Travel and expense spend typically represents 10% of a company’s overall operating budget, and as a travel manager, you work hard to ensure these costs remain in check. Not only is it essential to negotiate volume discounts and incentives with airlines, hotels, rental cars and other vendors, but there also has to be a balance between enforcing travel expense policy compliance, while maintaining employee happiness.
Travel managers need an expense management solution that makes it easy for employees to stay within policy, guiding their choices with policy reminders as they build their trip pre-approval. The solution must make expenses straightforward and hassle-free for employees, instead of adding another burden.
Travel Expense Visibility When and Where It’s Needed
Travel expense visibility and reporting are vital for corporate travel professionals, not just for keeping the budget in check but also for tracking and enforcing compliance. Increased scrutiny from CFOs also requires constant travel spend analysis, along with on-demand reporting. Up-to-date travel expense analytics are also essential to accurately gauge spend and bookings volume, information that’s critical to negotiate better deals with hotels, airlines and rental car companies.
Travel and HR Leaders Know Productivity on the Road Is Key
Business travelers already deal with so many stressors on the road; their expense reports shouldn’t be one of them. The latest expense management solutions are designed to reduce stress, rather than increase it, with global capabilities, mobile features, and streamlined functionalities that increase business traveler happiness, compliance and productivity.
These same streamlined functionalities make travel and HR leaders happy when it comes to introducing the expense claim solution to new employees. That’s because the ideal solution:
- Is easy and intuitive to use
- Doesn’t require training
- Looks and works the same on every mobile device
- Teaches employees the T&E policies every time they start a pre-approval or expense claim
- Balances traveler contentment with compliance
Travel Managers Need Their Voices Heard in the Decision-making Process
Expense management systems need to satisfy accounting and finance personnel who strive for intelligent workflows according to business logic. But those same systems need to satisfy travel managers, as well. They need a unique set of functionality from an expense system that includes:
- Percentage of compliant and non-compliant charges/transactions
- Hotel folio parsing
- Uber integration
- Sabre integration
- Amadeus integration
- Slicing and dicing of department/location/division travel spend
- Reports for the CFO on-demand
- Volume and spend for better negotiations with vendors
Find an expense claim solution that fulfills all of the above, and you’ve found Chrome River. Chrome River additionally has the ability to integrate with the ever-changing slate of financial systems, online booking tools, corporate card programmes, and travel management companies, remaining as the one constant on which travel managers can solidly depend.
