It’s no surprise that travel policy compliance is difficult to achieve and hard for companies to modify the policy as per the changing market needs and business conditions. Nowadays, electronic systems are incorporating guidelines into the software that employees use to report travel and entertainment expenses. This would provide relevant information to your employees when useful, instead of overwhelming them with a lot of information.
With companies soon expanding to wide horizons, employees started traveling to various cities across the world. Therefore, the T & E expense policy of the company should cater to the country-specific needs. Hence, there is a great need to bring policies to life from paper to practice and that is highly not possible without an automated solution.
Apparently, there is a greater degree of dissatisfaction for companies in the areas of mobility, visibility and control. Thus, a solution that helps to improvise the processes and manage the data better is required in companies.
Automating T & E expenses
T & E automation is the required change to put the organization on a track of success- both corporations and individuals should expect the change to see positive outcomes. Long-term benefits may take some time-but your business can see instant benefits of automation now with expense management solution.
Key facts for why T & E automation is highly required
Of all T & E expense stats, the following are some key facts that every business owner should know:
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61% of people feel that existing T & E systems does not help them negotiate better with suppliers
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One-fourth say they are not satisfied with the system’s ability to request and approve T & E expenses, track the spending, how frequently an expense is being incurred and act on the spending before it takes place
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Major issues are loss of time and productivity, lack of control over spend and issues faced during auditing
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Delay of 5 days in approval can increase the airfare costs by 10%
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68% of people report that by automating T & E process, companies can save on increased airfare and other travel expenditures
It is pretty easy for employees to abide by the travel policies when tools are guiding them through the process, figuring out items that do not abide by policy and keeping them abreast of some activities can save a lots of business money. Here are some ways in which technology is creating waves in travel and expense industry.
Expense Limits by Destination
Setting rules and limits should be based on where your employees are traveling, because the expenses vary greatly by city. No matter where your employees are traveling, setting fixed limits for all expense categories does not work these days. However, this should be redefined; you should make use of a lot of data sources that benchmark costs around the world. This data should be incorporated in the expense solution so that category limits would become dynamic depending on where the person is traveling.
Best airfare deals
It is hard to get reasonable benchmarks for airfares since the prices often get changed. Online booking tools can track and flag the lowest fares and present them to employees based on city, travel dates and classes. Since a lot of online travel booking tools are out there in the market today, it is difficult for you to choose the best tool. That’s where SutiTravel, an online travel booking software comes in. SutiTravel offers travel booking services and provides best deals for travelers all the time.
Automatic guidance
Expense management solution allows admin to embed policy in the system, so that when an employee adds an expense, they can get instant notifications about any discrepancies. As all the rules will be incorporated in the software, you can easily train new employees. Besides this, automatic guidance will educate you everything that is required so that you can easily comply with the company’s norms and policies without any confusion. As everything can be pre-defined, you need not bother about how to make employees abide by the travel policy. If implemented properly, automatic guidance feature would solve the biggest challenge that most companies face.
Quick updates
Making changes to the T & E policy is difficult as every employee should be notified about the latest updates. Expense report software can make these changes reflect instantly. Your booking tool and expense solution can work together to communicate with employees. The system would work by displaying preferred vendors so that you can select one among them. You can make your policy in line with changing business conditions instead of doing a full review. Also, there are various tools that allow you to test the impact of latest changes before you roll them out.
Compliance
It is highly important to embed policy in travel and expense system. Until you do this, your employees will not be able to know about policies and are likely to overspend. The worst part is to not to have a policy at all. With policy in place, there will be no room for employees to indulge in fraudulence, hence every expense will be within compliance.
Having policies in place would not be sufficient, the key is to have the right level of specificity. In addition to this, using technology to streamline the process would make it easy for both employers and employees.
