Business travel may be an important aspect of your company, used to strengthen international client relationships and attend important meetings. Therefore, it’s important to manage all travel expenses to ensure trips are planned well and budgeted for, accordingly. Travel expense management is constantly evolving and your business needs to keep up with any ongoing changes.
This article will detail some of the most important changes to travel expense software and business travel trends in 2023, so your company can continue planning hassle-free business trips.
What is travel expense management?
Travel expense management software allows a company to document and process company travel business expenses and payments – these payments include transportation, accommodation and food.
The software allows an employee to book and pay for themselves using a corporate card, whilst your finance team can control their budget and view transactions.
Travel policies can be enforced automatically on each trip with this software, but these are always updated with changing times.
So, what changes to travel expense management should your business be aware of this year?
1. Integration of travel and expense management
In 2023, businesses can increase cost efficiency by adopting both travel and expense solutions in one.
Many companies can’t afford how inefficient these manual, older systems are, but these new solutions reduce manual labor and costs.
Instead, your business can obtain real-time management visibility, so better travel opportunities can be provided for employees.
2. Digitalization continues
With integration comes digitalization and as more people are working remotely, digitalizing these expenses has become especially crucial.
This also helps your accounting team to automate processes and identify more ways to save costs and create better financial forecasts.
In 2023, there are better ways to use a unified database with more accuracy and reliability.
It takes all the stress away from sorting out a business trip – and going paperless has made it a much easier process.
3. Cash flow efficiency
With the increased use of digitalization and automation in recent years, expense management systems used prior have become inefficient.
One of the biggest current changes to combat this inefficiency is the growing demand for a centralized and streamlined payment solution.
This often comes in the form of a single payment tool to track business expenses, including travel – managing everything at the click of a button.
4.Simple employee expense reporting
Gone are the days of having to save receipts from all expenses – it is a time-consuming task that may be hard to keep up with whilst away.
With improvements in travel expense software, it’s possible to track and scan receipts wherever you are, at any time.
These can all be submitted after a trip, quickly, saving hours of frustration.
5. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the world and it will become more involved in travel expense management, to help reduce fraud and any errors in expense reports, which is easier and often more accurate to do whilst using AI.
With the travel expense management world continuously changing, it’s vital for your company to understand the current trends that may affect business trips. This keeps company policies up-to-date, ensuring maximum safety of every business expense.
