Get your arms around spiraling business travel expenses

Spending time on the road is a fact of life for people in the innovation economy. While we’ve all learned how to make the best of tools like Teams, Zoom and Slack, there’s no substitute to meeting with clients, teammates, and industry colleagues face-to-face. But inflation is continuing to hit hard, and we see it across the board in our airfare, hotel rates, meals, and car rentals. Cutting costs and increasing the efficiency of corporate travel and expense management have become top concerns for the CFOs of fast-growing companies.

What are the challenges with managing business travel expenses, and how can you solve them?

Business travel has rebounded and continues to grow

According to the 2024 Deloitte corporate travel study, nearly 60% of travel managers expect their business travel expenses to keep increasing about 15% a year. Deloitte noted that “half of travel managers report that their companies are encouraging or mandating lower-cost flights.”

Companies can always issue mandates. But there are often extenuating circumstances, particularly for businesses that are growing fast. The practical reality is that, as you scale, you have more people traveling and spending on behalf of the company. How do you enforce such mandates and enforce budgets without introducing a ton of new bureaucracy?

Often you can’t spot the out-of-policy spending until after the fact. Manual reconciliation processes compound the delays and increase the burden for both travelers and finance staff.

Key challenges in managing business travel expenses

For your finance and accounting teams, some common problems include:

• Keeping spend within budget for each traveler
• Ensuring use of approved travel vendors
• Tracking business travel expenses to manage cash flow 

These teams often don’t have the tools and resources to effectively oversee travel spending. They may be frustrated by the lack of real-time visibility, and travel and expense data may take weeks to trickle in from employees. And when travelers use personal cards and submit for reimbursement, it takes even longer to detect issues. 

Then there’s the cumbersome headache of manual expense reporting (a burden on employees), followed by time-intensive manual reviews and reconciliation by the finance staff. When you consider the total cost of business travel, you can’t overlook all the time it takes your workforce to manually compile and process receipts and reports.

Integrate booking into corporate travel and expense management

With a spend management platform built for efficiency, you can easily control and track spending by issuing virtual cards with pre-set travel budgets and time limits, and track card activity in real time across individual travelers and group trips. I work directly with SVB clients to help optimize travel policies, customize automated rules, and implement business travel and expense management without adding to bureaucracy.

While some companies allow employees to book business travel using any website or app, sourcing across random channels can be time-consuming for travelers, and may increase travel cost. To make booking more seamless—and invisibly enforce travel policies—I recommend that clients use an expense management platform with integrated travel booking.

For example, with SVB’s AI-powered spend management solution, your teams can manage travel bookings and expenses all through a single platform, using your approved providers. If people search for other travel options, they receive out-of-policy warnings, and assesses any exceptions before finalizing booking using automated approval flows. The system even automates reconciliation of those travel expenses, so end-to-end, the process of managing travel expenses is faster and easier.

Save time, cut costs, boost efficiency

Manual expense reporting and reconciliation drains employee time away from strategic work. It can take staff hours to organize every expense, adds burden for approvers, and the finance team may still have to track down receipts and enter data, sometimes into multiple systems.

Your teams save time and increase productivity when all of the pieces come together in one place. Company-issued cards, integrated travel booking, pre-approved spending, and a mobile app to capture receipts enables travelers automatically generate expense reports. This approach helps eliminate the need for employees to pay with a personal card, and the finance team gains real-time visibility and better control.

Put data to work for managing travel expenses

As your company tackles the top business travel challenges, one of the greatest gains may come from the insights you can generate from corporate card data. However, when business travel is paid for using diverse company cards and personal cards, payment data is fragmented and hard to access.

With a centralized platform for business travel and expense management, and customized virtual cards to empower employee spending, your finance team can unlock value from the data. For example:

• View total spend, average trip cost, in-policy trip ratio, top vendors and top travelers
• Slice and dice data by department, traveler, and geography
• Identify out-of-policy spending patterns
• Create custom reports, such as unused tickets, to help reduce unnecessary spend
• Obtain the data they need to negotiate rates with travel vendors 

Managing booking and card spend in the same platform centralizes travel payment data for more comprehensive and accurate spend analysis. Actionable insights give you the agility to identify trends, issues and opportunities for making improvements and cutting costs.

Choosing a solution that can grow with your business enables you to optimize over time as your workforce and spending scale up. SVB’s commercial card programs and expense management platform help solve travel spend management challenges while you meet evolving business needs.