May 10, 2023
Knowing how to reduce your business travel expenses allows your company to invest more in other business areas. When done strategically, you can save money on business travel without compromising safety, service, or reliability.
Getting a handle on your employee travel expenses is a challenge, but with the right tools, you can quickly reduce business travel costs.
Every business is looking for ways to reduce spending — and overspending on business travel is one area you can uncover by comparing it with other companies. Then you can budget better for business travel.
The average business traveller spends just over $326 daily during a work-related trip. Based on this average, a typical 3-day domestic business trip costs around $1,000. For international business trips, double that!
Business travel represents a substantial outgoing; therefore, knowing how to save money on business travel is vital.
Business travel is essential for many businesses. The potential return on these trips by getting a new client to put pen to paper can far outweigh the outgoings.
With that in mind, here are 4 steps to best manage travel and expenses.
Reducing employee travel expenses all starts with a clear business travel policy.
A recent report revealed that 60% of businesses have a travel policy. If you’re in the remaining 40%, it’s time to act — and it’s not as complicated as you might think.
A business travel policy is a framework for how your employees travel, covering their accommodation, expense allowances, and the preferred suppliers (or booking channels) your company uses.
Such policies can become complicated, so it’s best to keep them short if you want them to remain effective. The key is to focus on the fundamentals:
Remember — your policy should be simple enough to apply across the entire company but also keep in mind that your employees will likely need different budgets based on their roles.
A successful part of knowing how to reduce business travel expenses is addressing corporate ground travel. Whether getting to and from the airport for an international business trip or visiting a client closer to home, your team will be on the road whenever they travel for work.
The company car has been a staple for many years. But businesses now realise that paying out for a depreciating asset doesn’t make financial sense — especially when there are more affordable, reliable, and sustainable alternatives.
Owning or leasing a fleet of company cars means dealing with an ever-growing list of expenses:
By taking a new approach to ground travel, you no longer have to handle all these business travel expenses.
One alternative to company cars is a car allowance. Adding a car allowance on top of an employee’s salary supports them in using a personal vehicle for work-related trips. But there’s no concrete way to track whether all funds go towards business travel — which is where corporate ground travel services come in.
With Bolt Business, your team can travel for work using the Bolt app. They’ll only be able to travel within the terms the company admin sets — including how much they can spend and where they can travel to and from.
Managing work travel expenses this way removes all the costs of owning or leasing a fleet. There are no concerns over currency when travelling abroad either, as Bolt Business is available in 45 countries.
Many companies already see benefits, such as Clean Kitchen, which reduced travel costs by 52% when switching to Bolt Business.
A lack of formal processes and outdated booking systems harm business travel and budget management. A company’s tools and procedures often make it impossible to get an overview of how much different teams spend.
Instead, managers waste hours manually reporting and updating budget spreadsheets, resulting in a lengthy reimbursement process which doesn’t support anyone’s productivity.
Digital business travel solutions support you with a wide range of travel costs. For example, Bolt Business offers companies a complete overview of employee travel expenses and automatically handles all expense reporting and invoicing.
By allowing managers to set employee-specific travel expense allowances, employees get instant expense reimbursement. This removes the hassle of submitting claims or spending hours filing reports.
Besides the time and money saved, allowing individuals to book their business travel transportation makes travel more convenient and enjoyable, thus reducing stress levels and keeping them in the best frame of mind to meet business targets.
An administrative team or employee won’t have the power to negotiate great deals with an airline, hotel, or transport supplier. Partnering with travel agencies who are experts at getting great deals can help you save thousands, if not more, on travel expenses for work.
As well as reducing your costs, partnering with a mobility company is an opportunity to make work trips more sustainable. The emissions of all Bolt Business rides in Europe are carbon-neutral, and you can allow your team to use Bolt e-scooters and bikes too.
For many small to medium businesses, employees don’t have the luxury of having their flights booked for them. Instead, they’re responsible for getting themselves from point A to B.
If you don’t have a clear policy on how much that should cost, you’re setting yourself up for some substantial extra costs. And this is where incentivising your employees to treat company budgets like their own can help you remain within budget for business travel.
From an annual bonus for keeping within their business travel budget to a reward after well-managed trips, the benefits of rewarding your employees for sticking to their budgets can be substantial.
This point is especially important if you don’t use a mobility service where you can set spending limits in advance — something you can do with Bolt Business.
Now that you know how to reduce business travel expenses, you can focus on finding the simplest way to reimburse employees for any work-related expenses they made themselves.
The need to reimburse employee travel expenses after trips is an inevitable part of business travel.
Employees often return from business trips with a pile of receipts, as they may have to use their own money to make work-related payments, such as:
As their employer, you’ll need to reimburse them in line with your corporate travel policy.
Unfortunately, the current state of expense management is time-consuming, leads to errors, and looks something like this for employees:
Because management must approve the expense report before going to the finance team to process the repayment, your employees may have to wait nine days for the expense to be processed (this doesn’t include the time spent reporting the costs).
Manual expense management has few positives, but automating the process makes everything far more efficient.
As an employer, you should do all you can to reduce expense reporting time, which means leaving manual expense reports in the past.
Expense management software, such as SAPⓇ ConcurⓇ, Rydoo, Zoho Expense, and Expensify, make expense management more effortless by automating the process. After your employee makes a payment and takes a photo of the receipt, their expense claim is processed automatically.
This approach allows your employees to submit expenses before their trip ends — saving valuable time in the long run. And you can connect them with the Bolt Work Profile so that your ride receipts go straight to them after each journey.
While the Work Profile solves personal expense management headaches, you can do the same for your whole company with a Bolt Business account.
Building your corporate ground travel policies with Bolt Business takes the time and hassle out of manually filling out and processing business travel expenses.
By adding employees to your account, they’ll see your company as a payment method in their Bolt app. Attached to this payment method is your company’s corporate travel policy that their journey must meet to complete the order.
After each journey, an automated ride report becomes visible to all account admins. That means no paperwork and more time to focus on tasks that bring value to the business.
Speak to a member of the Bolt Business team today to learn how to reduce your business travel costs and make travel expense management easy.
