How To Choose The Best Travel Management Solution?
Anup Sheshadri
If your team requires to travel, then you are likely expending admin time to manage their travel. These admin activities could be related to:
- Handling payments and/ or reimbursements
- Managing approvals to control budget
- Maximizing utilization unused airline credits
To manage travel efficiently, you need a solution that will help reduce your admin time and make your teams more productive.
So what’s the no-brainer way to choose a travel management solution that will make your team super-human?
1. Handling payments and/ or reimbursements
- If you have reimbursement process in place, it’s a sign that you’re already expending too much admin time in managing travel. But good news is that you can avoid this if you tweak your process just a little to handle payments more efficiently and eliminate reimbursement from travel process altogether.
- Travel management solution that allows you to issue smart cards can give your employees a simple way to pay for what’s needed while finance teams get one place to better control, manage and track business spend. The software’s built-in controls on smart cards ensure spend compliance, real-time spend visibility, and automated expense reporting.
- Such efficient solution will allow you to completely eliminate reimbursement process and handle things productively at the payment level itself.
2. Managing and controlling budgets
- Depending on your team size and purpose of business trips, you might need a stricter policy for one team versus the other. This calls for an ability to customize budget controls differently for different teams.
- Additionally, cost of travel could vary widely for different destinations. One simplest way to handle such situations is to set budget policy relative to the cheapest “logical option” in that destination. A travel management tool having extensive inventory can have these logics built into the system so that you don’t have to do any destination level cost research.
- Moreover, in general, your employees will always comply with your travel policies. In exceptional cases, some employees may need to book travel outside of given policy. In such cases, without making it too intimidating experience for employee, the travel management tool should allow them to request approval which will allow to have visibility and control for any out of policy bookings.
3. Maximizing utilization of unused airline credits
- Flight trips get cancelled for many reasons. In most cases, airlines offer the value of ticket as credit that can be used for any future travel. But utilizing unused travel credits has challenges, and many companies consider it as sunk cost. If you use a tool that allows you to automatically apply any available credit towards next flight, then this won’t be a sunk cost. There shouldn’t be a need for a manual process to document, search and utilize the credits.
What are the options to consider?
One option is that you subscribe to a suite of different products to solve these varied challenges in pieces i.e. you buy travel management, expense management and payment management solutions separately. Some of such solutions could be:
- Travel Management: TravelPerk, Deem, TravelBank…
- Expense Management: Expensify, Zoho Expense, SAP Concur…
- Payment Management: Divvy, Brex, other corporate banks…
But having separate solutions means multiple layers of processes and execution effort, which will likely not save admin time or just marginally improve efficiency if at all. So, if you want to simplify all these into one solution, Routespring is great option, which is a modern travel and payment solution. With its travel native payment software, you won’t need to look for multiple solutions. Routespring is designed to provide refreshing experience whether employees pay for travel, routine expenses, spot purchases, or software subscriptions, while finance teams get one place to better control, manage and track business spend.
About Routespring: Routespring is a corporate travel management software optimized for centralized payment for all travel so that you can potentially eliminate the reimbursement process.
