Travel and Expense Management and How it Benefits Your Organization
By streamlining travel planning, a comprehensive corporate travel management platform gives a business a flexible and scalable way to manage corporate travel and expense management.
Travel and expense (T&E) management is a way for any organization to track and report on the travel behavior of its workforce. With a comprehensive T&E management program, including corporate travel policies to help set guidelines, you can easily keep costs within a finance-approved framework while providing a convenient solution for employees to travel.
Without solid corporate travel expense management, it’s easy to make minor mistakes that can lead to a world of torment. A lack of visibility on travel activity could lead to travel plans outside of a company’s negotiated rates, increasing costs without a travel manager noticing it. Outdated tech could come with extra costs to keep things properly integrated with corporate systems. And without anyone enforcing policy, you run the risk of non-compliance with the Internal Revenue Service, which nobody wants.
Corporate travel is hard enough as it is, but what if there was a way you could remove those challenges? What if there was a way to control costs, enforce compliance, and track it all with a click of a button? You could create a streamlined travel and expense management program that stops problems before they start. You could even create a travel experience your employees really want to use.
And with corporate travel management software, you can.
What does corporate travel management software do?
Corporate travel management software is designed to provide businesses with a platform to control costs, streamline processes, and maintain comprehensive records for air, hotel, and ground transportation accommodations. With a corporate travel management platform, travel managers can lower costs, improve forecasting, and minimize fraud, while finance managers can receive automatic reports for travel purchases to provide quick reconciliations and reimbursements.
When a business starts using corporate travel management software, it delivers a scalable and flexible solution to help its team with travel planning. And as a business grows, the right platform can enable travel managers to negotiate supplier rates by providing accurate and reliable data. Travel managers benefit further with simplified processes and tracking for travel spending, which helps save both time and money in the long run.
Evaluating options
There are a few ways you can identify what sort of corporate travel management solutions you need. One possible route is using an all-in-one travel and expense platform. All-in-one platforms are common solutions to handle both travel booking and expense management. While some travel managers may prefer working with only one vendor, an all-in-one T&E service isn’t without some quirks.
Although an integrated solution may offer a similar set of tools and features as an individual travel or expense app that employees can access, an all-in-one service also comes with limitations. These include a lack of flexibility to integrate with the tools you may already be using — requiring a full revision of the company’s T&E technology stack — an absence of critical travel content, an inability to customize the technology enough to accommodate your travel program, or software system updates that may not work for your company.
Another option is to employ more of a mix-and-match approach. By using individual, best-in-class solutions for travel booking and expense management that can easily integrate with each other, you can create an ideal corporate travel management platform for your company that also offers travelers an optimized travel experience.
If you’re already using tools that work well for your team, why give them up? No two organizations are alike, and with a way to combine all the different tools and applications you need, you can create a bespoke solution that’s optimized for your business.
Take a tech-first approach
At Deem, we recommend using a technology-first approach when evaluating a travel management platform. What are the features you need for your travel program? What services are you currently using, and are they working for you? If those services are working for you now, can your solution incorporate additional, innovative services as technology evolves?
When looking to create a travel management platform, make sure it can truly integrate with the software and tools that work for you. If you enjoy using a particular expense management platform, there’s no reason you have to change services to accommodate your travel software. We think it should be the other way around – the choice should be yours. A travel management platform should be able to adapt to your travel needs, whether for planning, tracking, or integrating with other tools.
An open ecosystem
With Deem, you get the powerful travel management platform, Etta, that can be seamlessly integrated with nearly any expense platform available today. If you want to stick with your current expense management solution, we’ve got you covered. Or, if you’d like to find an expense platform that’s better suited for your business, we support an expanding list of partners to make sure your needs are always met.
Designed with a people-first philosophy, Etta offers an effortless and intuitive user experience that helps improve adoption and control spending. Filled with self-service functionality to empower travelers on the go and within a finance-approved framework, Etta helps your employees easily book and modify travel plans on a reliable, robust platform.
Etta also helps keep travelers safe with the award-winning Travel SafetyCheck feature, which delivers health and safety information as a part of the booking process to help keep employees informed. Combined with features like one-click fare comparisons, simplified trip sharing, seat pinning, Automatic Ticket Exchange, and more, Etta empowers your team to design its own adventure with a platform that’s so easy and helpful, they won’t be able to imagine another trip without it.