Top 8 Ways To Control Corporate Travel Expenses

An expense management process for employees can be challenging, tedious, and time-consuming, especially for individuals who are out of the office. Employees have a natural tendency to maximize their personal profit. It turns out to be a repeatedly tempting proposition, especially when done at the expense of others.

Chastising employees constantly over their uneducated use of their expense accounts is ineffective. It is exhausting and exasperating from an expense management viewpoint, and very restraining from an employee’s viewpoint.

Managing your team’s spending is a matter of strategy and is a necessity for controlling operational costs in your business, collecting invoices, and for carrying out analytical accounting.

What are the best ways for controlling corporate travel expenses? Here are a few tips:

a) Cloud-based Expense Management System
A Cloud-based Expense Management system, with policy enforcement carried out by management, can drastically improve any bad feelings employees have around expenses. The cloud technology can grant system access to employees, no matter where they are, and promote real-time reporting with the use of digital receipts.

b) Real-time Processing Benefits
Collecting and storing away paper receipts for weeks is messy and disorganized for employees to manage. There is also a higher chance for some receipts to get permanently lost. But, when using the right type of expense management software, it is fast and easy to digitize receipts.

A good expense management software system ensures that all important details needed for examination on expense reporting are shown in one place, such as an expenditure category, amount, and receipts required in order to back-up the approval process.

c) Expense Protocols and Procedure
A cloud-based expense management system helps the decision-making procedure and helps in promoting responsible expenditures. The product you select to use will permit the expense management team to design and install any automated protocols along with the approval process. This can also help when employees incur future expenses.

d) Expense Expenditure Policies
An expense expenditure policy can be utilized to organize limits and ensure there are working guidelines inside a cloud-based expense management program. Say an employee goes over the maximum amount for a particular claim, an early warning can be given from the system and any breach of policy can be investigated by management. The perfect expense management software can save your company’s money and your employee’s time.

e) Setting Up Budgets for Expense Categories
One of the best ways to control employee expenses is by setting up budgets for any expense. This should include hotel stays, restaurant bills, flight bookings, purchases of supplies, etc. Explain to your employees how much they will be able to incur and also emphasize that they will not be reimbursed if they spent beyond limits.

f) Time Limit for Reimbursements
Try to set up a particular time limit for expense reimbursements. This will help you to collect any required proof of purchases on time, and also allow you to not have to chase after your employees get their invoices.

g) Suitable Payment Method
A customized method is highly effective and helpful for employees to control expenses. Using credit cards for travel that are loaded with specific amounts is helpful for all employees as they can pay for a broad range of incurred expenses many places such as restaurants, hotels, flights, petrol, and more.

h) Expense Report Fraud Tracking
According to a recent study, expense report fraud effects many companies and costs them large amounts of money every year. The most effective way of preventing it is to get a clear view of expense reports. Paper reports are easy to falsify, so abolishing them would be a wise decision. Once that is complete, many flexible payment solutions can be evaluated.

To Sum Up
Employees are the most valuable asset in a business. Employee engagement has a direct impact on the profitability and productivity of an organization. Low self-control in an employee can cause them to have lower effort in the workplace, so they tend to be distracted more often. Thus, maintaining self-control is an important task for all employees to do to make an organization more efficient.