How HR Tech Can Simplify Travel Expense Management
The Global Business Travel Association had predicted a 3.8 percent increase in costs for 2017, so with the perceived rise in cost of business travel, should companies now focus on introducing more effective methods to reduce the challenges that come with travel expense management?
Business travel management already involves several criterion and challenges. Submission of travel claims, approvals, reimbursements all involve much coordination and precise verification too. The bigger the business, the murkier internal processes can start becoming.
Notwithstanding, with new-age Human Resource Technology, businesses and employees can now experience a range of gains with travel expense management tools. Some of them could be:
- Capture of travel receipts digitally,
- Approval of plans and claims from a portable device of choice,
- Logging of expenses much more easily, at preferred times,
- Quicker reimbursements, and/or
- Quicker expense approvals.
7 key reasons why your businesses should invest in a travel expense management tool
1. Streamlining
The manual completion of expense reports can be both time-consuming and daunting. Don’t you agree? An expense management tool can help streamline the entire process besides making it a lot faster.
2. Thorough data capture
A software that easily helps record, compare and assess business travel expenses can also help companies and their Human Resource teams to better understand expense breakdowns while also working towards better travel budgeting. How so? Well, because the data that is recorded by your expense management tool will most likely allow you to extract different kinds of reports and statistics and more advanced ones will also extract the insights and analysis needed to make more informed decisions.
3. Minimises fraud
A tool will make it easier to spot and track false travel reports or elevated claims faster. This can further help prevent fraud while also contributing towards a company’s cost-cutting initiatives.
4. Increased convenience and productivity
Hitting two birds with one stone is always a good thing. Since an expense management system makes it quicker for business travellers to submit their claims and easier for HR/Finance/Admin teams to process those claims, both parties will see an increased level of convenience and efficiency, with minimal manual errors Every business would want their employees to focus on achieving core company goals and increased time on internal processes can unnecessarily affect productivity.
5. Integration
Some expense management tools might also allow business travellers or business travel planners to hook directly into the booking systems of travel providers, in this case, businesses can also work towards minimising or withdrawing the need for the employee to actually make a claim, given that the travel data will already be captured automatically. Could be quite the boon for some senior-level executives and their assistants too.
6. Mobile optimisation
There are a range of expense management tools today and some of them could even offer mobile optimisation features whereby employees can directly take a picture of a receipt and upload it into the system. Regular business travellers who already perform a large part of their tasks on portable devices would find this convenient.
7. Modernisation
In a digital world, it is not important to just go with the flow but also to grow with the flow. Modernisation of processes like business travel expense claims through cloud-based travel expense management solutions can help businesses be part of the growing digital modernisation trend.
So, should you wait before investing in your choice of travel expense management solution?
This is the tech-age. And with the burgeoning quantities of tools and software, businesses can extract the very best benefits for every single internal and external process. In spite of all the advancements in video conferencing technology, there is a strong business case for face-to-face interaction and business travel may never drop down to a nil. It does make greater sense for companies with a large employee strength who travel regularly to use the best of expense management tools to automate, monitor and manage T&E claims in a much more easy and effective way.
Source: HR Technologist
Find out how FCM Travel Expense Management technology offers flexible finance solutions ensuring payment and expense reconciliation is fast, transparent and integrated here.