Corporate Travel Management Blogs

Corporate Travel Management – 3 Min Read

Corporate travel, an integral contributor to business success, is a function that entirely relies upon complex workflow processes with exhaustive communications between employees, travel agents, travel admins, and managers. 

One of the most common byproducts of these inefficiencies is the inflation of travel budgets and inaccurate reporting of cost centers and expenses. 

Although this system may have been acceptable for businesses to follow in the past, innovations in travel management software solutions are driving the paradigm shift toward newer optimized travel management systems. 

A 2020 report suggested that a significant majority of around 67% of surveyed respondents stated that their organizations used an online corporate travel expense reporting tool with integrated mobile solutions. 

Tripeur’s platform is a market leader amongst such travel management solutions with mobile capabilities that can help enterprises achieve a more simple, efficient, and transparent rehaul of the business travel experience and reduce its impact as a significant cost center. 

How Tripeur simplifies corporate travel management

Tripeur’s platform has actively been helping businesses achieve a cheaper and more efficient travel management solution with better workflows by acting as a single multipurpose tool to tackle all travel needs. 

Our user-friendly interface provides the right tools to track, control, and report all travel-related organizational expenses in real-time. 

Additionally, our system strives to optimize the entire travel management process to help you consistently achieve a return on investment on your corporate travel. 

While older systems have functioned through the years similarly to traditional services businesses, our platform design aims to take a whole new approach to CTM. 

Tripeur’s platform eliminates the current practice of relying on back-and-forth communications between travel agents and stakeholders for every travel-related action. We aim to simplify the entire workflow’s lives, beginning with the employees, travel desk, and finance department. 

Simplify travel management workflow

We have reworked our customers’ corporate travel management workflow to decrease the time taken for requests, procurement, and posting expenses. Let us explore how our platform’s travel management workflow helps the three most important stakeholders of corporate travel; the employee, travel admin, and finance department.

Elevating user experience for all parties

There are three key parties that are involved when it comes to corporate travel expense management, and we hit all of them.

Employee

In the current state of CTM, when employees wish to plan and execute travel, the plans are subject to review for compliance with the company’s updated travel policy, after which, they are subject to approval by the different admins and managers. 

Acquiring these approvals requires in-depth scrutiny of every aspect of the travel process and devised budget. When managers examine and find issues in the travel plans, the proposals need to be reworked, causing substantial delays in the booking processes. 

These delays create a prolonged and complex situation for employees who often lose the motivation to explore economically feasible travel options and instead want to get done with the booking. 

On the other hand, Tripeur’s user-friendly platform allows employees to transparently view the cheapest stay and travel accommodation options readily available and swiftly relay them to the relevant managers and travel desk for speedy approvals.

Through Tripeur’s mobile capability, managers and travel admins can receive booking approval requests directly on WhatsApp or any other preferred channel, allowing faster processing. 

This workflow shifts away from the prior requirement of employees to depend on the traditional working hours of managers to receive the necessary grants. 

Now, managers can instantly review and make approvals on their mobile devices, making it much more convenient for their own life and that of employees.

Travel admin 

The travel admin’s life is troubled by three inefficiencies in the travel process. It falls within the purview of the travel admin’s duties to manually review all employee travel-based requests before forwarding them to the manager for further scrutiny. 

• The first hurdle is the request management caused by the manual booking management process. 

• The second hurdle arises when sending the approved requests to travel vendors who perform the ticket and accommodation purchases. 

• The final hurdle occurs when all vendor invoices must be collected manually and reviewed after the completion of travel. 

After completing these three tedious manual steps, the admin gets an overview of all the travel expenses incurred, after which, the documented costs are subject to final reconciliation by the accounting department. 

In our experience, this three-pronged manual process causes delays due to mismatched schedules and the varying workload of all involved stakeholders. 

Also, delays in this process cause the collection of incomplete or inaccurate data that are not always assigned to the correct cost center.

Our automated platform helps businesses effectively mitigate all three hurdles. With a click of a button, you can now provide admins with all the necessary intelligence MIS reports and dashboards with a detailed view of the travel budget utilization. 

Our system offers a much more streamlined workflow, reducing the time to manage bookings, collect invoices, and final reconciliation. 

Finance department

Some of the finance department’s essential functions are ensuring that an audit trail is maintained, optimal budget utilization, accurate travel costs are recorded, and GST compliance. 

Tripeur’s platform provides real-time invoicing and reporting of all travel expenses guaranteeing that the finance department always stays alerted on all employee expenditures. 

Stakeholder inclusion in expense reports ensures that non-compliant expenses that fall outside the corporate travel budget and policy are swiftly corrected and assigned to the proper cost center. 

It is a common occurrence that when receiving delayed travel invoices lacking adequate information, the finance department often approves and posts the expenses into the wrong cost center. 

In such cases, our system automates and provides real-time invoice reporting improving the accuracy of posting expenses and reconciliation. 

Complete visibility into travel management

At Tripeur, we are looking at a holistic view of the entire corporate travel ecosystem and trying to make this whole function as seamless and efficient as possible. 

We have created a system where the workflow, policies, transaction logs, and detailed MIS reports are transparent and visible to all relevant stakeholders for smoother workflows. 

Integrating your corporate travel policies into our platform ensures that you always receive real-time reports detailing employee compliance with expenses billed on the company’s behalf. 

By our system, when non-compliant expenses occur, the managers and admin are notified immediately with accompanying details, ensuring real-time accountability.

How Tripeur intends to solve corporate travel in the next 12 months

While we have covered most of the critical elements, there is more we can do. The next 12 months are dedicated to solving the following corporate travel discrepancies that need to be addressed to create a seamless travel expense workflow.

Post-travel reimbursement

Although our current system improves trip and accommodation-related bookings, it does not record incidental expenses such as those that travelers face daily on their journeys. 

In the next 12 months, we aim to complete the travel management loop by building a feature in our platform that completely automates post-travel reimbursements and expense reconciliation. 

We are working to fix this as our new feature will incorporate all incidental expenses, such as purchasing goods, transport, food, beverages, and more during travel. 

We strive to provide employees with the capability of performing payments and posting these expenses automatically to stakeholders along with automated MIS reports. Our reconciliation and expense reimbursement model is poised to be functional as early as September 2022. 

Expose benefits of corporate travel

We have designed our systems to provide our customers with a broader range of travel and accommodation options than what they receive from most travel agents and portals. 

Our customers are offered special deals from hotels and airlines with additional benefits like free seat selection and travel meals. We aim to extend these benefits to cover personal travel to help employees save time and money during their trips. 

Customers utilizing our systems can improve their brand image as a business that offers employees travel benefits that make personal travel cheaper and more efficient. 

Expense analytics for finance teams (Increased say for finance teams in CTM)

We are additionally working on an expense analytics platform for the business’s finances. Our analytics features can allow the accounting and finance teams to fragment costs to make travel expenses more controllable. 

These are the three things we are working on today. We consider the valuable feedback we get from some of our largest unicorn customers to provide better customer experiences. 

We are devoted to working closely with these large companies to learn what more around the space we can solve and will constantly strive to do so. 

To finish up…

Think of Tripeur’s platform as the swiss army knife of corporate travel, where every tool you need for corporate travel management is available to you within one platform. 

We have understood that no amount of workforce or capital can improve the old-school travel management systems. 

Instead, the best corporate travel management systems allow for implementing corporate travel management through a user-friendly and simplified interface that simultaneously lowers travel costs. 

Tripeur thus keeps the finance department in the loop through expenditure alerts and reports through all stages of the travel booking experience. Our software can perpetually fix your corporate travel inefficiencies and make travel cheaper than ever. 

Contact us at Tripeur to find out more.