Proven Strategies to Reduce Travel Costs for Aid Workers
Implement an automated travel and expense management tool
The travel expense management process is a huge operational burden for finance teams and employees alike. It takes a lot of time and effort to manually check & verify expense submissions, send timely filing reminders and clarify policies & processes with employees. This often leads to costly inefficiencies, including delayed reimbursements and missed opportunities to improve policy and address unusual spending trends.
A fully automated travel and expense management tool can help your team streamline these processes, resulting in cost savings and increased compliance and accountability. These tools automate the entire expense management process end-to-end, from reporting and submitting expenses to processing payments and providing BI insights. They can also integrate with your accounting or ERP system to automatically sync transaction data, giving you a real-time view of travel spending and expenses across departments.
Depending on your organization’s needs, there are many different travel and expense management solutions available. However, you should make sure to choose a solution that offers a wide range of features. Moreover, it should be easy to use and offer high adoption rates among your employees. Having a mobile-integrated solution with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can be very helpful, as it allows employees to upload receipt photos and extract their details digitally. It can also be a good idea to implement a mobile-optimized website and an app that allow your employees to file expenses from anywhere.
When selecting a travel and expense management software, it is important to ensure that it includes an embedded travel policy engine. This will enforce your company’s expense policies and flag any out-of-policy spend. Additionally, it should also provide a feature that automatically itemizes expenses and categorizes them. This will save your finance team a significant amount of time and will help them ensure that all costs are reimbursed in a timely manner.
SAP Concur is an all-in-one travel and expense management solution that offers best-in-class features, a seamless approval flow and impeccable 24*7 customer support. It is a popular choice for mid-sized to large businesses with frequent travelers, government and non-profit organizations that have strict travel rules and regulations, as well as universities.
Automate your approval workflows
In the business world, approval processes are commonplace. Whether you’re booking travel for yourself or someone else, submitting a time off request, purchasing equipment for your team, or even hiring a new employee—there are countless tasks that require an approved signature before they can be completed. Unfortunately, these processes are often inefficient and prone to errors, which results in lengthy delays and costly mistakes that impact productivity and profitability.
Using workflow software to automate your approvals can eliminate bottlenecks and streamline the process. By reducing manual steps, you can make sure that the correct people are involved at each stage and that the necessary paperwork is filed correctly. In addition, automation can help reduce the number of miscommunications that occur during the approvals process by clearly defining each step and providing transparency to your entire team.
The first step in implementing an automated approval workflow is to choose a program that allows you to create a custom workflow template for each of your content types. Kissflow Workflow is one such tool that lets you define parameters for each submission and includes features such as custom fields, auto-population, tables, and more. The program also allows you to specify which users should receive an alert when a submission is ready for approval.
Once you’ve created your workflow template, you can start building out the specifics of each step. This means identifying who will be responsible for reviewing and approving each submission, setting deadlines, and ensuring that the submission follows your organization’s guidelines. It’s also important to include a step that defines the authority of the approver, which may be as simple as assigning an individual or as complex as a hierarchy.
Finally, you’ll want to set up a sequence that uses the Create an approval (v2) action to initiate a flow that sends out an approval request once a specific criteria is met. For example, you can use this to automatically send a travel itinerary to your managers when it’s booked for an amount that exceeds your company’s travel policy. You can also set a long running approval flow to ensure that all responses are captured and processed, even after the original flow run has expired.
Incentivize your employees to spend less on trips
Travel and lodging costs are on the rise for most companies, making it more important than ever to incentivize business travelers to spend less. While it’s not feasible to make every trip free for employees, there are many other strategies that can help. Here are a few:
1. Offer a cash bonus for spending less than their travel budget. This is one of the most common ways to incentivize employees to spend less on their trips. This is especially effective when it’s tied to airfares, as it can motivate employees to book lower-priced flights or to book hotels that are slightly cheaper than their original choice.
2. Give them more room in their budget for meal reimbursement. Providing employees with more room in their expense allowances to cover meals on their business trips can reduce overall expenses without affecting their quality of travel experience. Providing clear guidelines for what is and isn’t eligible for meal reimbursement can also help keep indirect travel costs in check.
3. Encourage them to stay longer on their business trips. Staying longer on a business trip can significantly reduce your travel costs, especially if you take advantage of discounted airfares and hotel rates that are available when traveling during the off-season. It can also allow your team to give expensive, peak holiday meetings a miss.
4. Encourage them to travel by train. Trains can be a great way to cut down on expenses while reducing carbon emissions. Consider providing your employees with train tickets or a discount on car rental to encourage them to choose this option for their next business trip.
In addition to these tips, you should be engaging your employees in conversations about the reasons behind corporate travel policies and encouraging them to adhere to them. This will help make them more receptive to incentives that can increase their compliance and ultimately save the company money. Incentives like sharing a percentage of savings, rewarding good behavior with vouchers or time off, or even simply adjusting policy terms to accommodate cost-conscious choices are all good ways to do this.
These strategies for reducing travel expenses can be particularly beneficial for non-profit organizations and NGOs, as they often operate on tight budgets. By implementing these cost-saving measures, these organizations can ensure reduced travel costs for aid workers, allowing them to allocate more resources towards their humanitarian efforts and maximize the impact of their work in the field.
Embrace trip batching
With a travel and expense management solution like ITILITE, you can automate your approval workflows, achieve near 100% policy compliance, reward your employees for choosing hotels/flights within budget, and more. One way to cut costs even further is by embracing trip batching, which involves consolidating trips for a specific region. This can help to reduce emissions, save money, and make for a more efficient use of your travelers’ time.
ITILITE can also help you to identify cost leaks, optimize your travel budget, and more.