How to provide a better business travel solution to employees

When salespeople attend conferences and trade shows and meet with prospects, it translates to more business and increased revenue. As these new opportunities open up, it also opens the gate to a new set of administrative tasks that require a great deal of time and resources. When not handled properly, this can lead to unnecessary expenses and misuse of the organization’s resources.

Starting from requesting a business trip to handling travel reimbursements, there are a lot of moving parts. When these processes aren’t handled meticulously, you may end up paying much more than you initially planned to. You want to make business travel as stress-free as possible for your employees, so they have a productive trip while ensuring there aren’t any unnecessary expenses.

There’s a fine line between cutting costs indiscriminately and doing so while still making life easier for your employees. Business travel solution helps you tread this line carefully.

How to provide a better travel experience?

Travel managers often focus on trying to cut down expenses. Sure, a flight with an eight-hour layover is cheap, but if the employee gets to the client’s office jet-lagged and exhausted, is the trade-off worth it?

Check out best practices for travel expense management that not only help control costs but also contribute to a better travel experience.

1. Employee Experience Matters

Businesses, more than ever, are trying to create memorable travel experiences for their employees.

In fact, 8 out of 10 employees say the quality of their business travel experience impacts their business trips’ results and their overall job satisfaction.

Non-stop flights and shorter travel times are as crucial as any perk. Little things, like a seat upgrade or a nice meal at the end of the trip, can make a lot of difference to business travelers. They get a morale boost and you’re empowering them to do great work.

2. Give Flexibility

Employees should be trusted with a level of independence when it comes to business travel. Some companies allow employees to book their own flights and reimbursed later. This gives them the flexibility to travel according to their convenience. While there’s a chance of employees going rogue, the fact that you trust them with something as important as this tells them to be more responsible.

3. Empower Them With Tools

How many times has an employee come back from a trip and forgot the receipt for their morning coffee? It’s crucial to provide travelers with travel and expense tool that can help them track and submit expense reports without making them spend a lot of time on it. A mobile app comes handy and you can ensure that each expense is accounted for.

4. Make Reimbursements Faster

Expedite the reimbursement process by making approvals faster. You can automate travel approvals up to a certain limit when it falls into specific expense categories. When approvals get faster, employees can get back their money faster.

DIY or Dedicated corporate travel solution.

In the case of small companies, where one or two key people make business trips, there’s might be no need for a corporate travel solution. There’s no need to request approvals or reimbursements. Even if there is, the process isn’t as complex as in a bigger organization.

However, this is not the case in larger organizations. Some medium businesses use spreadsheets or print templates from the Internet to fill their travel requests, and emails for communication. Others use dedicated business travel solutions to help them with bookings and reimbursements.

Some enterprises use Travel Management Companies (TMC) to outsource all the headache. However, these systems don’t always accommodate all your requirements when your road warriors grow in size. You’re required to work around the existing structure of the tool, which defeats the very purpose of using such tools.

TMCs, on the other hand, work great even if you scale, but the cost can skyrocket out of control.

Best of Both Worlds

Kissflow Finance offers organizations robust yet simple solutions to overcome obstacles in their travel request approval processes. It gives employees and managers the opportunity to make and authorize claims on the move, and its built-in system formulas mean that the number of fields that need to be manually completed is minimized, leading to quicker and more accurate processing.