Understanding Your Travel Management System- Part I | Software | Computers

When companies grow in size, they also grow in number and spill over to different locations. When the number of employees increase, it becomes difficult for the managers to accurately track employee related expenses. The age where all the tracking and reporting would be done manually is long gone. Now, organizations rely on intensive software solutions to handle this task. The major advantages of automating expense tracking are that the chances of errors drastically reduce, auditing expenses are reduced, reimbursement is faster and more efficient, and the finance department is able to obtain a clear visibility on employee spend. One of the major sections of spend that gets particularly hazy is the travel expenses. Travelling on business is unavoidable, and travelling takes you to different countries. Going about your business by constantly worrying about keeping track of the expenditure hardly seems to fit into the definition of giving your work your full attention. By switching to automated travel expense tracking, all you have to do is stop worrying about the bills.

Most of the travel management solutions available in the market are accessible over the internet and are easily integrated with the leading finance systems. The employees can claim their travel reimbursement both online and offline. This way, the employees can file their expenses on the go. The travel management solutions are available as a hosted solution or a licensed version depending on the clients’ requirements.

With a travel management system, an employee can avail pre-trip approval from the management. S/he can enter all the travel details such as hotel reservations, flight tickets, car rentals etc. and send it to the manger for authorisation and approval. If the claims are found to be compliant with the company policies, the claim is approved. If the claim overshoots the policies, an e-mail is sent to the employee informing them of the violation. The traveller can then modify the details or provide justification for the charges and the claim is once again sent to the manager for approval. With an online system, the traveller need not even be in the office to get his pre-travel claims approved. All supporting data can be uploaded from any location.

Creating an expense report after the travelling concludes also becomes quite simple. If the traveller has submitted a pre-trip report, s/he can modify the same to include the latest expense. If the pre-trip expenses have not been submitted, the user can start from scratch and include the credit card charges and other overhead expenses. The charges can be split to indicate the expense division for better visibility to the management. The management can even compile a single report by drawing data from all the employee-submitted travel reports. When these reports are audited, the team can easily identify the activities that drain company resources more than required.

Irrespective of whether a pre-travel claim has been submitted or not, the system invariably runs the claims against the company travel policy and flags down all the claims that violates the policy. The system sets two levels of exception: hard exception and soft exception. Soft exceptions are cases where a specific travel expense of the employee overshoots the budget by a small margin. This can be easily rectified by just providing an acceptable justification after which the claim is escalated to the successive department for reimbursement. Hard exceptions are inflexible and come into effect when the costs have been tremendously overshot. The system prevents further processing of the claim until this exception has been rectified by the employee.

One of the major advantages of the system is that it allows the traveller to submit a scanned copy of the supporting documents and receipts as an image attachment which gets automatically tagged to the appropriate expense report. Thus, the finance department does not have to follow up with the employee to obtain the original versions of the receipts and can directly proceed to payment. The travellers also do not have to keep fussing over maintaining countless receipts and travel bills. Travel management systems are definitely turning out to be a win-win for all.

Enaviya provides Travel and Expense Management, Expense Management Solution and Travel & Expense Management Application

via freearticles.mohul.com