how to optimize the budget of your business travels

How to optimize your business travel budget

Many small and medium-sized companies use a booking tool as a backup tool. Booking and Expedia when making your business trips. With this method, billing control is a complex task as invoices for different trips have to be extracted from different booking sources in the market.

In addition, with most of them we cannot always get the invoice so we may lose the VAT and, therefore, it is a problem.

When using a travel agencyThe reservation management is done manually, so we do not have real-time information on travel expenses and there is no data analysis to optimize management.

Although most companies use a travel agency, however, most business travelers prefer to book on their own and continue to use tools such as Booking. This leads to policy non-compliance and a problem in data collection.

The business trip represent the company's second largest expense, after payroll. Therefore, the importance of having control over data is growing.

Without data, it is impossible to optimize the company's travel budget.

Why is it so difficult to control business travel expenses?

Business travel involves variable costs very difficult to predict. The number of travelers of the company, the different tools used to book, the different destinations, different prices, etc. come into play.

As a result, setting a budget is a complex task for a company. financial department. The time it takes to gather the correct information for all trips is too long and costly.

Ideally, we would like to have the information in real time in order to make decisions at the current moment.

The importance of obtaining data

The best way to have total control of expenses is to break them down by different users. That is to say, to have a full visibility of what is being spent for each department or project, team and person. This is the best way to start optimizing business travel expenses.

How to obtain them

The easiest and fastest way is to allow the travel tool itself to collect all the necessary information.

When using online booking websites, we will not have the information we need to optimize our budget. Likewise, when working with a travel agency, we will not get all the information broken down, to which we must add the number of calls and emails to request that information.

Therefore, in order to save time and money, we must use a booking platform for companies, capable of generating all the information in real time.

optimize business travel budget

With this you should be able to obtain all the information in an automated way and broken down by the criteria you choose:

  • Expenses by department.
  • Expenses per traveler.
  • Travel or project expenses.
  • Expenses by type of service (lodging, trains, flights, etc.).
  • Expenses by time period (monthly, quarterly, annually).

For example, let's look at the usefulness of the data. Imagine that in your company there is a travel policy that regulates spending. However, some travelers do not take it into account when booking. When you review the data, you find that 40% of the bookings made are outside the travel policy.

Therefore, thanks to the data, you can make decisions to enforce spending limits, such as implementing a travel tool that only allows booking at accommodations that are within the policy.

Tool to control expenses travel

In short, data collection is essential to make the best decisions during business travel.

With Vyootrip you can get all the necessary information about how much each of the company's travelers is spending.

In addition, to get a total and controlled view of your spending, you can use Okticket in order to have all the expenses incurred during your business trips grouped together in the cloud.

In this way, we can optimize month-to-month spending in each of the company's areas. At the end of the day, to know if something is working, we need metrics that help us to have a reference on what we want to improve.

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