In the pre-covid days Travel & Expense Management was seen as the second highest operational cost to an organization after employee payroll. With the corporate travel sector rebounding back despite the rise in travel cost after the pandemic, it slated to take back that position soon. Travel and related expense management is an unavoidable task for finance teams and employees, alike. It is today a pivotal process that can make or break the motivation of employees, especially in an organization where employees spend most of their time on the road.
Employers are now making sure to do whatever it takes to make processes simpler for their employees as they now know that happier employees are more productive and efficient. Those who need to travel more often for work find it distracting to work manually on maintaining receipts and cumbersome spreadsheets. It add to the already tiring process of packing and preparing for business trips. Recent researches show that over 40 percent of employees would prefer spending an extra hour in commutation but avoid filing manual expense reports. This indicates a strong need to automate travel and expense management process, which can help business travelers focus on core tasks at hand.
Let’s checkout some of the benefits of automating the Travel and Expense using technology such as the BizTripz platform that’s build with just the corpoates in mind for streamlining and organizing their business trips and related expenses.
1. Makes it Hassle-Free and Easy for Employees
A good travel and related expense management system makes the processes simpler for both employees as well as the HR and Finance Teams. With easy-to-fill expense forms, HR / Finance teams can process their claims much more quickly. This brings about an increased level of accuracy and efficiency . There isn’t any need save paper receipts and create manual entries at the end of the trip. Every expense can be processed as per a company’s travel and expense policy to avoid any confusion. Moreover, the payroll team can view the trail of expenses for individual employees and extract the required documents to avoid any chance of error.
2. Better Enforce Travel and Expense Policy Compliance
It is critical to ensure that all types of reimbursement claims fall within the parameters of the organization’s travel and expense policy. Having a good Travel and Expense management system helps the HR professionals to clearly set policies and specify limits on costs. The employees can then be required to justify those expenses that cross beyond the permissible limit. Further, these technology tools can help organizations enforce reimbursement policies firmly. With well defined expense policies that are then communicated properly among the employees, you can discourage employees from committing expense fraud.
3. Companion Mobile App That Make It Even Easier
A good travel and expense software comes with companion mobile applications that make the capture and reporting possible on the go. The BizTripz mobile app for example lets people take photos of bills as they move allowing them to upload it and attach it as a travel related expense to the ongoing trips. It make work easier for both the claimants as well as the accounts people. It also gives the senior management and the leadership a better view and control over the spend.
4. Helps Make Payroll and Travel Programs More Efficient
Better collection process with fewer errors means the data is more accurate and useful for making the various processes more optimal, including the payroll and compensation as well as the business travel program of the organization. The data can be analyzed and converted into detailed reports which can then be used by the senior management and different departments to get a more complete view of the expense pattern of employees. Accordingly, steps can be taken to optimize policies and processes to further save time and money.
Other major benefits include:
- Making the process Paperless — eliminating paper from the process can do good at different levels, from making a difference by going green to saving on the long term
- Eliminates human bias and errors — automating removes possibility of errors due to typos and other human mistakes including bias
- Increase policy compliance through tools — technology can help reduce hassles and increase the adoption rate and with it the travel and expense policy compliance
- Get instant reports on what’s happening — various questions on how the money is spent and where it’s going can be answered within minutes rather than weeks or months
- Helpful in case of remote and distributed teams — the HR and Finance departments can better coordinate the jobs with a good software, especially in the case of organizations which now offer remote working or have distributed teams
- Decrease the time taken for reimbursements — automation helps to significantly decrease reimbursement times, for everyone involved by eliminating the need for manual entries and reducing the need for additional human intervention in the process
- Helps reduce waste, fraud and abuse — these stuff unfortunately happen, even in the best places. However automation can bring a huge difference to it by providing a good level or transparency and accountability.
No one understands the challenges an organization faces with with its current travel and expense program better than its finance people and senior management. Switching to a travel and expense management software like BizTripz is worth it in every way — short and long term!
To know more about the exciting capabilities of our travel and expense management system, BizTripz, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
