Are you paying attention to your corporate travel and expense management? 

You should. Because according to GBTA (Global Business Travel Association), annual corporate travel spending will reach $1.4 trillion by 2024. 

If you are struggling with your travel and expense management due to your manual setup, it’s time to take a step towards digitization. This is because if you leave your expense management woes unattended, it can significantly impact the growth and scale of your business in the long run. 

This article highlights some of the top corporate T&E challenges and how businesses can embrace corporate T&E software to make expense management less frustrating.

Top corporate travel and expense management challenges and their solution 

Challenge no.1: Tracking and managing receipts

As a necessary means of staying compliant, businesses should always ensure employees submit their expense reports with corresponding receipts. This is because expense receipts serve as proof of spending and are crucial during audits. Receipts may either be paper receipts or e-receipts, and a single expense report can often come with multiple receipts. In these cases, the onus of collating, verifying, and documenting these receipts and reports would fall entirely on the Finance teams.

While some businesses believe using expense report templates may solve the problem, the truth may vary. With templates, employees are to manually enter expense details and attach photocopies of receipts as proof of spending. This may result in receipts all over the place and in varying formats. For example, with a car rental for work, you have receipts from the rental agency, gas stations, and parking validation - that’s already three different types of receipts for just one corporate travel expense.

To add to the confusion, these templatized expense reports make it easy for missing, incorrect, and exaggerated entries to slip by. In these cases, Finance teams are to manually identify and address issues with multiple employees over multiple expenses. Further, all clarifications and justifications for these business expenses go unrecorded as they happen over emails, calls, or word of mouth. This translates to zero clarity and a highly ineffective means of managing business expenses and receipts.

How can a travel and expense management software help manage receipts?

• Business travel and expense software comes with unlimited cloud storage that can store all your employees' trip reports and expense receipts in one place.
• You and your Finance team can access the trip reports for review or reference from anywhere, using any device and at any time.
• The T&E software eliminates the frustration behind paper receipts as employees no longer need to hold on to them to file later. They can simply use an expense reporting app to take a picture, and the software will automatically extract all the crucial information to the trip report form and store it in the system.
• Employees can submit expenses through everyday apps like text message, Gmail, Outlook, and more. The software will collate all information under one platform no matter how your employees submit their expense reports.
• Before your traveling employees submit their trip reports and expense receipts, the software can also run an automated audit check, so no errors or potential fraud pass through. 
  

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• Mobile-based receipt data extraction is the new standard in expense reporting

Challenge no.2 : Frustration with unclear travel and expense policies

Is your travel and expense policy clear and comprehensive? Is it easy to understand and document every step of your travel reimbursement process in detail? If not, then the chances are that it may be contributing to employee expense reporting frustration and poor reimbursement turnaround time.

Unclear T&E guidelines can lead to policy violations, out-of-policy expense claims, and finance teams spending more time going back and forth with confused and frustrated employees. This translates into productive time wasted over something that could have been curbed from the beginning.

Your travel and expense policies work as your one source of truth when it comes to employee reimbursements. Unfortunately, most companies pay no heed to their policies, and as a result, so do their employees. This results in out-of-policy expenses and other policy violations, which cause unnecessary financial leaks in the system.

How can a travel and expense management software help enforce policies?

• Businesses can pre-set policies based on designation, business goals, nature of business expenses, and other such parameters.
• Once you’ve set up your approval workflow and integrated your T&E policies into the software, it automates your entire expense management process.
• With the policy set-up, you can spot expenses incurred on alcohol bills, holidays or weekends, and any other expenses outside your T&E policy guidelines.
• This feature simplifies the entire expense approval workflow and increases employee compliance and productivity.
  

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• How can expense policy compliance benefit your business?
  

Challenge no.3: Reviewing and approving expense reports takes too much time 

Expense management tasks can be frustrating for both employees and Finance teams. For example, employees need to keep a tab of their travel expenses and correctly enter all the information into an expense report template to be reimbursed on time. 

After employees submit their T&E reports, Finance teams need to collate all the trip reports from managers and manually identify claims that are not supported by your travel and expense guidelines. Then, in case of a policy violation, the Finance team needs to send back the travel report to the employee in whole or in part for necessary changes or clarification.

This can translate into a costly and time-consuming process. Additionally, due to stringent timelines, they may not thoroughly verify the submitted expense reports and may end up missing claims that might be fraudulent in nature. This behavior over prolonged periods can prove detrimental to the financial health of your business.

How can a travel and expense management software help review and approve expense reports?

1. Modern expense software comes with OCR technology that scans receipts, extracts crucial data, and auto-fills a digital expense report in just a few clicks. This cuts down manual data entry tasks for traveling employees and also eliminates human-prone errors.
2. The robust policy engine also comes with real-time policy checks to ensure no policy violations slip by.
3. If the software detects any out-of-policy expenses, the software flags the errors and notifies the employee immediately to make corrections. In case of a serious violation, the approver gets informed as well.
4. The software also provides a detailed digital audit trail that documents all activities related to an expense report. This comes in particularly handy during quick reviews, approvals, and audits.
   

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• How to review and approve expense reports?

Challenge no.4 : Lack of visibility into spending patterns and trends

Insight into expense trends occurs when Finance teams have historical and real-time data in hand. But, businesses who use traditional expense management means gain little to no insight as they have no data to refer back to. As a result, you can end up making ill-informed business decisions. 

Expense analytics and real-time insight into expense data play an important role in cost optimizations and preventing financial leaks in the system. But, this can happen only when businesses have the numbers to speak for them. 

How can a travel and expense management software help with spend insight?

1. Since all travel expense data, such as flight bookings, accommodations, transportation costs, and more, are stored under one platform, Finance teams don't need to gather expense data from discrete sources.
2. Finance teams can identify frequent spenders, top policy violators, and other recurring or abnormal patterns and address them.
3. With real-time insight into the business's financial health, Finance teams can tweak and improve the organization's travel and expense policies to drive compliance.
   

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• The role policies and analytics play in expense management‍
  

Challenge no.5 : Delay in closing the reimbursements cycle on-time

Delayed reimbursements in a manual travel and expense management setup can be due to a number of reasons. It can be because of:

1. Employees dread the time-consuming and tedious expense reporting and tracking tasks and keep it for the last minute. This can lead to late expense report submissions from the beginning. 
2. Working on their expense report at the eleventh hour can also cause multiple manual data errors, incorrect expense entries, missing receipts, and ignoring policy guidelines while filling in the expense report form. This may result in numerous back and forths between the approver and employee before it reaches the Finance team for a final audit. 
3. Furthermore, since Finance teams receive all the expense reports in bulk just before the deadline, fraudulent expense claims can pass unnoticed.
   

How can a travel and expense management software improve reimbursement cycles?

• The expense reporting app makes it really easy for business travelers to keep track of their expense receipts and submit their expense reports on the go from anywhere, ensuring they never miss a deadline.
• With features like data extraction and receipt scanning, an expense software drastically reduces errors in an expense report. 
• The real-time policy check engine also flags any out-of-policy expenses, duplicate bills, and policy violations when an employee uploads their receipts. This helps curb delays right at the source of expense creation. 
  

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• 3 reasons your business needs a travel reimbursement software
  

Streamline your corporate travel and expense management process today

The business world is continuously evolving to become highly receptive to the needs of employees. While the choice to automate your travel and expense management software may benefit you as a business, it also is a boon for your employees. Addressing employee challenges has a direct impact on employee morale and productivity. Thus, also impacting the overall financial productivity of your business. 

All this and more without your Finance team slogging it out.

Do you want to hop onto the bandwagon of digital change? Fyle does more than just expense reporting. Schedule a demo today to witness how Fyle helps you put an end to your expense management woes.

Only people who have dealt with a travel expense report know business travel doesn’t always mean business class flights and fancy restaurants. 

Employees, managers, travel managers, and Finance teams juggle with multiple things to ensure business trip expenses are within the specified budget and comply with the travel and expense policy laid out by the company.

A travel expense software makes management of per diems, trip budgets, mileage, and trip expense reports easy for all the stakeholders involved. In this article, we list the top reasons why businesses should switch to a travel expense software to manage business travel expenses.

What is a travel expense software?

A travel expense software helps employees and managers streamline and automate all business travel-related expenses like cash advances, hotels, flight bookings, per diems, and employee travel reimbursements. 

A modern travel expense software also helps Finance teams gain real-time visibility and complete control over business expenses. Read on to understand how your business can benefit from a travel expense software.

Why should your business use a travel expense software?

Business travel is not all fun. It requires stakeholders to do a host of research and work even before the business trip. 

• The travel managers or employees first need to find all the travel booking options that fall under the set guidelines for their category. 
• If the employee selects the travel booking options, the employee would need to get it approved by their manager or travel manager. 
• On approval, the employee is all set to go on the business trip. He/she would meet and dine with multiple people to close deals or to sustain and maintain business relationships. 
• Employees would need to save all expense receipts during these visits to avail of employee expense reimbursements. 
• If the employee either loses the expense receipts or forgets to report the expenses for the set deadline, the employee would stand to lose out on their money on business expenses. 
  

Additionally, there is a high chance of non-compliance or even deliberate expense report fraud in case:

• Your expense policy does not lay out the framework of expense reporting properly
• There are sudden changes in the business trip itinerary
  

This is where a travel expense software can help. 

SUGGESTED READ: How to detect and prevent expense report fraud

Features of an ideal travel expense software and how they help

Travel expense management is a complicated process for employees, managers, and finance teams alike. It involves hours of either manual entry and compilation of expense receipts and expense reports or manual verification and approval of submitted business expenses.

A travel expense software helps cut costs, save time, and provide valuable insight into expense data that can be used to further streamline your organization’s corporate travel management. Let’s dive deeper.

Feature: Pre-spend approvals

Problem: Travel expenses occur even before the trip does. Therefore, employees are issued cash advances for travel and accommodation bookings. 

Travel bookings are generally either done by the traveler (employee) or the travel manager. In either case, your employees, manager/approver, and travel manager must understand  your travel and expense policy, preferred vendors, and budget allocations. Additionally, the travel booking preferences and booking confirmation back-and-forths, all happen during billable hours.  

Solution: A travel expense software automates this process and allows the employee to directly raise trip requests and submit a list of preferred vendors to the travel manager. This can then be forwarded to travel vendors for booking. 

Once the details are in place, the vendor sends the trip request back to the approver/traveler for confirmation. Travel bookings can be confirmed immediately on approval. 

Fyle offers 360-degree trip reports that bring all business expenses incurred for a particular business trip/project under one single trip report. 

SUGGESTED READ: How to use Fyle as a travel approval software

Feature: Employee expense reporting

Problem: Traditionally, traveling employees save receipts for all business expenses so they can fyle for travel reimbursement post-trip. 

Safekeeping of receipts, ensuring expense policy compliance, and submitting the expense report on time is much unproductive work for your globe-trotting employees. This can be especially hard in case of sudden changes in the itinerary.

Solution: A travel expense software makes it easy for employees to track, scan, and save business expense receipts - from wherever and whenever. 

Once the trip is finished, your employees can submit their travel expense reports with just a click. The ease that an expense reporting software brings to traveling employees saves them a lot of frustration, time, and hours. 

Fyle allows employees to send business expenses to expense reports from within everyday apps like G-Suite, Outlook, WhatsApp, text message, slack, and many more. 

 SUGGESTED READ: Five ways to make expense reporting easier for employees

Feature: Expense policy compliance

Problem: One can not always be expected to remember the nuances of their company’s corporate travel and expense policy. 

Employees can sometimes forget what expenses qualify as business expenses or spending limits, and managers or Finance teams may sometimes miss fraudulent or out-of-policy expenses. This puts the organization and the traveler at risk with the tax authorities.

Solution: A travel expense software comes with a robust policy engine that detects and prevents any non-compliant expenses from even being claimed. 

In cases where the employee submits an expense despite automatic flagging, the expense is sent to a reviewer to validate the expense. This prevents any fraudulent expenses from being fyled.

Fyle’s policy engine automates and enforces policies on anything your organization might need. It also maintains a digital audit trail that helps track actions taken on every single expense.

SUGGESTED READ: Check expense report frauds with Fyle

Feature: Employee travel reimbursement

Problem: Finance teams are tasked with manually verifying receipts with expense claims, ensuring expense policy compliance, and processing travel reimbursements. 

In cases of non-compliant expenses, the report is sent back to the traveler for rectification or justification. Finance teams also have to check and weed out out-of-policy expenses, or fraudulent expense claims. This time-consuming task ultimately results in delayed travel reimbursement, which takes a hit on employee morale.

Solution: A travel expense software ensures real-time policy compliance by raising flags for any non-compliant expenses or expense reports at the source of expense creation itself. This allows travelers to rectify errors without the Finance team having to chase them. This saves a lot of time and effort for all the stakeholders involved in the process.

Also, when it comes to travel booking research or employee travel reimbursements a travel expense software automates the entire process of travel expense reporting while ensuring real-time expense policy compliance and audit readiness.

Further, a T&E software allows approvers to initiate multiple transactions to different employee bank accounts from the centralized expense management dashboard.

Fyle’s travel reimbursement features allow approvers and Finance teams to track the transaction status of any expense reimbursement right from the dashboard.  This allows for an overall view of all business expenses that can help Finance teams gain sight of the larger picture.

SUGGESTED READ: Balancing expense policy compliance and happy employees

Benefits of using Fyle as your travel expense software

Here’s a list of excellent reasons why you should consider Fyle as your travel and expense management software:

• Direct integration with your existing ERP/HRMS/accounting software
• Integration of corporate credit cards and automatic reconciliations
• Effortless travel and hotel bookings for business trips 
• Google Maps integration for accurate mileage tracking
• Flagging of non-compliant expense receipts at the point of expense creation
• Pre-compliance for trip requests to ensure continuous compliance
• Real-time visibility into all trip statuses and trip expenses
• Reduced turnaround time for employee travel reimbursements
• A unified, searchable and unlimited business expense receipt storage
• Industry-best practice security and privacy measures
  

Fyle’s innovative and employee-friendly expense reporting features make travel and expense management a breeze! In the words of the folks at IDC,

“Fyle is intelligent, employee-centric, scalable, and delivers significant value to growing businesses without any impact on user experience and quality of support.”

Ready to upgrade your T&E management? Schedule a demo with us today!

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