When it comes to travel business expenses, travelling is something that is twinned with entertainment. Why? Because in most of the business organizations travel and entertainment are the largest uncontrolled areas of business spending. Given below are the 8 major ideas and strategies that would help you controlling your business travel costs through expense management software.
Going mobile: Each and everything starting from booking to snapshots of all your receipts to project management tracking is now made available on the mobile devices. Nothing here reduces the annoyance of monotonous tasks say for example like standing in the line for security at the airport. Immediacy is the major key to accuracy. Tracking down the time immediately after the amount is being spent or snapping down the image of your receipts while at lunch would here mean that it gets into the system faster and with greater accuracy.
Creating a travel policy: If you do not have a travel policy created for the employees of your organization then it’s the right time for you to create one. In case you do have one you need to have a look at it once and make sure each and everything is working well. It could here a part of your general expenses policy or a standalone document. Having a detailed guideline created for your business is pretty much impossible as there are factors that vary when it comes to the destinations being chosen. What you could do, what you cannot do should have a clear set out of the process employees need to follow when arranging for a business travel as well as specific guidelines on services and suppliers to use.
Speaking to the experts around: Depending on the size of your organization and the time they have been travelling, speaking to the experts around is one of the best options while dealing with expense management. These are organizations that would not just offer you with the best deals but would also provide you with knowledge in order to negotiate insurance, visas and the best hidden costs. An alternative for you here is to hire someone internally in the finance team and is already been tasked with business travel costs and planning.
Getting approvals on time: Having your time and expenses tracked is just half of the task. Do make sure you are clear to the managers so that they know what to look out for during the entire process of approval, having a small training session. From here your system then needs to move on from one approver to the next automatically based on the ones who has have been leading the project.
Reporting capabilities: Where your organization has 300 or 1000 members, you like all the others would here like to know where the entire amount is being spent. Getting the required information on regular basis would not just help you enact changes in the organization saving your time and money, but would also streamline the entire process. This entire process of managing the expenses of your business organization added to the benefit of detecting fraud, even if it is something unintentional and could lead to severe impact on you and your organization.
Keeping things simple: Have projects created that you easily could track through a manageable task structure. Have standard limits created for all your clients and customers especially in terms of the hotel rates or the daily allowances that you can. Through this you could set your expense policies at once and your employees would here be less likely to make mistakes when the rules still continue to be the same.
Do you stay or you sign: Through digital technology we do have the ability to communicate in real time with all your clients and customers through any part of the world. Services like Skype and Google hangout would here offer you with virtual conference tool especially the ones that were accessible only to the large multi – nationals. This would again mean that proper and intelligent decisions need to be made, balancing the costs through virtual meetings against the benefits of real world meetings.
When your organization adopts or is planning to adopt an expense management report, it does become that you choose the right tool for your business. So how have you been managing the expenses of your business organization? Do leave your comments below and we would be happy to add them above.
Author Bio:
Jain is a Marketing Operations Manager who focused on growing Travel Expense Report Software open source product and communicates the value of identity to customers, partners, and the larger community by targeting specific markets through segmentation and analysis
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