Extracting Real Benefits from Travel and Expense Management

For your company to truly reap the rewards of a structured corporate travel policy, it must focus on one thing above all else: compliance. Unfortunately, while the explosion in convenient Self Booking Tools gives you a lot more freedom of choice, it also makes compliance a great deal more challenging. Any technology that supports an increase in compliance to policy has merit; it will save your company money and bring back the benefits of corporate travel.

Today's diversity of choice in self booking tools makes compliance through denial of access a very difficult protocol to enforce. What you really need is a funnel through which 100% of your company's travel activity must pass. In the corporate world, the only viable funnel is the payment mechanism - getting paid is the ultimate leveler. If you use a corporate credit card as the payment mechanism, supported by a corporate expense management software solution, and suppliers who can report back to you a reasonable level of data, you stand a very good chance of supporting the compliance objective.

A compliance-friendly corporate expense management software solution A corporate expense management software solution which processes card transactions requires the traveler to personally justify all deviations from policy to their supervisor on a transaction by transaction basis. Just as importantly, the warehoused individual transactions give the corporate travel manager the opportunity to conduct spend analysis and examine individual and aggregate behaviors.

The benefits of policy compliance 80% of the business case benefits of corporate travel will come from travel policy compliance. This requires:

Sound policy and procedures; A comprehensive communication strategy; A gate through which all activity can be channeled (the card and the corporate expense management software solution); and Tools to monitor and measure compliance. There will also be some peripheral benefits to be gained from a corporate expense management software solution in the pre-trip phase:

The traveler can use the work flow component of a corporate expense management software solution to create travel request and approval records rather than using something less structured like emails.

Using the corporate expense management software solution, the traveler can create a "commitment" record at the time of booking for subsequent matching of the credit card transaction when it comes through.

The corporate expense management software solution provides travelers with a real-time log of commitments beyond what might be recorded in a personal diary. How does it apply to your company?

In looking at the business case for this exercise, you do need to closely examine a number of factors to determine the benefits you will actually realize:

There are no industry-wide standards, and the market tends to work as a series of isolated closed provider loops - your efficiencies will be greatest if can conduct your business entirely within one closed loop. It is up to you to determine if you can obtain maximum purchasing power in this environment.