Set up expense management automation for business travel

If you’re finding business travel expense management (T&E) challenging to control – you’re not alone! 

Slow T&E processes affect everyone in your business – from finance teams, to travel managers and the travelers themselves. If you have employees traveling to numerous different cities, your finance team will be frantically trying to track down countless flights, hotels, ground transportation, and food vendors. As travel expenditure varies from month to month, without the right tools in place, your organization risks a lot of time-consuming manual work and potential errors from manual processes. 

Put simply, when your team has less paperwork to deal with, they can focus on higher-impact initiatives. 

In this article, we’ll take you through practical steps that will help you save time and automate your expense management processes. 

How to speed up expense management for everyone

Everyone at your company deserves faster expense management processes, so they can spend less time on manual operations and more time on meaningful projects.

To set up your company right, you’ll need both a travel management platform and an expense management platform.

• Travel management platform – To book, approve, and analyze travel spend. 
• Expense management platform – To add, approve, and reimburse expenses (all business expenses, not just travel).

Let’s dive deeper into why you need both of these systems, how they work together, and how to choose the best options for your accounting team.

1. Choose a best-in-class travel management platform

A travel management platform can drastically reduce manual work in several important ways. First, travel managers won’t need to book business trips on behalf of travelers, who can instead book the options they want within company policy. There’s also less back and forth when it comes to approving trips. Travel platforms offer customizable approval workflows so that approvals are transparent and automatic.

Travel management platforms reduce manual effort on the financial side as well. There should be no need for employees to pay upfront and request reimbursement. Rather, the platform should offer consolidated monthly invoicing. This can shave dozens of hours of hassle off of your normal manual process if you’re used to wrangling hundreds of invoices at the end of every month.

Key features in a successful travel management platform

• Easy self-booking with…