How to optimize your business travel budget

Many small and medium-sized businesses use a booking tool such as Booking and Expedia when it comes to making your business trips. With this method, billing control is a complex task as you have to extract invoices for different trips from among the different reservation sources in the market.

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

When using a travel agency, reservation management is done manually, so we don't 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 causes a breach of policies and a problem obtaining data.

Los business trips represent the company's second largest expense, after payroll. Therefore, the importance of having control over data is increasing.

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 in the company, the different tools used to book, the different destinations, different prices, etc., come into play.

Because of this, setting a budget becomes somewhat complex for the financial department. The time taken to gather the right information for all the trips is too much and is a costly job.

The ideal would be to have the information in real time to make decisions at the current time.

The importance of obtaining data

The best way to have full control of your expenses is to break them down by different users. That is, to have a total 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 get 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 won't have the information we need to optimize our budget. Likewise, when working with a travel agency, we will not obtain all the disaggregated information, to which we must add the number of calls and emails to request that information.

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

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

• Expenses by department.
• Expenses per traveler.
• Expenses per trip or project.
• Expenses by type of service (accommodation, trains, flights, etc.).
• Expenses depending on the time period (monthly, quarterly, annual).

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

So, thanks to the data, you can Make decisions to enforce spending limits, such as implementing a travel tool that only allows you to book in those accommodations that fall within the policy.

Tool to control expenses Of trips

In short, data collection is essential for making the best decisions during business trips.

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

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

In this way, we can optimize monthly spending in each of the areas of the company. After all, to know if something works, we need metrics that help us to have a reference to what we want to improve.

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