Empower employees to improve travel and expense management

Engaging employees is a win-win

Fast-growing venture-funded companies often fall into a trap of overspending that can derail growth. Expense control is often decentralized, which can result in unmanaged spend and inefficient processes that increase your burn rate. Other negative consequences include budget overruns, audit risks, and employee dissatisfaction if reimbursements are delayed.

That’s the last thing you want when you have to answer to investors. It’s critical to efficiently and precisely manage your company’s travel and expense spending.

Centralizing travel and expense management is about more than optimizing how your finance team operates. With the right corporate card, you can simplify workflows for all employees. Beyond saving time and improving productivity – it helps rally everyone around a common goal of smarter spending.

How can you do it? Here are some crucial strategies that we’ve seen work best for managing travel expenses:

Get people on board with using purpose-specific employee expense cards

Instead of relying on unmanaged plastic company cards, with a robust expense management platform you have more options. For example, you can issue virtual cards to meet specific needs. Your program administrator can determine the degree of customization with preset budgets, time limits, required expense categories and more. It helps keep spend in-policy, and ensures there is centralized, real-time tracking for all transactions.

For employees, travel and expense virtual cards give them purchasing power to meet important needs, while also providing clear spending policies. With Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions, you can block or limit usage at high-risk or off-policy merchants like luxury retail or personal services. By putting guardrails around usage, employees can’t mistakenly (or deliberately) use their corporate card for personal expenses. And virtual cards are more secure, reducing the risk of loss or theft when employees are on the road. 

Make it easier for people to manage their own spending

With traditional company cards, even if you assign employees a budget, tracking balances can fall by the wayside when they’re busy with work. Equipped with the right platform and mobile app, employees can easily gain real-time visibility. For contractors or infrequent business travelers, it can be particularly helpful to know how much budget they have left for meals or ad hoc expenses.

Help employees save time with mobile expense reporting

Remember that overspending isn’t just purchases, it’s also the costs for reporting and reconciling every expense. Inefficient manual processes for travel and expense management are a key culprit. Creating expense reports can be time-consuming for employees and result in errors, missing receipts and more. That’s why it’s vital to make expense submission as simple as possible.

With an AI-powered mobile app, users get a reminder as spend occurs and all they need to do is add a few details and snap a photo of the receipt. The system auto-generates the expense report. Automating the process empowers employees to do their part in promoting cost-efficiency to support growth.

Make it easier for people to meet needs on the fly

In a fast-paced environment, your people may suddenly need more lab supplies to meet milestones or have to fly to a last-minute client meeting. You can embed your travel and expense policies within the cardholder training and onboarding process, and use the system to automatically administer them. This allows you to enable people with what they need, when they need it.

We make managing travel expenses easier with SVB corporate cards and an integrated platform for travel and expense management – learn how we can help you stay on track for growth.