After a series of global disruptions, inflation is now impacting the world of business travel. In the last few months, many industries, including business travel, have been significantly affected by increased costs, forcing businesses to make more careful expenditures.
Therefore, companies are now switching to advanced solutions like B2B travel software.
This type of software can help streamline your processes, increase visibility into expenses, and reduce errors that lead to cost leakages. Our savings calculator can help you estimate how much you can save by using a B2B travel solution.
It helps companies identify cost leakages and offers solutions to mitigate them. Let’s look at some of how B2B travel software can eliminate cost leakages:
1. Automates Expense Management
Expense submission and filing is one of the most challenging tasks for employees, travel managers, and the finance team as they need to track every expense incurred during the business trip. Employees need to collect paper receipts as proof of expense.
After this, they need to manually enter the details of the costs in the expense report. The finance team, on the other hand, must segregate these expenses from the physical receipts under different categories in a spreadsheet.
While doing all this, there are high chances of data entry errors and loss of a few physical receipts, leading to wrong calculations and results. This, in turn, can impact your company’s revenue and overall financial health.
With the help of B2B travel management software, you can automate the expense management process. The software streamlines the process of tracking, recording, and categorizing expenses incurred during a business trip.
Employees need to scan their receipts using software that automatically captures all the essential information using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. Hence, there is no chance of any data entry error or miscalculation. With this, you get clear visibility of the costs incurred by employees.
2. Facilitates Fraud Detection and Prevention
Cost leakages can also occur due to fraud and misuse of travel expenses. As per the ACFE (Association of Certified Fraud Examiners), organizations lose around 5 % of revenue annually to fraud.
Some employees can commit fraud by submitting duplicate bills or by altering the data. If the finance team or the travel managers are not checking properly, mismanagement of funds is bound to occur.
A B2B travel software includes advanced fraud detection and prevention features that help companies identify and prevent any fraudulent activity. The software verifies the reports and alerts the finance if incomplete or duplicate receipts and bills in the wrong category are submitted.
This helps you identify and prevent fraud and saves time and money in the long run.
3. Provides Travel Consultation
If your company wants to reduce travel costs, it is essential to know if employees are spending more than necessary. For instance, employees may book flight tickets a few days before their business trip.
However, at that time, the flight prices are the highest. Additionally, unmonitored spending during the business trip, such as incidental expenses and meals, can significantly add to business travel costs.
Modern company travel software offers advanced features such as a virtual travel consultant. A virtual travel consultant provides actionable insights into areas where you can cut costs by comparing them against industry benchmarks. It also analyzes your employees’ historical travel and spending trends.
Moreover, you get a 360-degree view of your travel process, which will help you optimize your business travel management process. This lets you understand areas of cost leakages and ways to eliminate them.
4. Provides Real-Time Notifications
If your company uses the traditional method of managing expenses, then there is no way your travel managers or the finance team can find out how much employees are spending.
Only after employees return from the trip can you identify if they have spent more than the company’s budget or are out of policy. And if employees have spent more than the required limit, it can significantly impact your company’s revenue.
The best way to identify if your employees spend within the expense limits is with the help of B2B travel software. The software instantly transfers the expense details to the expense tracking dashboard whenever an employee files an expense report.
This way, the finance team can get real-time notifications of the amount spent and a consolidated view of employees who frequently spend more than required or show abrupt spending patterns.
This level of transparency helps travel managers and the finance department make informed decisions about their travel spending and take the necessary steps to reduce costs.
5. Ensures Travel Policy Compliance
Your company’s travel policy is the backbone of the corporate travel management process. However, getting employees to comply with travel policy is a major challenge most companies face. This may be because the employees may misinterpret the policy updates, or they are simply unaware. Another main reason is that they cannot view the policies in real-time when they want to make any changes to the trip or update their expenses. Such policy violations can lead to cost leakages.Â
You can avoid these issues by investing in travel software to help ensure travel policy compliance. The software integrates with your company’s travel policy and can be configured to offer any personalized booking. This way, you don’t have to manually check for any policy violations, as the software automatically detects out-of-policy expenditures and alerts the managers and the finance department.
This level of control helps companies maintain a tight grip on their travel spending and ensures that employees follow the company’s travel policy.
6. Integration with Other Systems
The expense spreadsheet your travel managers or the finance department use to manage costs cannot be integrated into other systems such as accounting, payrolls, sales, etc. They must manually retrieve and upload the data into other systems.
However, with manual work, there is a broad scope of errors. Even minor errors, such as copy-paste or data entry, can cause catastrophic consequences.
A B2B travel software integrates with other systems, such as accounting and payroll, reducing the chances of cost leakages due to manual errors or duplication. For instance, when you integrate the software into other systems, any data updated in one system gets automatically updated in another.
Hence, there is less chance of any manual errors. When you automate these processes, you can improve your financial bottom line.
7. Advanced Analytics and Data Insights
Business travel analytics are essential for monitoring employee travel spending and making smart decisions such as budgeting and forecasting.
A report by IBM shows that around 58% of medium and large companies still use spreadsheets to manage their overall costs. However, this method is unreliable as they miss out on essential travel KPIs that can help them improve their financial performance.
Therefore, the right company travel software or B2B travel solution offers access to advanced business travel analytics. Advanced analytics lets travel managers and finance teams understand employees’ spending patterns. The analytics dashboard of this software analytics dashboard gives you a consolidated view of travel-related expenses. This helps them get a better understanding and detailed insight into the company’s cash flow and identify areas of cost leakages.
Put an End to Cost Leakages with B2B Travel Software
A B2B travel software offers companies many benefits, including eliminating cost leakages. With technologically advanced features such as automated expense management, virtual travel consultant, advanced analytics, and more, it is easy for companies to streamline their travel process.
If your company is also looking to save travel costs and make business travel seamless, then look no further than ITILITE. ITILITE is a SaaS-based B2B travel software that streamlines your company’s travel and expense management through automation. We offer advanced analytics, help reduce fraud, ensure expense policy compliance, provide virtual travel consultant, and many more.
Book a free demo with ITILITE to know how its advanced features help you save costs.
