Are you truly in control of your T&E spending?
There may be more opportunities than you realize to optimize controls and align spending with your company goals.
Watch our conversation with CFO Leadership Council and learn:
- Trends and insights from employee spending behavior last year
- Strategies to align spending with company goals and culture
- Actionable tips to enhance T&E policies for stronger spend controls
Webinar Transcript:
Kate Hart: Welcome everybody. I’m really excited to talk to you all today about T&E and really what we’ve been seeing in 2024 as people start to plan for 2025. So here at TravelBank, every single year we analyze the state of business travel. We’re looking at the data to tell us a few things. So one, we’re looking and analyzing hundreds of thousands of sample travel bookings and expense reports submitted on our platform. TravelBank is an all-in-one travel and expense platform. So we have a ton of data in there from our clients. So by comparing these expenses to previous years, we’re able to see the evolution of how employees are traveling, how you all are doing business, and then we can go to work with what this data means and how it can impact you.
2024 is a really interesting year of data for us. So we found that it was the year of the autonomous business traveler employees have now started supplying their own needs without the hassles of going to official procurement. That’s been pretty helpful in a couple of different ways. One, it’s saving time in some ways and it’s saving money, but what we really need to dig into this data for and what I recommend you all do as well, is look into that data to see where it’s actually saving the time and the money or are we wasting it. So essentially after this webinar today, I want you all to ask yourselves, have we gone too far into letting people just do whatever they want that we’re starting to waste money or waste time, or is what your company’s doing through your data and your analytics helping all of this?
So that’s the biggest thing we’re going to start thinking about. Going into 2025, we really took a very close look at what merchants have been expensed. So general merchandise retailers like Amazon are now expensed far more than meals, hotel stays and flights. I’ve been in travel and expense as Kim Marie said for almost a decade now. This is not something that we’re typically seeing and has really shifted. As you can see in 2023, we had Delta Airlines above Amazon, and now in 2024, Amazon has jumped up there. That’s indicating to us that travel spend is going down a little bit and people are starting to maybe do business calls, like virtual webinars like we’re doing today, doing Zoom calls and the travel flight travel is just not as popular as it used to be. So what do we want to do with that data?
Because chances are you and your HR team aren’t as focused on the stores like Amazon as you have been in the past on meal policies, hotel stays, airfare policies, ground transportation policies, everything that typically goes into travel and expense. So we really want to start shifting what our policies are looking like and where our focus is living. So what you all will want to do is pull this data, we’ll look into what analytics you actually want to pull as we get a little further into the presentation, but this will just give you a good snapshot of what type of merchants we want to keep keeping an eye out for. Chances are, depending on your business, you may have seen Delta American and United Southwest all a little bit higher on your list, and they may have dropped in 20 23, 20 24, and now we’re seeing Amazon and different retailers like that popping up to the top.
Speaking of these retailers, I mean, we all use Amazon. Holidays are coming up. I have ordered all my Christmas gifts on Amazon, my whole desk setup right now, I got on Amazon. So we are all using it in our personal and our business life in addition to Amazon. It was expensed 2x more than any other retailer, but we’re also seeing Walmart, Costco, Target and Best Buy in the top 10. So similar to me having my desk set up from Amazon, employees are self supplying from consumer sites and stores. So what we need to focus on is your organization wasting money by having employees source piecemeal supplies without oversight. A really good example of this, I worked with one of my clients right when the pandemic hit. So we’re looking at 2020 here. Everyone started working from home. Their policy for that was each month employees were able to expense a certain amount for what they need to work at home within that month.
So they were getting $150 a month. As we started to look at their data more and more and look at the receipts, it was a lot of Amazon, a lot of Best Buy, Target, Walmart… all those big merchandise that we would expect to see. But once we looked into the data, more people were buying their remotes again, they’re buying one, and then six months later needed another just because there wasn’t that oversight of what people were buying and where they were buying it. So people weren’t getting the stuff that was going to last, and that’s what we really want to start looking at. So with this client, we made a shift where they changed their policy for people to have a certain amount that they could spend within the year. So instead of 150 a month, it shifted to an annual basis, and then they also, they regulated what brands people could get. So people weren’t buying the cheap stuff that then needed to be replaced. So while it seemed like there was a lot of more upfront spending just to get some quality items for their at-home setup, it actually ended up saving money in the long run. So this is why TravelBank looks at the data over the course of the year and why we want to get that data out to you and suggest that you do the same. So you can see if maybe you want to switch kind of how your policy’s looking.
So while we think about that, a poll will pop up, but does your company have a clear policy for general retailers like Amazon? So this is kind of what we are typically seeing. It seems like a lot of people don’t right now. A couple do, which is awesome. My assumption would probably be that this might be a newer policy for you and everything. Travel and expense really have shifted. 2020 right before the pandemic flights were very high, hotels were very high, and now it’s just switching. So we have a couple of years of data under our belt. Now, 2020 was definitely a transition year for us. 2021 was still kind of a transition for travel and expense, but 2022 we started to get a better idea of what we’re doing. 2023 and now 24, we have really strong data that we’re going to want to use moving forward.
I can’t say I’m surprised, but a lot of people don’t have a policy for this. So we’ll look into what type of data we would suggest that you look at to find out your own policy. So for those that maybe you don’t have a policy for the retailers, but do you have oversight on purchases from the retailers? So the poll will pop up here, but what I mean by that is are you able to see what people are actually buying from Amazon or are you just seeing a hundred dollars was spent at Amazon?
All right, we’re seeing a lot more yeses here. So we tend to see the oversight when we start thinking about if you’re using an expense platform, a lot of different travel and expense platforms out there. But once to get that oversight, an expense platform will really help just by mandating categories, being selected, capturing the merchants, and then also receipts needing to be submitted in a certain amount of time. So getting that type of oversight for those that don’t feel like they have the oversight right now, this is something that I would recommend putting into your practice. So it’s different for every company. I have some clients that have one central person that does all the ordering through Amazon, so they need to submit an expense or submit a form to them saying, this is what I need. They order it. That works really well for smaller companies. For larger companies, it’s where they’re using their expense platform, especially to use categories just to be able to see exactly what they submitted for. So the category could be work from home expenses, different things like that. So there’s a few ways that we can get the oversight into exactly what people are spending.
So retailers are the top right now. Definitely something we want to focus on if I haven’t stressed that enough here. But let’s shift gears a little bit as we start to think about travel itself. Ground transportation has seen a very, very large shift. So in 2019, prior to the pandemic, personal vehicles were used in only about 25% of trips, and that’s to be expected. People were flying a lot more trains, much more common, but there was a lot of travel going on. So we transparently did have a lot of data, just because we had more trips. But since the pandemic, the share of personal vehicles has grown to 63%, that is a massive shift that we’re seeing.
So Uber, Lyft, car rentals, all of those are starting to go down and the personal cars are starting to go up. So since most business travelers now use their own cars and expense mileage, there’s some things that we want to think about. It can get pricey sometimes it seems like it might be a little bit cheaper. When the pandemic started, it felt safer too, which absolutely, you were in a car by yourself, you were in your own personal car, you didn’t have to interact with Uber or Lyft taxis or people at the rental car front desk. You just got in your own car. But now that people are still using their own cars, we need to start thinking about the expense of mileage. Most companies go off the IRS rate, so 67 cents per mile, but then we need to start thinking about parking too and tolls. It all adds up very, very quickly As we break down the ground. Transportation, I would recommend that you break this down more than just ground. So we want to start seeing the mileage, parking and all the tolls. So completely breaking that up so you can get a better sense of exactly what’s being spent. That’s going to help just create your policy and make it even more in depth and make sure you’re seeing exactly where you can save money.
Because the biggest question we want to ask as we look into that data is do employee cars cost more? There are times that planes and trains are going to be cheaper, but in our minds sometimes it’s ingrained that the car’s just cheaper, it’s easier. We need to start getting that hard data to prove that the cars are cheaper or if the planes and the trains are cheaper. So how are we going to do that? It’s going to be worth analyzing and creating guidelines, especially when we start thinking about daily parking rates. They can be $30. The average cost of parking in Manhattan is $69 per day. You have back-to-back days of meetings that’s going to add up super quickly. Manhattan’s not the only city that gets that expensive. So if you’re traveling to Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, that will add up very quickly. Northeast has a lot of different tolls too, pretty expensive once we start going through those.
So what we want to start thinking about is where are you traveling to? How we can do that is let’s first look at your travel data. Let’s see where people are traveling from. If you are an organization that has quite a few different offices that people are traveling between, it’s going to make this a little bit easier because you can really dive deep into those different routes. So like we see on the screen, for example, if you have an office in Portland, Oregon and an office in Seattle, that’s going to be a little bit less than a three hour drive, give or take with traffic. So that’s going to be about $234 a mileage alone. Or you can fly round trip on Alaska Air for as low as $137 round trip. The benefits of a flight definitely outweigh the driving because people can also work when they’re on the plane if they need to.
It’s going to be a pretty quick flight. But if you’re traveling between big hubs… say you’re going from Portland to Seattle, Boston to New York, those short ones, there’s going to be hourly flights. So if your meeting runs long or if the flight gets canceled, you’ll still be able to get there pretty easily. If your office or a client location is, maybe it’s a three hour drive, but the flights are not as often. That’s something that you do want to take into consideration when we’re creating guidelines because if a flight gets canceled, people are traveling for business, they need to make it to their meeting, it’s going to be very important for them to get there. So make sure that you’re taking all this into consideration. So my recommendation here would be to look at the routes that people are traveling very frequently.
If it’s around a three hour drive, start doing the math to make the guidelines of should people be flying? Is there a train available? I mean, let’s be honest, the Amtrak can get a little expensive too. So sometimes flights are cheaper or should they be flying from here? If you’re using a travel company. So for example, here in TravelBank, we can put policies and caps in there for flights. So we could make it so that people can’t spend more than $400 on a flight. Then if they go to book and maybe the flight’s not $137 in this example, it’s $400. It’s going to put them out of policy that’s going to make them think twice and say, Hey, should I be driving this? So we need to start with the data. We need to start with your routes, and then we need to start putting the policies into place. But your first step will be to track your routing.
So today, very curious, do you help your employees decide between driving, flying, taking a train or taking a lift? All right, so we’re seeing it a little bit larger. Majority of people are not right now. We do have some that are helping, which is awesome. And one thing to think about with this too is policies do not need to be one size fits all, and they typically aren’t. We typically don’t recommend them to be. The policies that you build out can differ by department, by level, by region. So maybe you have a region where the airports are not very popular ones, they’re not hubs. That region might be your driving region, and then you have the regions that have, they’re going on the short Boston to New York, for example. That policy is probably going to look a little bit different for them. So just keeping that in mind that policies are not one size fits all.
All right, so we talked about the big merchandise companies. We’ve talked about the ground and the flight, transportation, and hotels. But let’s shift gears a little bit again and start talking about meals because this is one that has really, really shifted in 2024 this year. UberEats surged to the second most popular merchant for business meals in 2024. We’re still behind Starbucks in 2024. Not a huge surprise, but now we’ve jumped ahead of McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A with UberEats. This is where there’s a really, really good opportunity to look at your policy. Food delivery apps and their fees are more common than in restaurant business meals, but they’re also going to be a little bit more expensive too, sometimes a lot more expensive. So we want to start thinking about this, and like I said, not all policies need to be one size fits all. So if we start thinking about it on a regional basis too, the people that are traveling to those heavy cities, we might not want to have them doing UberEats if they can just walk down the street and grab dinner or lunch for the people that are a little going to places that it’s not as easy. UberEats might be the way to go versus them having to rent a car or hop in an Uber to go get their food. So we need to start thinking about it on a few different levels there.
But this statistic was kind of crazy to me. So I mean, I’ve always seen that the app fees are more expensive, but they inflate costs dramatically. So food delivery apps can make your order 92% more expensive than the pickup price, which is absolutely crazy. So if you can just walk down the street and grab it and you can save that much more money, we should definitely be doing it. How can we control this? Similar to everything else we’ve talked about, we need to look at your data first. How often are people doing UberEats in 2023? How much were people spending on UberEats, DoorDash, all the delivery fee apps versus 2024? And then what do we want it to look like in 2025? So what I would recommend here is really utilizing categories within your expense platform. So for example, somebody submits a receipt for UberEats.
The UberEats receipt. Total is $60, 40 of it was for the actual food, and then 20 of it was for fees. And then any of these surcharge costs, you can set it up in most expense platforms to break that up. So it would say $40 food, $20 delivery fees, whatever you want to call that category. So I would recommend doing, and then as you go into Q1, Q2 of 2025, see how much you’re paying in the fees. You can take it a step further as we discussed, like doing it regionally. So are the fees a lot higher for your people that are traveling to New York, Boston, Chicago, where they could just walk down the street so we can get a lot of data and make this extremely powerful to make sure that people are not overspending just to go get the meal. So we have a lot of different options, but I think that this was one of the biggest statistics that surprised me with 2024 that UberEats has jumped up so high despite the fees that they’re charging. We don’t all realize that sometimes convenience, especially when you’re traveling for business, is extremely important and we just want to make it easy on ourselves. You’re tired after a busy day of meetings, you just want to get food delivered. But as a company and as leaders at your company, there’s a really good opportunity to save some money here. So looking at that data is going to be important.
So for you all today, do you have a delivery app policy right now? This is another one that I actually haven’t seen too often, and your answers are definitely supporting that. Everyone’s saying no, but when we start to think about it, it’s a policy that really should be put in place. So like I said, we all love the convenience of it, but we do want to make sure that you are not paying 20, $30 like we saw 92% more in inflated fees just by using it. When I go to order food, if I compare the price to the restaurant directly on their website versus UberEats or DoorDash, it’s always extremely different. So this is one policy I recommend that you start putting into place for 2025.
All right, so we looked at a bunch of data. All the analysis that TravelBank has done in 2024 in previous years is made possible by having good insights into spend. So while TravelBank, we have a lot of information from our clients that use us for travel and expense. This is something that you have access to all travel and expense companies you can get information through. If you’re not using a travel and expense company today, this is still useful for you for sure. You can get info through your ERP, your accounting team should be able to see the receipts, what’s been spent. If you’re using a corporate card program, you’ll be able to get some information out of there and be able to see what merchants were spent, and who’s used their card the most. So you can dissect the data, but if you are using a travel and expense company today, you can just usually get the data a little bit quicker.
So these slides that we’re going to go through right now, they are all the screenshots from TravelBank directly, but like I said, you’ll have it through your travel and expense company as well. First one we want to look at is the travel bookings dashboard. So why is this important? You can track gross bookings costs, total booking numbers, and how spend compares to budget. So when we start thinking about the budget, that’s when we start thinking about policies. So say you build in a travel policy that says people can spend up to $400 on a flight and they book a $300 flight. So we’re going to be looking at that as the budget, so people are coming in under them, what they could spend. The policies are going to be very helpful and powerful and these are going to shift. So I always recommend people look at their policies minimum once a year if the policy is new to you.
So maybe you’re just starting out with travel, start looking at your policy on a quarterly basis because it will keep changing as you get more data. If you’ve had a policy for quite a few years, once a year is typically good just to make any changes based on what we’re seeing in the industry that year. You can monitor and improve how far advanced employees book travel. You can do this with a policy. So business travel sometimes has to be booked last minute. We all know that. But if people are traveling for a conference, they know ahead of time, you all probably knew you were signing up for this webinar ahead of time. Very similar to the conferences. So making sure that they’re booking further out. It’s easy to just visualize how bookings are spread across departments and by flights. First hotel versus rental car, this is where we’ll really be able to see where the money’s been spent, especially across departments.
Sales teams typically will have a little bit higher spend when it comes to travel, if they’re traveling for different perspective meetings, client facing teams as they’re meeting with different clients. So just making sure that they are going to these meetings and it’s bringing in the ROI for you all. So this quick visualization is going to help you. And then also if you’re using incentives, you can see how much employees are saving by making smart choices. This is incentives aren’t something that are built into every single platform. There are a few out there that do have this. So what those look like, for example, at TravelBank, we have it with hotels. If your policy says, for example, you can book a $200 a night hotel, somebody books a hundred dollars a night hotel, they’re saving a hundred dollars in there based on budget, you can incentivize them by giving them a gift card for a percentage of that savings.
So if they are saving, if you want to give them 30% of the savings, they would get a $30 gift card to be able for DoorDash, for UberEats as we’re talking about those to use for themselves. So the incentives can help. If this is something that you think would work really well for your company, then I would definitely recommend looking for a travel management company that has these incentives already built in because it just takes the legwork away from you. It doesn’t work for every company, not every company has it turned on, but definitely can be helpful. So something to think about.
Similar to the travel bookings dashboard, we have our expense reports dashboard, similar look, but we’re looking at completely different data here. So we can track the total and monthly trends of expense report volume. This is going to be important to understand your peaks and then your lows. So I’ve gotten a lot of out of office emails so far this month. A lot of people are out already. We are seeing a lot less expense reports coming in this month because of that. Same thing with the summertime, just with vacations we see a lot less travel in those months too, so we will start to see an uptick, especially in Q1 as people are gearing up for the new year of expense reports. So this will help just to understand when people are spending the most.
You also want to look at your data to understand the ratio of created versus approved reports. With whatever expense platform you’re using, you most likely have an approval process in place there. So what that can look like is somebody submits an expense report, it goes to their manager for approver, it goes to you all on the finance team as an approver, and then it’s finally approved. So approved for them to be reimbursed or approved just to have everything submitted and they put the categories incorrectly. They were within policy, all of that. So we want to see what’s been approved and then just what’s been created and what’s going to be going through the approval. Approval flow. It’s giving us a good idea of what’s to come. We also want to visualize how expenses are spread across departments and by category. At the first half of this presentation, we were really looking at those merchants and categories, and I recommend you do the same.
We want to see your trends. You want to start looking at what your top categories are. Your top categories are probably where you want to have your policies in place. So if those UberEats delivery companies are at your top of the categories, start getting that policy into place. If your top five, 10 categories don’t have a strict policy, that’s going to be your biggest room for improvement right there. Going into the new year, you just want to see top expenses at a glance. Similar to wanting to see the categories, we just want to see where the large chunk of your money’s going and make sure that it’s being spent wisely.
The flight bookings report. So let’s flip back to travel a little bit here. This is what I love about travel and expense. It all goes hand in hand, but there can be two very different conversations and a lot of room for improvement for different companies. So the flight bookings report, this is going to be the one that will really help guide you into should people be flying, should they be driving, should they be going on a train? So you can track traveler information and trip details. Those trip details are going to include how far in advance the flights are, how far in advance they’re booked, excuse me, the length of each trip, if there’s been any change fees and how flight prices to budgets. It’s also going to show you the different routing. So that’s where you can get the information of anyone going from New York to Boston, what should they be doing?
You can look very closely at that data. This is going to help form your travel policy if you don’t have one. And like I said, if you do have one, this is going to help revamp it. Travel policies, you don’t want to set one and then keep it forever. The industry changes every single year, especially in the past four to five years with pre-pandemic into the pandemic. There have been more changes in these last couple years than I’ve seen in my whole career in travel and expense. So just being able to stay on top of those different trends is going to be important and this type of report is going to be important for you. So I definitely recommend reaching out to, if you don’t know where to find this report, reach out to your travel management company. If you are not using a travel platform today, you can still get this information just by going into the receipts and your ERP, all the information of where you’re tracking either reimbursements or corporate card expenses.
You’ll be able to break it down by merchant and get a pretty good insight into the spend. It would be a little bit harder just to get how far in advance flights are booked, length of each trip. That would take a little bit more manual work, but it’s the spend that we really want to take a look at Travel and expense since they go hand in hand. This seems like something very small, but having receipts directly linked is actually a really, really big and helpful thing to have access to. Since flights, especially on the business side, can change really often more often than you probably like. We want to make sure that those receipts are directly linked and that you have access to them very quickly. So maybe when your sales reps deleted the receipt, they get a ton of different emails that one just didn’t make the cut to save in their inbox, they delete it, you’ll be able to have the link to that receipt. So like I said, this seems like a small thing that might not seem that important, but it’s something that a lot of people really love that they just have access to. So as you think about combining travel and expense platforms in one, this will be really helpful.
The credit card reconciliation report. So whether you’re using an expense report or you have a corporate card feed, or excuse me, a corporate card account through whatever bank or credit card company you’re using, you’ll have access to this. So through the credit card reconciliation report, you can see transaction costs and dates across all users and merchants before expense reports are created or even submitted. I find this report to be extremely helpful, especially in times like December, November and December when people are out. Some people may already be out for the rest of the year and maybe they didn’t submit the expense report or their card has some recurring charges that are going to hit while they’re out in your position. On the finance side, you’re going to be able to go into your credit card reconciliation report and be able to see what expenses have been completed.
If you’re using an expense platform, you’ll be able to see what ones have not been submitted in an expense report. So what’s still out there missing, it’s going to just be able to help you close your books. In the event that you don’t have the information from the card holder themselves, you’ll still be able to see the merchant, the price, the date, all of that information to be able to account for it. And then once people submit their expense reports is when you’ll be able to start gathering the categories. On the flip side, this gives you some leverage into who has not submitted an expense report. Depending on your policy of when people need to submit their expenses by this will be able to help you go through, see what’s been charged in the last 30 days, what’s come through in an expense report, what hasn’t, and then you can start talking to those people saying, Hey, we have to get these categories in because without this type of data and this analytics, you’re not going to be able to form your policies as we go into the new year. You’re not going to have that full picture of your data. And that’s what we really want to figure out here is what that data looks like. So a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about definitely comes from the top down, but it takes everybody in your organization to be able to get this information. So being able to know what’s still missing out there is going to be important.
So for those of you that either are using the credit card, just using a credit card corporate card, if you’re using an expense report, how long does it take to get a custom report today? So let another poll there just to see how quickly you can actually get the information that you need to be able to dissect it. So if somebody calls you up and says, Hey, I need to know what we spent in the last quarter. I have a meeting in an hour, is that something you’re going to be able to get pretty quickly? So curious if it’s going to be less than an hour, a few hours of business day or if we’re going to be looking at something a little bit longer than that.
Wow, these are actually some really great answers. So a lot of people can get there in less than an hour, which is amazing. Some people are getting in a few hours one business day. So this definitely helped you all to just be able to see exactly what’s going on with your spend without spending too much time. TravelBank did a report. We talked to a lot of different CFOs and 71% of CFOs said that travel and expense takes up just way too much time. And this is one of the sections where we’re seeing a lot of time being taken up by finding those reports. So by you all cutting that time down, it’s giving you more time to actually dissect it. So those are some really awesome answers there.
We talked a lot about reporting. So more efficient reporting is kind of the theme of this. So without having efficient, thorough reporting, we would not be able to bring you the state of business travel for 2024, and now you all need to turn around and find that state of business travel for your own company for 2024 and use it to go into 2025. So a lack of visibility into T&E spend is a major pain point that we hear from clients, even friends, family that are in finance. That’s something that they struggle with too. So it’s really powerful to have that data. And from that last poll right there, a lot of you have that data so you really dive into it and use it because your better visibility leads to smarter decisions, better budgets and efficient optimization of spend. And that’s what we want to get to.
We want to make sure that people are spending where they should and how they should. So use what you have a user-friendly interface trimmed 15% of the time spent approving requests, submitting expenses and receipts and creating reports that 15% of time that you’re saving is going to be massive. So we got this information through the Forrester consulting report with TravelBank, which you all will get this slide deck. So we have the link to it right there if you want to read exactly how that 15% can help, where that’s being trimmed from and then how you can use it in your own organization.
So all this information that we’ve talked about today is part of the 2024 state of business TE report. This is something you’ll get access to. This is where we dissected all of our information. We’ve talked to CFOs, we’ve talked to finance leaders about what’s important to them, such as how they’re spending meals, air lodging, retailers like Amazon, all of that. So you’ll have all of this information that then you can turn around and be able to dig directly into your own business. So I know we had some questions come through both from the registration and I’ve seen a couple pop in now too. So definitely want to answer all of those and dive into anything a little bit deeper that you all might have.
Kim Marie: Thank you so much for that, Kate. So I’m looking through some of the questions we have had and one that comes up is if you could talk a little bit more about the integration of the travel process with financial systems and dive a little deeper into some of those best practices for optimizing TE spend. So if you could give someone a couple of best practices to walk away with today as it relates, what would the top two be?
Kate: Yeah, I love that question. So T&E definitely goes hand in hand. So if that’s something that maybe you focused on just travel, you have your travel platform, you don’t necessarily have the expense platform. So my biggest recommendation is by bringing the two together, having those policies compliment each other. So what I mean by that is if you’re travel policy today is I keep using the number 400 for flights. If your travel policy today is saying $400 capped for flights, using that policy on the expense side too can compliment it by saying people can spend on their travel budget a month, spend a thousand dollars. So you can really have the two compliment each other. What that’s going to do is it’s going to make sure people aren’t spending too much on one trip, but then since we’re using the expense side to see how much they’re spending monthly, it’s making sure that they’re not taking too many trips. So how can you complement each other? And it’s usually through the policies there. So I recommend looking at them from both sides of it.
And then just the biggest thing too, by having the two together, my biggest recommendation is going to be looking at the data together. So like I said, the receipts seem like a small thing, but it’s actually a very, very big thing. So what can you get from travel and what can you get from to make the case for your policies and use that Reporting in one travel expenses are typically going to be very high up on your list. So making sure that we’re starting there and if, like I said, if you’re just using travel platform right now and you’re not using expense platform, we’re missing a lot of that extra information because the travel itself is going to get you flight, hotels, cars, but the expense is going to get us all the rest of it. So using that data to get the full picture is going to be your biggest thing
Kim Marie: Expense. And you mentioned that earlier, I think that mileage reimbursements are becoming more and more common. What are some other reasons you think that may have increased?
Kate: I think one of the biggest things is personal preference, to be honest. I mean a lot of it, since it did shift with the pandemic just from talking to clients, a lot of it did come down to just they felt safer in their own cars. I think part of it too is what people might see, I mean at the end of the day, the mileage is for wear and tear in your car too. So we don’t want to say that people are using it to kind of get that benefit. So that’s something that you might want to start thinking about too. Are people maybe using their car instead of getting a rental car because it’s giving them a benefit for the wear and tear on their car? And should we start thinking about maybe they should rent a car? If you feel like people are abusing that in a sense and not using their own car with the company top of mind, we just want to make sure that they are using it properly. So you all know your travelers and your employees better than I ever will of course. So just knowing if they’re using it properly is going to be a big thing.
Kim Marie: And kind of related to best practices, how frequently should we be analyzing the T&E data?
Kate: Yeah, quarterly it’s going to be really important because like I said, we’re going to have highs and lows. If you have a hotel negotiated rate with a business travel rate, your rates are going to, you’re going to have four seasons with those, you’re going to have two high seasons and two low seasons. That’s how we want to start thinking about all of your travel that’s going to turn into your expense. You’re going to have your highs and your lows. So we want to look at it on a quarterly basis. Once we get through Q1 of 2025, compare it to Q1 of 2024. We’re always going to want to look at quarter over quarter just knowing that we have those highs and lows. It’s also going to help you plan for the rest of your year. So if you started to come out of the gates a little hotter than you expected with spending in Q1, we might want to pull it back in Q2 and Q3 so you’re not getting to this point of Q4 and being like, oh my gosh, what happened? So I would definitely say quarterly, start looking at your policies, start looking at your spend and all of your data.
Kim Marie: Okay. And then based on that, how often would you say we should update the TE policies?
Kate: Most people. And what makes sense for most is doing it once a year and doing it around this time of year. And that’s typically, or at the end of your fiscal year. I know some people might go off the government year, some people might start in July. So at the end of your fiscal year is going to be a really good time to do it that way you can see exactly what you spent. You are typically going to have budgeting done for the year. So just make sure that your policies fit in with the budget. If you are new to having a policy though, so if you’ve only had a policy for one to two years, I would actually recommend doing it probably twice a year. And the reason for that is you just simply didn’t have the data prior. So you put policies into place that made sense that somebody coached you on and said, this is what we typically see. But just like a policy isn’t one size fits all for the whole company, it’s not a one size fits all for everybody. What works well for TravelBank might not work well for your company when it comes to an internal policy. So if you’ve only had a policy for one to two years, start looking at it probably twice a year and seeing what needs to be shifted.
Kim Marie: And then we did have a question come back in, back to an employee driving their own car or even a rental car. What would you say is a normal policy around the employee’s insurance standing as the first line of coverage then if the claim exceeds the employee’s policy?
Kate: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Something that gets talked about in the industry a lot. So my biggest recommendation is if your company’s doing a lot of rentals, then I would actually, you can get negotiated rates with the different vendors. So Enterprise, National, Avis, Hertz, all of them, and you can build in insurance there. So that’s just kind of a good catchall. It’s safe for everybody to use because you don’t want to be asking everybody when they rent a car, Hey, what’s your personal insurance policy? Will it work with the rental car? You don’t want to assume that. So my biggest recommendation, go to your local rep, the car rental rep gets a negotiated rate. Their thresholds are actually, they’re not super high. If you’re spending maybe five, $10,000 a year in rental cars, you can get a good rate. But the biggest benefit of those rates is having the insurance added in, being able to do direct bills if you want to with them having that locked in price.
So that’s where I would start. And then if that’s not something that fits well for your company to get that negotiated rate, a lot of times, I mean, yeah, the personal insurance actually covers more, but because it’s for business, you also need to start to take that into consideration. You don’t want people to use their personal insurance, so you would probably want to start to talk to any legal person in your company and understand exactly what gets covered by the company. We can’t fully speak to that of what would be covered, but I would go the route of getting a negotiated rate with the vendor if you can.
Kim Marie: And speaking about how often to analyze the data and things like that, do you have a recommended T&E analytic app?
Kate: I don’t actually, because all your travel management companies are going to have their own data and their own information. So I would ask them, your vendors, what they have access to, and then go off of what they, because I mean what I’m going to recommend for clients on TravelBank is probably going to be different than one of our competitors will, and it’s just simply how we get the data. So utilize the vendors that you
Kim Marie: Yeah, yeah, that’s the advice right there. And then aside from policy, are there any other ways people can optimize their T&E spend?
Kate: Yes, I love this question. There’s a lot, especially on the travel side. So you heard from my bio, I started my career on Hilton business travel sales. You can get negotiated rates with hotels. So if you’re traveling to a certain area, very frequently find the hotel that you love to reach out to, their business travel sales team or anyone on their sales team and get a negotiated rate. So there’s really good savings that you can get there. Also, airlines have corporate loyalty programs, very similar to when you sign up for AA loyalty programs, American Airlines for yourself, the company’s going to start getting kickbacks too. It costs nothing to sign up for it. So every airline’s a little bit different, but some of them you can get upgrades, you get points that you can use towards upgrades, you can get name change waivers.
So if maybe Kim Marie, you’re not traveling anymore and I’m at your company, I might be able to use the credit that you have. So there’s a lot of really, really good soft dollar savings we like to say in that aspect. But then like I said, with the hotels and the car rental negotiated rates, that’s going to be some hard dollar savings where you can get some really good negotiated rates there and it’s not something that everyone knows about. So definitely not. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite perks, especially in travel. I mean when I travel for business too, there’s definitely just a lot of perks that I’ll get from my company being signed up for those programs.
Kim Marie: I think the hardest part is just realizing what those perks are and then how to communicate them to the team to make sure that they’re taking advantage of it.
Kate: And that’s where it’s helpful to partner with a travel management company because you can load in your company American Airlines numbers, so it’s just automatically applied to all of their bookings. You can put in those hotel rate codes, the car rental rate codes, so everyone’s getting it kind of on the backend. They don’t necessarily even realize that it’s happening, but that way it’s more of a set it and forget it type of thing. The end of the year when you’re looking at your data, you can go into your Delta Sky business program, see how many points you’ve accumulated just from having that number in there. So definitely perks to working with a travel management company for those other things.
Kim Marie: Makes sense. Well, I think that was all the time and all the questions we had for today. So I just want to give a very special nod to you, Kate, and of course the entire TravelBank team. Thank you for the insights you provided today and we really encourage you to keep the conversation going by connecting Kate after the event. You can also look for our post-event email, which will include a link to this full recording, the slide deck, and more information on TravelBank. And this does conclude today’s program. So thank you so much, Kate.