Whenever you have a corporate policy of any kind that fails, it’s almost certainly the result of multiple problems rather than just one.
The same goes for any corporate travel policies that you have as well, including travel expense management. It’s very important that your company have a solid travel expense management policy, because paying for your employees to travel as required can end up being one of the biggest corporate mistakes that you incur.
Here are the top business travel expense management mistakes to avoid:
Having Unclear Policies
Fundamentally, the biggest mistake that your company can make in regards to travel expense management is having poor or unclear policies to begin with.
Truth be told, travel expense policies may be complicated, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be difficult to understand. For example, your policies should be very easy to understand in regards to the cost of hotels, flights, and food.
Does your company have any partnerships with airlines or hotel chains? If so, that should be clearly stated in the travel business policy.
In short, your travel expense policies should be clearly written out for your employees to turn to. They need to know what part of their required business travels your company will pay for and what your company won’t pay for, and under what circumstances they will need to take over their travel business costs.
Handling Everything Manually
Business travel expenses are something that do not need to be handled manually. Manual processes simply make it exponentially more difficult to remain on top of tracking costs, especially if your company has dozens if not hundreds of employees sending in their travel bills.
You simply don’t need to have additional employees managing your business travel expenses manually, such as on a spreadsheet. Instead, you need to automate as much of it as you can in regards to data entry and processing. Yes, you’ll need employees to oversee this process, but using software to automate your travel expense entry and processing will help them save a lot of time.
Making Travel Costs Excessive
As we noted previously, business travel costs for your employees can end up being one of the larger costs that your company is forced to incur.
This is why your company needs to carefully consider how to save on business costs as much as you can. And while the obvious solution may be to force your employees to pay for their business travel, the truth is you don’t want to overburden them financially and should take action to pay for as much of their business travel as possible.
Better solutions would include limiting the amount of business trips and partnering with airlines and hotel chains to get lower prices for your employees.
Business Travel Expense Management Mistakes To Avoid
Having a solid and effective travel expense management policy in place should be a top priority for your company, especially if your employees have to travel often. To ensure that happens, keep each of the above mistakes in mind and strive to avoid making them.
