Integrating Travel & Expense
Travel and expense (T&E, for short) is often the most significant budget item besides labor. According to statistics, business travelers in the US spend around $949 per trip on airline fees, accommodations, and other expenses. This adds up to about $111.7 billion in domestic travel expenses in a year.
However, for many companies, the policies and processes governing travel and expense management are time-consuming, manual efforts consisting of spreadsheet templates, mountains of receipts, and lengthy email exchanges about approvals and reconciliations.
If you’ve been struggling with incomplete expense reimbursement requests, requests with travel items out of your T&E policies, or the lack of consolidated reporting on your company’s travel spending, this blog is for you.
We tackle the following topics below to help you improve your travel and expense management — and enjoy smooth, painless expenditure processing:
Travel and expense management and its importance to your company
Top travel expense management challenges
Solving travel and expense management challenges
What Is Travel And Expense Management?
Travel and expense management refers to the process of documenting and processing business travel expenses for financial analysis and tax deduction purposes. The goal is to keep track of employee spending, make travel more convenient for employees, and help finance departments write off eligible items for compliance.
The Importance of T&E Management
Managing your company’s travel and expenses is critical in preventing non-compliant trips, capturing and controlling costs, and overseeing expense patterns. In the long term, this will help you accurately track your expenditures for tax write-offs and simultaneously give you better visibility of your business’ finances.
An improved T&E process also benefits your business travelers. A straightforward, streamlined process for recording expenses and requesting reimbursements encourages employees to utilize your system. Of course, it also gives them peace of mind knowing they will be paid back in time.
Top Travel Expense Management Challenges
The challenge is that travel and expense management in real life is often far from the statements above. Even if you only have a handful of employees traveling in a year, T&E management can be complicated if you don’t have a clear process for tracking their expenses and collecting receipts.
Travel expense report processing can also be time-consuming and costly, especially when these processes must be repeated due to human errors, like inaccurate data or late expense form submissions.
If you are dealing with any or all of these pain points, you may want to consider reevaluating how you manage your travel expenses.
Late or Incomplete Reimbursement Requests
Late or Incomplete expense reimbursement requests continue to plague finance departments in businesses of all sizes. Requests with travel items falling out of T&E policies are another significant challenge in travel expense report processing.
These problems often lead to back-and-forth emails about what can or cannot be reimbursed. As a result, reimbursements usually take weeks or even months to be issued — that is, if the documents don’t get lost in the email threads.
Lost Receipts and Other Documents
Failing to integrate travel and expense reporting also often causes the loss of paper receipts — which are crucial documents in the reimbursement process. They prove that your business travel expenses indeed occurred, so you technically cannot reimburse your employees for their out-of-pocket spending without them.
If you do refund them without receipts, you put your business at risk of compliance issues with the IRS during auditing.
Unauthorized Travel Bookings
Relying on laborious, manual processes makes it easier for unauthorized travel bookings to slip through the cracks. Even if you have pre-approval processes in place, verifying travel requests one by one can still be challenging and prone to errors.
On the other hand, integrating travel and expense and automating your processes help set clear, specific booking parameters. Digital solutions available today also alert you when bookings not aligned with the policy are made so you can take prompt action.
Lack of Travel Expense Data Visibility
Manual travel expense management often results in inaccurately recorded data and a flawed overview of your corporate spending. Without a clear oversight, it will be difficult for you to develop essential insights into your travel costs, such as how much you’re actually spending and what your biggest expense categories are.
Ultimately, this hinders you from making informed decisions, planning for future travel costs, and managing your finances efficiently to scale company growth.
Solving Travel and Expense Management Challenges by Integrating T&E
Besides reviewing and updating your T&E policies, integrating your travel and expense management solves the challenges above through these key benefits:
Improved Productivity
In a 2022 Business Value White Paper by IDC, SAP Concur Solutions delivered the following results for participating organizations:
54% less time to book a business trip
43% less time to fill out an expense report
32% increase in employees following company T&E policies
With your employees spending less time booking a business trip, filling expense reports, and following your T&E policies, they’ll have more time to focus on their work. This also saves your finance department from the painful, time-consuming task of manually verifying travel bookings and reviewing expense reports for errors.
Improved Compliance
The speed and accuracy of automated booking, approval, and expense reimbursement is also a fantastic incentive for business travelers who want a quick and efficient process for booking travel and their getting expenses paid.
Improved Visibility
Of course, as automation drives improved compliance and fewer errors, businesses have much better visibility from accurate data driving sharper supplier negotiations and more effective travel policy management.
The Way Forward
Ready to shake off the common T&E challenges haunting your business and enjoy the benefits of integrating travel and expense? The way forward is begins with CI Azumano Business Travel.
As an SAP Concur TMC Elite partner, we’ve helped hundreds of companies address their unique T&E pain points via integrated travel expense management. We can do the same for you, working with your leaders to design a best-in-class solution tailored to your business requirements. Enjoy tremendous savings, all while improving the productivity and satisfaction of your employees.
Here’s what a streamlined process with CI Azumano Business Travel and SAP Concur looks like:
Pre-Trip Approval - Allow your managers to assess and authorize travel requests before the trip is booked.
Booking from Any Device - Let travelers book from their mobile or tablet device through Concur Travel, or by email, or by calling our expert travel agents available 24/7/365.
Expense Submission from Any Device - Through Concur Expense, travelers can include digital copies of receipts to quickly and easily submit an expense report. This saves enormous amounts of time over Excel spreadsheet submissions.
One-click Approval - Approval requests for travel and expense reimbursements are automatically routed. Approval is also given with one click, moving the process along without delay or complicated email strings.
Reporting and Analysis - With complete visibility over the entire process, analyze your T&E spend painlessly to look for opportunities to improve on travel expenses. This makes it easier to drive changes to travel policy or new supplier negotiations.
Save time and money with an integrated travel and expense platform backed by 24/7 expert travel agents, skilled travel management consultants, and powerful reporting. Reach out to us at businesstravel@ciazumano.com to get started.
About CI Azumano Business Travel
CI Azumano Business Travel has a fifty-year track record servicing Fortune 1000 companies and the US Government. As an Elite Concur Partner, CI Azumano is part of a select group of TMCs supporting the world’s most popular and powerful online and mobile travel booking management platform. We also integrate with leading international travel security firms.