Managing travel and expense (T&E) processes for business can be complex, time-consuming, and error-prone. For companies with frequent business travelers, tracking multiple expenses like flights, hotels, transportation, and meals can overwhelm finance teams. Without streamlined systems, manual processes can lead to inefficiencies, mistakes, and lost productivity. By automating your T&E management, you can eliminate unnecessary paperwork, speed up approval processes, and reduce errors, allowing your teams to focus on more strategic tasks.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to automate your business travel expense management using the right tools and platforms.
Steps to Automate Business Travel Expense Management
Streamlining travel expense management benefits everyone, from your finance team to managers and travelers. Implementing both a travel management platform and an expense management solution is essential to ensuring smooth processes from booking to reimbursement.
1. Select a Robust Travel Management Platform
A comprehensive travel management system simplifies booking, approvals, and reporting, helping reduce manual effort. With such a platform, employees can easily book their travel while staying within company policies, and managers can automate approval workflows, minimizing back-and-forth communication. Moreover, the finance team no longer needs to handle hundreds of invoices each month; instead, they can rely on consolidated monthly billing, saving hours of work. This streamlined approach reduces errors and allows you to manage travel budgets more effectively.
Key Features of a Travel Management Platform:
-
Self-service booking with built-in approval processes
-
Integration with company travel policies for compliance
-
Access to a wide range of competitive travel options
-
Consolidated monthly invoicing
-
Real-time reporting tools for travel spending insights
-
Seamless integration with your expense management system
-
24/7 customer support
AirBooking, for example, offers a fully integrated travel management solution with an extensive inventory of travel services, consolidated billing, and real-time expense reporting—all designed to simplify corporate travel management.
2. Implement an Efficient Expense Management Platform
In addition to managing travel expenses, businesses often incur other costs, such as office supplies or client-related expenses. An expense management platform automates the process of collecting, approving, and reimbursing these expenses. The right platform eliminates the need for paper receipts and manual data entry, using features like receipt scanning and credit card transaction importing.
An ideal system will automate approval workflows, speeding up reimbursements and ensuring proper oversight by allowing access delegation within your finance team. Most importantly, your expense management tool should seamlessly integrate with your travel management platform to offer a unified view of travel and other business expenses.
Key Features of an Expense Management Platform:
-
Automatic receipt scanning and data capture
-
Credit card transaction importation
-
Expense approval workflows with customizable rules
-
Easy access delegation for finance teams
-
Corporate card reconciliation
-
User-friendly interface with minimal learning curve
-
Integration with your travel management system
Platforms like AirBooking provide one-click integration with leading expense management solutions such as Pleo, Divvy, and Spendesk, allowing for seamless automation of travel and non-travel expenses.
3. Roll Out and Integrate Your Platforms
Once you’ve chosen the best travel and expense management platforms, it’s time to implement them across your organization. The setup process typically includes adding all travelers and admins to the systems, defining travel policies, and configuring approval workflows.
To ensure successful automation:
-
Set up dynamic budgets that adjust according to travel destinations.
-
Automate expense approvals based on predefined rules.
-
Inform employees about new tools for submitting expenses, such as mobile apps for scanning receipts.
After both platforms are fully integrated, you can either consolidate travel expense data within your expense management tool or bring general expense data into your travel management system. This integration will offer deeper insights into both travel-related expenses and broader business expenditures, enhancing your ability to analyze costs and improve financial decision-making.
Benefits of Automating T&E Management
By automating expense management for business travel, your organization will enjoy several advantages, including:
-
Reduced manual workload: Automation minimizes paperwork and manual data entry.
-
Increased visibility: Gain real-time insights into travel and expense spending.
-
Faster approvals and reimbursements: Automation speeds up the entire process, from submission to reimbursement.
-
Improved compliance: Integrated travel policies help ensure employees adhere to company guidelines.
-
Enhanced decision-making: Real-time data enables better budget management and financial planning.
Final Thoughts
Automating your business travel expense management can transform your organization’s approach to T&E. By leveraging integrated travel and expense management platforms, you’ll save time, reduce errors, and gain valuable insights that allow your teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. Start by choosing best-in-class solutions that meet your company’s needs and enjoy the benefits of streamlined, automated expense management.
