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Travel Expense Tracker | Perks of Automating Corporate Travel Process

5 Best Business Travel Expense Tracker Tools to look out for in 2023

Team Kissflow

Updated on 12 Feb 2024 3 min read

At some point, every business struggles with managing their travel expenses. Whether you make everyone responsible for their own details, or try to impose standard policies, claiming travel expenses can be extremely high and the process is extremely complicated. Everyone’s eager to find a way to make the process better, control costs, and reduce the back and forth.

The job to streamline the effectiveness of this area often falls on the finance department. But many finance heads are not equipped to handle the legacy of paper forms, spreadsheets, and emails to handle business travel requests and expense management processes. Outdated travel expense tracker results in ineffective travel expense management and an incredible waste of time. That’s where you need a streamlined, automated business travel management.

What is a travel expense tracker?

A travel expense tracker is a portal where all employees can submit travel expenses and claim reimbursements. The system helps identify expenses that don’t comply with the organization’s business travel policy, making it easy for managers and the finance team to approve or reject a claim.

Once the expense claims are approved, the travel expense tracker categorizes the expenses and the employee gets reimbursed.

5 best travel expense trackers to look out for in 2022

There are tons of corporate traveller apps out there. Here are some of them that you can start evaluating before choosing the one that suits you best:

1. Certify

Certify is an easy-to-use, web-based expense management tool that has an in-built travel management functionality as well. Beyond airfare booking, Certify includes several other features like displaying penalties, price verification, result filters, and expandable flight details.

Ideal for: SMBs, Enterprises

2. SAP Concur

Concur is a comprehensive travel and expense management solution that lets you take control of every aspect of corporate travel management with a connected, end-to-end solution. Their slick mobile app lets you enforce travel policies and gives you negotiated rates.

Ideal for: SMBs, Enterprises

3. Travel Perk

Travel Perk is an easy-to-use tool that’s mostly geared toward medium businesses. You can make group bookings and it helps you find the lowest fares possible. It is also one of the few tools that let you book train tickets.

Ideal for: SMBs, Enterprises

4. Rydoo

Rydoo is a complete travel and expense management solution that helps you with bookings, tickets, and payments. It has a central billing option where a consolidated invoice for all trips is sent to your business at the end of each month.

Ideal for: SMBs, Enterprises

5. Trippeo

Trippeo is a travel and expense tracking app developed for the mobile workforce. It offers a mobile-first approach to handle business travel and book tickets. Trippeo tracks, submits, and reimburses travel expenses quickly and painlessly. It also helps business get negotiated rates and better prices for tickets.

On the expense management side of things, Trippeo takes the pain away by eliminating manual expense entry with OCR scanning and credit card integrations.

Ideal for: SMBs, Enterprises

Why Do You Need a Dedicated Travel Expense Tracker?

The problem with a conventional pen-and-paper system is that it’s prone to human errors, expense frauds, an exhaustive paper trail, and travel reimbursements that take weeks to get to the employee’s bank account. Most of this comes back to the manual nature; there’s a need for human intervention, right from submitting travel expense reports to identifying non-compliant claims to reimbursing employees.

To escape this drudgery, you need a fool-proof, automated travel expense tracker that takes care of the entire travel request workflow, right from submitting expense reports to processing reimbursements.

Things to Look For in a Travel Expense Tracker

It’s easy to get distracted with lots of bells and whistles from a travel expense management system. However, it’s best to focus on what you need. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to a travel expense tracker. However, you do need something that:

  • is easy to use
  • supports multiple users
  • accommodates your approval hierarchies
  • ensures business travel policies are adhered to
  • is accessible from everywhere
  • grows as you scale
  • helps you cut down on costs with insightful reports

Benefits of Streamlined Business Travel Expense Tracker

  1. Compliance with travel policies
  2. Visibility into financial health
  3. Tax deductions and audits
  4. Happier employees

Compliance With Travel Policies

Ensuring that corporate travel policies are adhered to takes a huge burden off the finance team’s shoulders. It makes it easier for them to approve or reject a travel expense claim. This will also help reduce expense frauds and enforce compliance.

Visibility Into Financial Health

Finding where your money goes helps you plan out an effective budget for business trips. When you track how much money goes out with the help of a travel expense tracker, you get a better picture of the cash flow. You can identify areas where you’re spending unnecessarily and make insightful decisions that can help you cut down on costs.

Tax Deductions and Audits

Claiming travel expenses must be handled in the right way in order for an organization to mark them as a legitimate expense. Without tight control over the process, you may be missing out on benefits. In addition, records and audit trails need to be present to show that you’ve properly managed to claim travel expenses and haven’t opened up yourself to claims to mishandling funds.

Happier Employees

You can make your employees’ lives a lot easier by making it simple for them to submit their travel expenses and get faster reimbursements.