Boosting Travel Expense Approvals and Refunds in No Time: Monthly Statistic Highlight
** Travelling on Business: Streamlining the Reimbursement Process**
Catching up with the pre-pandemic business travel pace means dealing with a flood of employee expense reports. Here is an insider's guide to accelerating the Travel & Entertainment (T&E) reimbursement process while unveiling hidden cost savings.
The Drum Beats Faster
Dig in as we delve into the cycle time required to approve and schedule T&E reimbursements and walk you through best practices for lightning-fast approvals. Organizations with swift processing times will save resources and keep both traveling employees and finance teams smiling. APQC finds that the top 25% of organizations can process T&E reimbursements in a jaw-dropping 3 days or less. Pretty quick!
Don't Let Delays Destroy Your Day
Being stuck with long approval times for T&E reports won't put anyone in a party mood - employees and finance teams alike. Besides annoying employees, slow reimbursements could cause headaches for finance teams down the line. For instance, the sooner T&E reports are approved, the smoother reconciliations become. Delays lead to difficulties tracking payments, making reconciliations a chaotic nightmare. Quick approvals keep things straightforward and merry for everyone.
Push the Button - Speed Up Your T&E Reimbursement
Optimized T&E reimbursement cycles guide employees through essential travel policies, collect documents effortlessly, automatically process requests, and spring cost savings. Top-tier organizations follow these three key practices to achieve these benefits.
- Clear and Enforceable Travel Policy
T&E can quickly turn into a Wild West show, with vague rules and lax oversight. A robust reimbursement policy incorporates input from stakeholders such as procurement, legal/compliance, finance, HR, and employees. It covers all aspects, including:
- Approval process, audits, fraud prevention, risk management, and health monitoring.
- Pre-approval required for overspending thresholds.
- Practical tips for booking travel and making purchases.
- Expense report specifics for requiring receipts and electronic submissions.
- Exception and dispute resolution processes.
Regularly train your travelers on T&E policies and procedures at least annually, not just during their onboarding. Leading organizations also conduct regular reviews to ensure that policies remain useful and relevant.
- Tech Up Your Travel Management
Nearly a fifth of employees would rather go to the dentist than file an expense report. Good news! Modern technology eliminates the pain from this process. AI-powered solutions guide employees through the entire T&E reimbursement process. They help upload receipts on mobile devices, automate analysis, process requests, and provide cost-saving ideas.
These tools also benefit your finance team by:
- Automatically enforcing travel policies.
- Enhancing workflows within the process.
- Boosting analytics capabilities for better cost management.
- Increasing visibility into travel booking and authorized options.
- Benchmark Your Performance
Benchmarking tracks T&E expenses over time, lets you compare your process with peers and competitors, and unearths improvement opportunities. APQC suggests monitoring a balanced set of measures, such as:
- Number of T&E disbursements per T&E "FTE" (Full-time Equivalent).
- Number of "FTEs" working on T&E reimbursements per $1 billion revenue.
- Total cost to process T&E disbursements per T&E disbursement.
Rev Up Your T&E Process
As business travel revs up, now's the perfect moment to overhaul your T&E process. Leading organizations rely on a combination of policy, technology, and benchmarking to accelerate T&E approval and spending. A pimped-up T&E process not only makes life easier for your finance team but also empowers your employees to complete expense reports faster, so they can focus on adding more value to your company.
- Streamlining the T&E reimbursement process can reveal hidden cost savings, especially for organizations that can process these reports in as little as 3 days, as found by APQC.
- Delays in T&E approvals can cause difficulties for finance teams during reconciliations, making it essential to approve reports quickly for a smoother and more straightforward process.
- To achieve optimal benefits from T&E reimbursement cycles, organizations should incorporate clear and enforceable travel policies, tap into advanced technology for effortless document collection and automated processing, and benchmark performance against industry peers.
- By optimizing T&E reimbursement processes with well-defined policies, technology, and performance benchmarking, organizations can enhance their finance teams' efficiency and enable employees to focus on generating more value for the business.
