future of business travel guide

Introduction

Business travel disruptions have become all too common. Evolving business practices, technical innovation, and climate uncertainty require a more seamless travel experience for admins and travelers. While organizations can’t predict the future, they can position themselves to evolve with it.

This eBook addresses the key issues that organizations need to consider to ensure they are ready for the future of business travel by looking at six considerations to enhance T&E management and position your organization for continued success.

Automate policy enforcement to free up your teams

In our 2023 Emburse Spend Management Trends Report, 26% of companies described travelers’ understanding of their policy needing improvement, and 6% rated it poor or non-existent 1. Travel policies must be living, well-communicated documents that address changes and trends. If not, they could confuse travelers and approvers and open the door for financial and other liabilities.

With flexible or hybrid working arrangements becoming the norm, employees have grown accustomed to buying everything with personal or corporate cards. Organizations using manual expense reporting methods experience higher rates of out-of-policy costs. As a result, unmanaged spend is on the rise. Also called indirect or tail spend, “unmanaged spend” describes transactions that fall between invoice-based procurement purchases and traditional T&E spend and often come out of a team’s budget.

Growing numbers of travel leaders also realize that the business traveler’s experience must be considered alongside compliance when devising and enforcing a travel policy. According to the iCIMS 2024 Workforce Report, 51% of workers surveyed are considering looking for a new job before the end of 2024, with 13% stating company benefits as their reason for potentially making this switch 2.

With this workforce uncertainty, it’s vital to help your company adapt and innovate to keep talent. Offering flexibility in travel purchases, like relaxing lowest-fare requirements for more convenient flights, can increase employee happiness and is one way you can positively impact your workers. Even if this could have minor negative financial implications, it could positively impact traveler satisfaction and long-term employee retention.

Changing policies or adjusting compliance tolerance should not place an additional burden on approvers or the finance team. Travel booking and expense tools should quickly incorporate policy changes to automate enforcement. Expense management systems can streamline reimbursements by including permit policy tolerances into approval rules, eliminating the back-and-forth over minor policy discrepancies.

1 “2023 Spend Management Trends Report”. Emburse. https://www.emburse.com/insights/2023-spend-management-trends-report

2 “2024 Workforce Report”. iCIMS. https://www.icims.com/2024-workforce-report/

Boost employee satisfaction with a mobile-centric experience

Over the decade, business travel innovation focused on enhancing travelers’ experience via mobile devices. Consumers have become accustomed to powerful and easy-to-use apps in their personal lives and expect the same experience at work. For an organization to ensure that it can support its business travelers in the future, it must provide its employees with mobile-centric solutions. As such, organizations must ensure that their travel and expense ecosystems are optimized to deliver a seamless mobile experience from the initial booking to submitting expenses for the trip.Some critical features that organizations should consider for their travel and expense providers’ mobile offerings include:

Book and amend trips

Bookings and changes should flow directly into a user’s expense solution without needing further intervention from the user, even if the organization uses standalone booking and expense management solutions.

Upload receipts and submit expense reports

Entering physical or electronic receipts into the expense solution should be straightforward. For a solution to be effective, it must also effectively and accurately automate critical processes, including the accurate and rapid extraction of data and the ability to create data-rich expense line items from the receipt automatically.

Integrate with other solutions

Make it easy for travelers to seamlessly book, pay, and expense transactions for third-party, app-driven solutions without needing to submit receipts manually.

Reduce fraud and wasteful spending with automated auditing

According to TravelPerk, expense fraud ranks among the most common types of employee fraud. With an estimated 5% of revenues typically lost to fraud worldwide, expense fraud alone accounts for 14.5% of all fraud uncovered. Luckily, expense tools are increasing their capabilities to detect and prevent fraud before an expense is submitted. Duplicate receipt detection is just one feature organizations can implement to reduce their exposure. Another growing trend is mandating employees place T&E spend on corporate cards.

Auditing also plays an essential role in the fight against expense fraud. However, it does come with its challenges. Manual auditing is time-intensive and costly and measured against the potential benefit of the fraudulent activity prevented. In addition, manual audits are the auditor’s opinion and can lead to false positives.

With the help of technology, forward-thinking organizations are reevaluating how to conduct expense auditing. Instead of focusing on specific infringements, organizations conduct audits that look at spend holistically. By focusing on the bigger picture, organizations can reduce the time spent chasing minor infractions and focus on larger patterns or trends that could identify more systemic abuses.

Streamline payment processes while boosting compliance

Corporate cards have become far more prevalent over the past several years as organizations become more aware of their benefits, including cash back and fraud prevention capabilities. As cards move from physical to virtual, the ability to control purchases at the point of sale has become more sophisticated. Forward-looking organizations are taking the adoption and use of corporate payment and credit cards to the next level.

Historically, individuals endured the lengthy process of applying for physical cards from their finance department and waiting for delivery. Once the finance team receives the card statements, they manually reconcile them with the traveler’s submitted receipts and review any discrepancies with the cardholder. Preventing out-of-policy spend was difficult, and the traveler often needed to reimburse the organization.

The introduction of virtual cards, tied with more effective built-in spend controls, has made issuing and controlling corporate cards straightforward. Cards can be requested directly from the organization’s finance team, and virtual cards can be processed and delivered to mobile phones instantaneously. Administrators can also manage these on a far more granular level. Particular MCC (merchant category code) types can restrict payments, such as hotels and airlines, and even to individual chains, airlines, or vendors. Spend limits can be similarly enforced as desired, such as over a specified period or a maximum amount for a hotel stay or air ticket. These spend policies can be implemented on a user-by-user basis and adjusted in real-time.

This flexibility also allows organizations to expand corporate cards beyond the traditional road warriors. Organizations’ card administrators can issue time-bound cards to infrequent travelers and interviewees, who can easily book interview travel, avoiding the need to submit expenses after the fact. Organizations that adopt next-generation corporate card programs with forward-thinking providers can ensure that they stay ahead of emerging trends in business travel payments.

Drive efficiency with a seamless end-to-end experience

A streamlined, highly-automated solution for entering receipts and creating and submitting expense reports is essential, but it plays a relatively minor role in expense processing. Automatic compliance checking, approval routing, and integrations with third-party systems are critical components of a rich, end-to-end experience.A future-ready expense management solution must be flexible to the line-item level, automatically route expenses for approval, and incorporate an organization’s policy-based routing rules. It should also have the ability to alter routing rules as change demands.

Approved reimbursement expenses should easily export data to the relevant systems, including accounting/ERP systems for GL entry, ACH reimbursement payment processor, and a billing solution for client-related expenses.An expense solution’s underlying architecture must be flexible enough to enable real-time integration with other solutions via APIs or web services. Even secure file transfers can be sufficient to connect disparate systems depending on organizational needs. The ultimate goal is to capture the data transacted in these systems to allow the data to drive strategic decision-making.

Make smarter, data-driven decisions by leveraging analytics

CFOs and other organizational leaders increasingly expect decisions based on meaningful, accurate, and timely data. Travel agencies can deliver detailed reports on air, hotel, and rail bookings. However, there are still large volumes of spend that these reports need to capture, such as out-of-channel bookings, ground transportation spend, and meal expenses. All spend, whether purchased on corporate-paid cards or with personal funds, passes through an expense management solution. Expense management solutions for medium-to-large organizations can contain several million individual data points about every aspect of employee spend—what was purchased, the amount, time, and location of the transactions.

Effective data analysis enhances:

• Your ability to analyze spend based on a wide range of parameters—department, location, category, etc. Identifying any trends or anomalies in travel and other expenses that may be out-of-policy is essential. For example, does one office spend higher-than-average amounts on meals and entertainment than others? Does a particular department tend to book travel outside approved channels?
• Your awareness about how much is spent in a category and with a particular vendor. For travel, an airline or a hotel chain can provide the insight required to secure favorable rates for maintaining a high spend volume and monitor spend with a preferred vendor on an ongoing basis to maintain the volume necessary for discounts. In addition, finance teams can drill down into the data to identify potential pockets of non-compliance, determine why, and correct the behavior.
• Your identification of spend patterns from individual submitters. You could uncover employees frequently submitting expenses just below the threshold for requiring a receipt or expense approvers continually approving out-of-policy spending.

A complete picture of travel and expense spend is a critical first step in more thoughtful decision- making. Effectively analyzing this data can deliver substantial financial benefits to organizations when used to support these decisions.

Future-proof your travel program with an automated T&E solution

Becoming a future-ready organization requires action on several levels. Adopting next-generation technology is a vital enabler of this process. But it must be accompanied by organizational change and a willingness to be flexible.

Choosing solutions with the flexibility to quickly adapt to the shifting tides of technology, travel, and organizational change is essential. Solutions must communicate easily with other corporate systems as part of a broader ecosystem to integrate new software seamlessly. They should also have the flexibility for business rules—from expense policy changes to approval routing due to organizational change.

It also means keeping track of changes within the overall travel and business environments and responding to them agilely. With a changing workforce demographic that is more technology-centric and savvy, talent management teams are increasingly focusing on an optimized user experience. Their work and personal lives increasingly intersect, and they expect the same high-quality and seamless user experience with their business tools that they have out of the office.

About Emburse

Emburse delivers innovative end-to-end travel and expense management solutions that solve for what’s next for forward-thinking organizations. Our suite of award-winning products is trusted by more than 12 million finance and travel leaders, and business professionals around the world. More than 20,000 organizations in 120 countries, from Global 2000 corporations and small-medium businesses to public sector agencies and nonprofits, count on us to manage business travel and employee expenses with ease.

Our highly automated, mobile-first solutions streamline business travel planning, booking and management, and eliminate manual, time-consuming expense submissions, approval and reconciliation. We deliver efficiency and time savings, increase financial visibility, enhance spend control and compliance, and improve the entire business travel experience. This empowers our customers and their teams to deliver meaningful value for their organizations.

For more information visit emburse.com, or follow our social channels at @emburse.