dive deeper into those unique data points.

With Premium Insights, you can access all the granular details with thousands of data points. In TravelBank, Premium Insights builds upon what you see in Core Insights. You’ll still be able to access your Core Insights reports and dashboards, but you’ll now have even more insight into your company’s spend and behaviors.

You will also have access to custom reporting, so you can use your spend data to build configurable reports that answer more specific questions, analyze the top vendors your company expenses by categories like advertising, lodging, and software, and see where your highest vendors are traveling and their expense submission timeliness. You can also identify trends with employee adoption and compliance with the booking platform.

Premium Insights will also allow you to automate alerts so you can schedule hourly, daily, or weekly insights to arrive in your inbox and view your data on the go. You can set up trigger reports that are sent to your inbox anytime there’s an exception or a threshold met.

Because TravelBank captures bookings and expenses in one place, managers can use Premium Insights to make better decisions about spend, by understanding habits and trends, predict costs with historical data used as benchmarks, and monitor real-time savings as employees book against company policies. You can also track travelers with reporting for duty of care.

So taking a look here, these are six most popular expense reports. Spent vs Budget allows you to quickly monitor how you are spending against your budget in real time. Top Departments with Reports Pending, allows you to look at the total number of unsubmitted reports amongst your teams expense. Awaiting Approval allows you to keep an eye on reports that are pending approval by managers. Expense by Category breaks down your overall spend for top categories. Custom Field Expenses shows your spend amongst your unique fields, such as client codes or locations that were set up during the implementation process. And Top 20 Expenses shows the most expensive expenses overall.

Here we can see our top six travel reports. So Top Travelers by Department to see who your top spenders are, Bookings by Department to look at the overall travel amongst your team, Flight Spend by Airline to see which airlines are preferred or most popular among your travelers, and where potential discounts might be possible. Hotel Spend by City, to tap into frequently traveled destinations, which can also help your team negotiate corporate discounts with those hotels, Booking 14 Days in Advance or Less to uncover reasons for late bookings and closely monitor potential loss savings. And lastly, Flight Credits tracked all in one place to see what is active and expiring soon, so you can inform travelers which airlines to book to use those credits.

So now we will be diving into the Premium Insights module to take a look at the dashboard. So here on your homepage you can click into Premium Insights. On your Premium Insights dashboard homepage when you log in, you’ll see the main dashboard with metrics, charts, and reports. In the dashboard you can also view the details of the components by clicking view all.

This is the travel dashboard, you can see all the details related to the company travel here, with all the corresponding data sets and graphs.

So up at the top you can add the date range, and also select one or more departments, the expense dashboard is going to work quite similarly to this. You can navigate Premium Insights from the left side of the page, under each section we’ve prepared collections of our most popular reports for you. As mentioned, you won’t lose access to Core Insights, you’ll also have a folder with all of that reporting here as well. So you can see all reports related to bookings.

So for example, we’ll click into Collections to view our Total Bookings. Info icons have been placed to give you a description of what you’re viewing. You can click on the title of the report to drill into more details.

Down here where it says, “Browse data.” You can click to see all the raw data in Premium Insights. So for example, if you click Booking, we will show you all the additional detail on the variables within this table. Lastly, if you use the search bar up here at the top, you can use keywords to help you easily navigate all reports and tables. For example, if you search “traveler”… You’ll see reports related to traveler information.

Okay, so Jiadi is going to walk us through how to build some reports in just a second. Okay, so Jiadi is going to walk us through creating two customized reports.

First, we’ll take a look at building a travel report that can assist with duty of care when it comes to group travel or large event travel. Now more than ever, businesses require duty of care to mitigate the risk involved for business travelers. So using Premium Insights, you can create customized reports to easily track and contact your team when needed, and help plan for those large events. We’ll also take a look at building an Expense Accruals report, which can help track trends to better forecast budgets in a condensed format. Okay, Jiadi, do you want to take it over?

Jiadi:

Yeah, let me share my screen. So this is the landing page once you go into Premium Insights. So, you can create a new report by clicking the button here, but if you choose to do it this way, you can not see the data just in your list. And I prefer to do in another way, starting from “Browse data” first, and then you can have a clear picture of what kinds of tables are inside our data. So, for our first question, we are focused on the flight booking. So definitely you should check what is the data saved in Flight table first.

First, if you start to create a new report, you can take a general view about the data inside, and then figure out what kind of data you want to put in the report. And then we can use “Show Editor” button here to start to create. First by clicking the button here you can see all the field names that belong to that table, because in that report you may not need all the fields name here. One way you can unselect is by clicking this, but it may cost a lot of time. Another way is you can simply choose this one, and then choose the information you want to put inside your report. So first we want to show the Vendor ID, that’s the confirmation number, and also Length of Trip, and also Total Price. Ticketing Airline, that’s the merchant, and also Trip Type is round, or one way, or multiple. And also Local Travel Start Date, and Local Travel End Date.

Since one flight booking can include several travelers, so in this case, we need to join traveler’s information by drawing different table here, let me show you how to do this. So you can use “Join Data” here, and then choose Booking to Traveler by joining the ID here equals to the booking ID in this table. And then joining the traveler table here, by using the Traveler ID and ID here. So then you can select which fields you want to show in your final reports. Since we don’t want to see the ID, we can unselect it all, and also choose the First, Last Name, and also Email Address. And in this table, that may include canceled flight booking. So you can use the filter here, and choose Status, and then exclude it, canceled. Once you click “Visualize”, it will show you the reports you just made.

So if you want to reorder the fields name, there are two ways to do that. One is, you can just simply drag, and the other is you can use this button and put the first name. And if you don’t want to see that, you can go… And then here it goes, it’s the final. And then you can save it under the folder. So then let me show you how to create the second report.

We still start from the data here, so the second one is related to expense report. Then we can start here. And once you have a general idea of how the data is inside this table, you can choose show editor here, and then first select which data you want to show in your final report, like the Title, User data, Status, Total Spend, the first and the second Approvers Name. And because for the expense category, and the transaction date, and the posting date, that data is not saved in this table, you can use Join Data to get from the other table. For example, we can get the category information here by joining the Expense table, and also joining the Synced Transaction table here, and choose the Transaction Date and Posting Date. And also you can use the filter to exclude this discarded record. And here it goes. And you can adjust the order of the column, and save this report.

Dani:

When we save any reports, we can save them to a dashboard, which you’ll see here in just a second. The dashboard is important to remember, because anytime you want to schedule those alerts and have the reports emailed to you, you can only do that from the dashboard setting. So that’s always step one before you start the process of getting those emailed to you. Here’s what the dashboard looks like. You can add multiple different reports onto one dashboard, and you can drag around, reorder, and change the display of it, as Jiadi’s doing now. But once everything’s to your liking, you can go ahead and save that. And you should see at the icons at the top, next to the editor, there is a envelope that says “Subscriptions.” You can click on that, and click “Email It”, to have this report emailed to you. You can enter in the usernames or email addresses of those you want to receive the report, and you can choose the frequency, so either hourly, daily, and from there you can change the time you want it sent at.

There are a couple of other options here, if you want it sent regardless if there aren’t any results, and then to also always attach the results in which format you prefer. Once you click “Done”, that alert will be set up, and you’ll begin receiving those at the schedule that you set up. You can always go back into the dashboard and update those subscriptions at any time.

Thank you, Jiadi. Okay, so now we can move on to any questions that you might have if you haven’t already done so, go ahead and drop your questions into the Q&A module.

Okay, so first question, “Is there a recommendation or best practice you recommend for alerts, and how often?” Honestly, it really depends here what you’re trying to accomplish with this. I would say a lot of our clients have them set for monthly, but if it’s something that you want to check more routinely, then I would do them probably daily or weekly. This is really good idea to chat with your customer success manager though, about what you’re trying to accomplish here, and see what would be best for that situation.

Okay, someone asked, “My biggest challenge with Premium Insights is creating my own reports. Where is the best place to start when mapping out a new report?” I think it’s really important to get familiar with the data structure and how everything kind of works together, and get really familiar with the existing reports. So then how we watched Jiadi go through those different data sets and add them together, you can see what’s already included within those before moving on to create your own. Jiadi, not sure if you want to add anything on here.

Jiadi:

Yeah, so besides you get familiar with the data structure. Another suggestion is you can also check the pre-made reports and figure out the logic behind that. Maybe based on the pre-made reports, you just need to make several modifications and make the new report based on the previous one.

Dani:

Thanks, Jiadi. Okay, someone asked, “Can I make a customer report template filter and share it with others in my organization?” So if you’re wanting to create a custom report, it’s definitely great to always start with that template. This is, again, something that you can work with your CSM on. We do have services that can help build custom reports for you, and then you can always export that, and you can share it amongst your organization or you can set the alerts up so they’re receiving those reports. There’s a couple different views within Premium Insights, you have your own personal view, but then you can also save to the entire organization. So if there’s something you want others to see as well, you can save it to that organization view.

“Which users on my account will be able to access this dataset?” That’s a good question. So all admins have access to Premium Insights, they can view data for the entire company, and also managers have access to Premium Insights. The main difference here though is managers are only going to see the data for those who report directly to them, and admins will see for everyone.

Next question, “Is there a separate login area from TravelBank or do I need another password login to access it?” No, it’s your same login information. So as we saw on the demo, you can get to it from the homepage on Premium Insights, and that will just automatically open up another tab and take you to the Premium Insights portal.

Alrighty, it doesn’t look like I have any other questions. Oh, one just came in, “If I don’t see Premium Insights, then my company did not set it up?” If you do not have Premium Insights, then you should see where it says, “Core Insights.” Instead. So if you see Core Insights, that means you do not have Premium Insights. The other reason why someone might potentially not see it, is if they’re not an admin or that manager role. Standard users would not see any reporting on their dashboard.

Okay, we’re coming up on time here, so we’ll go ahead and end the Q&A. But if you do have any other questions, feel free to reach out to your customer success manager. You can also email support or the success inbox listed here. As a reminder, we will be emailing a recording to all registrants in the upcoming days, and we’ll also be sharing an easy to reference user guide which covers everything that we went over today. Thank you so much.