Jul 24, 2023
Managing, tracking, and claiming your travel expenses has been a long-overlooked part of business travel. But the best travel and expense management software makes life much easier for business travellers.
In this article, you’ll find 6 of the best travel and expense management services that will allow your team to deliver the best results when they hit the road for work.
Any company sending employees away on business trips needs travel and expense management software. It’s essential to have these tools available to your employees; otherwise, business travel will end up causing more disruption than good.
The top travel and expense management services give you a seamless way to manage, track, and report on business travel expenses. Top services automate the expense process by providing your accounting team with pre-filled invoices. With the right software, expense reporting and receipt management becomes a breeze.
With a suitable travel and expense management system, your employees will have more time to focus on valuable tasks (rather than manually filling out expense reports), the accuracy of all reports will increase, and you could make considerable savings.
If you’re not convinced that you need to invest in travel and expense management software, here’s why you may need to think again. 👇
Cutting costs is always a high priority, and if your team keep overspending on business travel, it’s time to take action. The best travel booking software allows you to build travel policies and set spending limits which prevent your team from overspending. Each member of your team will have a clear spending limit and won’t be able to go over it.
Business trips come with countless expenses. And returning to the office after a trip leads to valuable working hours spent manually filling out expense reports — not the best use of time. Especially when the average expense report takes 20 minutes for an employee to complete.
Travel and expense management software automates expense reporting, so your team can focus on more important things.
Every business trip has a purpose — a goal which tells the rest of the company that the journey was a success. This could be getting a new client to put pen to paper, making new connections that could form fruitful partnerships, or sharing learnings from an event with the rest of the team.
If the transport is organised, comfortable, and reliable, it will be easier for your team to deliver, which is where the best travel and expense management services help. Unfortunately, too many companies have a travel policy failing their employees.
Ease and flexibility are essential when comparing travel and expense management solutions. Your business travellers must be able to arrange their travel on a user-friendly platform and have the flexibility to order a ride at the last minute. After all, business trips are often full of surprises.
But that’s not to say you should give your employees complete control over business travel. The travel and expense management software should allow you to build policies and ensure compliance.
Another necessity is complete visibility over how your team travels and spends its budget. By tracking your team’s expenses in an organised manner, it’s easier to spot opportunities to cut costs.
By prioritising user-friendliness, flexibility, security, and reporting capabilities, you can find the perfect software for your company.
Here are 6 of the best travel and expense management software programs on the market today:
Bolt Business is employee transport management software that removes manual expense reporting for ground travel.
As the admin for the account, you can build travel policies, set spending budgets, and track all of the trips taken by your team — all from your user-friendly Company dashboard.
Meanwhile, your employees can book their own corporate ground travel from their Bolt app. They’ll see your company as a payment method once you add them to your Bolt Business account.
If the journey meets the travel policy, they can travel for work and select your company as payment. And user-friendly corporate travel booking software is essential, which is why changing the payment method is this simple. 👇
Once you add them to your Bolt Business account, they can charge rides to your company. So they won’t lose time filling out expense reports. That means your company benefits from affordable work rides without the paperwork.
You may not need to read on from this point.
While Bolt Business is perfect for managing ground travel for an entire team or organisation, the Bolt Work profile is ideal for solo business people and small companies.
By setting up a Work profile, a free feature in the Bolt app, an invoice for every journey (pre-filled with all your company’s details) goes straight to an email address of your choice. And it’s automatically submitted as an expense report.
You can also connect the Work profile with your company’s expense management software, and then all your receipts go straight to them. That means no more paperwork, lost receipts, or dealing with expense reports.
The leading expense management services compatible with the Work profile include the following:
As these are the best examples of expense management software on the market, you can read more about them later in the article.
SAP Concur is one of the biggest names in expense management, and they have the tools to back up that experience.
Let’s say you take a client out to dinner and will need to claim back the expense from your company. When you get the bill, taking a photo of it with the SAP Concur app uploads all the details to the company’s Concur Expense account. Then when you’re back at the office, you can quickly create a report that includes your receipts and submit the expense claim.
Once submitted, a notification via the SAP Concur app alerts management that your expense report is ready for approval — helping speed up getting your money back even further.
Scanning receipts using a phone and expense app is essential for modern business travellers. And like other expense management services, Rydoo has recognised this.
Using the Rydoo app, you can scan receipts using the Rydoo app. Doing this will extract all the critical information (date, total amount, and currency) and make it available for search and review as part of reports.
You can also give your team Rydoo payment cards — in physical or digital form — fully integrated with your company’s account. Setting a spending limit for the card lets you know everything is within budget. And you have complete visibility of spending in real-time.
Another key feature is ‘Per Diem’, which allows you to set spending rules by country. You can select everything that can be expensed and set different rates for arrival and departure dates. With this feature, handling expenses when working across borders has never been easier.
Expensify is another cloud-based expense management software that will simplify your expense reporting process. It offers the following features:
You can keep track of your team’s purchases on their business trip with the Expensify Card. And you can settle the payments either daily or monthly.
With Zoho Expense, you can create your custom flow for expense approvals to ensure everyone who needs to approve expenses is in the loop. You can connect corporate cards to your account, which allows you to track all purchases.
Ahead of a business trip, employees can submit a request that includes the purpose of the trip, how they’ll be travelling, and the budget. You can then use approval flows for various stages of the business trip. That way, only the essential trips are happening.
Employees want to book travel without jumping through hoops or dealing with complicated apps or software. And you can’t forget about flexibility. While travel policies are vital, your employees should never end up in a situation where they’re blocked from ordering a ride. Solving this means finding business travel booking software which allows employees to make changes and cancellations.
You should also look for a tool offering various environmentally-friendly transport methods.
As younger workforce members are more environmentally-conscious and choosing not to drive, the company car or car allowance debate is becoming outdated. And you need to reflect this by building a sustainable travel policy where your employees don’t need a driver’s licence to travel for work.
Finally, the software must give you the information you need to improve travel policies. Monitoring travel budgets and tracking expenses makes identifying areas where you can cut costs easier.
All of this points you to Bolt Business.
Bolt Business is a travel booking service that you can use to arrange, manage, and track your team’s corporate ground travel. As the company admin, you’ll have access to a Company Dashboard, which is your place to add your employees, build travel policies, and set spending limits.
Once you’re all set up, your business travellers will see your company as a payment method in their Bolt app. That way, they can charge trips to your company without using their personal card and having to expense it back later.
And joining Bolt Business opens up a world of potential through business travel, as Bolt services are available in 45+ countries and 500+ cities. Depending on where business takes your team, they can get picked up by a top-rated driver, jump on an electric scooter or e-bike, or get behind the wheel of a Bolt Drive vehicle (perfect for transporting equipment). Even better news for your company is that all European Bolt Business rides are carbon-neutral.
End your search for the best travel and expense management software today by signing up with Bolt Business.
