Your company can increase revenue and expand its customer base by investing in business travel. However, it cannot increase the ROI without simplifying and streamlining a complex process like business travel management. Travel management solutions help your company streamline this multistep business process through automation.
Your corporate travel manager can boost the software’s native features through customization and integration. Your employees can use the software to make business travel arrangements without violating predefined policies and escalating average trip costs.
At the same time, your finance team can use the software to track travel expenses, speed up reimbursements, and find cost-saving opportunities. Hence, travel management solutions benefit your organization in several ways.
Here are some real-time benefits your company can leverage by implementing a unified travel and expense (T&E) management solution.
11 Real-Time Benefits of Travel Management Solutions for Your Company
- Ensure T&E Policy Compliance
Employees often increase the average business trip costs by violating T&E policies. While configuring the software, your corporate travel manager can implement custom and granular T&E policies. The software will consider the predefined rules while showing and recommending travel products to employees. Also, it will send automated notifications each time an employee violates predefined policies.
- Streamline Business Travel Approval Process
The travel management software will allow employees to start business travel bookings only after getting the required approvals. Your corporate travel manager can speed up the business travel approval procedure by defining multi-level approval hierarchies. Employees can use the software to send travel requests to the appropriate authority as well as track the travel request status.
- Facilitate Self-Booking
Travel management solutions feature easy-to-use corporate booking tools. Employees can use the tool to access a travel inventory customized according to organizational T&E policy and business travel destinations. The tool enables them to compare and book the desired business travel products directly without visiting external websites. Also, employees can use the same tool to cancel and reschedule bookings directly.
- Extend Travel Choices
Despite customizing travel inventories, the software will allow your employees to a wide range of air travel, accommodation, and ground transportation options. For instance, it will enable your employees to choose from direct and connecting flights. Likewise, your employees have the option to book either hotels or alternative accommodations like homestays. The extended travel choices will boost your employees’ work travel experience and keep them motivated.
- Provide Travel Assistance
Your employees need additional information to book the right business travel products. Likewise, they need assistance to manage emerging business travel risks. Leading travel management solution providers these days offer 24/7 customer support. Your employees can get the required information and support by communicating with a customer support executive using multiple channels – phone calls, emails, and instant messages.
- Meet Duty of Care Obligations
Reputable travel management software providers provide emergency assistance to work travelers by partnering with global health and security risk management firms. The partnership helps your firm enhance the safety and security of work travelers without investing in duty-of-care resources. At the same time, travel management solutions mitigate various risks by delivering real-time information to employees as mobile notifications.
- Automate Travel Expense Reporting
Your business cannot prevent policy violations and expense fraud without digitizing expense reports submitted by employees. Travel management solutions enable your employees to generate automated expense reports using their mobile devices.
They can generate automated expense reports simply by scanning various receipts, invoices, and bills. The software will generate digital expense reports accurately by capturing information from the scanned invoices.
- Streamline Travel Expense Management
Travel management solutions streamline travel expense management through the digitalization of expense reports. Also, they feature dashboards that enable your finance team to track travel expense reporting in real-time. Your finance team can speed up reimbursements by identifying pending and unpaid expense claims.
At the same time, the software helps them save the time and effort required to conduct expense audits by capturing audit trials. While reviewing expense claims, auditors can access the corresponding receipts as well as check comments made by the approving authority.
- Generate and Schedule Custom Reports
The dashboards allow managers to generate a variety of reports based on real-time T&E data. A manager has the option to generate and schedule custom reports using destination, goal, department, and other parameters. These custom reports help you analyze T&E data using various metrics and KPIs Also, your team can generate reports to understand employees’ spending behavior, refine the reimbursement process, and find opportunities to control costs.
- Get Data-Driven Insights
Travel management solutions store the T&E data of employees securely in a centralized location. Also, they analyze the data regularly using advanced data analytics solutions. The analytics make the software effective in sharing actionable insights gained based on real-time T&E data.
Your company can leverage data-driven insights to increase the ROI of business travel in several ways – enhancing business travel experiences, updating T&E policies, and identifying cost-saving opportunities.
- Control Average Business Trip Costs
Business travel solutions help your company reduce human resource costs through end-to-end automation of the T&E management process. Additionally, they reduce the average business trip costs by making employees book business travel products at negotiated rates and using discounts provided by vendors.
Also, your employees can use the software to cancel bookings without paying hefty fees and penalties. At the same time, you can leverage the data-driven insights provided by the software to curtail business travel costs without impacting the experience and safety of employees traveling for business purposes.
Conclusion
Business travel solutions help your company streamline a complex business process by providing built-in features and tools. Also, your corporate travel manager can implement customization and personalization in travel management software in several ways.
But you must focus on implementing the right travel management solutions. It is always important to implement software that comes with robust travel management and expense management tools. At the same time, you need to ensure that the software optimizes the process by leveraging real-time T&E data using cutting-edge technologies.
