Travel and Expense
Fact from Fiction: A Checklist to Find the Right T&E Solution
Do you use different logins to book your business trips and submit expense reports? If so, then you have cobbled-together applications and disconnected data instead of a truly integrated system.
Can you capture bookings happened outside of your corporate travel system? If not, then it’s difficult to readily monitor spending and ensure compliance.
Is your current solution a generic system made to work with travel & expense processes instead being designed to manage them? If it is, then you likely lack the support and scalability you need.
It’s safe to say you didn’t intend to end up with a T&E system that’s unsatisfactory. Often, the problem is that solutions just don’t live up to the promises vendors make about them. About integrations, about scalability, about the spending visibility and insights you’ll get, about a whole lot more.
Sorting through options and promises isn’t easy. To help you separate fact from fiction, we’ve put together a new checklist, Selling Promises Isn’t the Same as Keeping Them. Across several categories, it offers concrete suggestions on “what should you look for” and “what should you avoid.” Use it to assess various solutions and determine whether they truly meet your needs.
Faster isn’t better if it adds steps
Look for a solution that plays well with others, incorporating native integrations that keep work and data moving instead of requiring extra work by your team. Its mobile apps should streamline work through features like taking pictures of receipts and automatically sending data to expense reports.
Continuous improvement beats occasional compliance and control
A robust, integrated solution should incorporate AI and machine learning, so that it gets ever more adept when checking expenses and determining whether they comply with your spending policies. It should also be able to capture bookings no matter where your travellers make them.
Seeing your spending is better than seeing the future
Your solution should provide an up-to-the-minute picture of spending, along with extensive analytics that allow you to dig deeper and forecast. Dashboards, turn-key and customisable reports, and access to human experts who can help with metrics and reporting should be part of that picture.
If it doesn’t scale, it isn’t a solution
The technology should readily expand and adapt as your business does, while maintaining a foundation that ensures spending is visible and compliant. It should create a flexible travel program using multiple suppliers and partners and allow you to add services as you need them. All the while, it provides the support needed by employees, from travellers to the IT and finance teams, through both in-solution, self-service learning tools and readily accessible in-person support.
Find truth, detect fiction
With labor and budgets tight, ensuring your T&E management is as efficient as possible is essential. To get that efficiency, the time is right to make leaps in improvement instead of tweaks.