How to optimize your business travel budget

Whether you’re working for a small business or a larger corporation, business travel can be a large expenditure, second only to payroll. With 84% of business travelers expected to take at least one trip in the next 6 months, making corporate travel cost effective has never been more important. 

The problem is, many CFO and Finance managers spend too much time chasing multiple invoices, receipts and logging into numerous travel platforms to get a grasp on how much of their business travel budget has already been spent.

This often chaotic process combined with lengthy expense reports makes it incredibly challenging to get ahead of the budget and make informed financial decisions in real-time. 

As business travel is typically a variable cost, if your company is booking corporate travel across various consumer platforms or via a traditional travel agent, rather than booking everything in one place, getting an accurate, up-to-date view on your spend so you can optimize your budget is not only stressful but nearly impossible. 

In this piece we’ll share our insights on how you can save money and make your budget work harder for you.

Real-time data is the key

If you want to optimize your business travel budget, having real-time data to hand will help you set benchmarks for your travel costs, create future budgets that reflect reality, and help you make smart decisions that will affect financial decisions in your current month and quarter. 

To gain better control of your budget, you need to have full visibility of all business travel expenses and be able to visualise the spend of every business trip by various categories. This will help you work out the average cost of business travel for each department, team, person, and/or office location. If you’re used to more manual, labor-intensive processes, this sounds like a dream, right? 

So how do you get the data you need?

The easiest way to get the data is to let your business travel booking tool collect it for you. 

This means moving away from allowing business travel managers and office managers to book their corporate travel on websites and apps designed for leisure trips and vacations. Avoid using traditional travel agencies to book your business trips too. Instead, we recommend using a modern booking platform specifically designed for business travel and most importantly, keeping the finance teams’ needs in mind. 

Ideally, the booking…