TRXperts - Experts in Travel Technology

Shane Hammond On Booking And Expense Integration

  

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I was pondering Alan Tyson's, Databasics CEO, guest commentary in the Beat the other day and a few things struck me about this whole dialogue regarding booking and expense integration. Alan's right that the benefits of integrated booking and expense have not been fully realized by many organizations. But it's not because there are no benefits.

An integrated booking and expense tool can deliver tremendous value, and with new innovations in data intelligence we're just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible. Intelligent pre-approval with benchmarking, booked-to-billed analytics and expense report automation are just a few "useful things" available to help organizations save money and deliver on budget. And since T&E is the second-biggest category of spend for many companies, it is a worthwhile endeavor.

A Match Made In Heaven
Pre-filling expense reports with booking data and intelligently matching it to card transactions will save the traveler time, no doubt about it. But there's much more to the story. Booking data gives us detail like check-in/check-out dates. Armed with this seemingly simple data, incidental transactions on the road can be logically grouped together to provide the true cost of a trip, regardless of how an employee chooses to organize or categorize expenses.

When merging, we've found you don't need to worry about which fields to overwrite. In fact, we see no need to overwrite data when merging booked and billed details. The real insight comes from keeping the data separate for analysis.

Suppose the expense solution can display the booked and billed data together at a glance for everyone in the approval chain. Further, if the expense solution would then aggregate all booked-to-billed data and display trends over time, then decision-makers would have a new level of visibility into corporate expenses to drive more effective policies. This is how we work with booked and billed data in our solution and is just one way we deliver value from the marriage of booking and expense tools.

There's More To Pre-Approval
The pre-trip authorization process is designed to give managers the right information at the right time, before a card has been swiped.  

Sure, you could try a simple yes/no approval process with a not-to-exceed budget. You'd think this would be fairly easy to implement, but we've found the opposite is true. Managers have to juggle more and more each day, and keeping track of manual requests and approvals (usually hiding in an overloaded email inbox) is a no-win situation.

With integrated booking, the pre-approval process is completely automated and can screen for more sophisticated policies, such as flagging multiple employees traveling to the same location at the same time when one employee will suffice. Once you have access to integrated booking data, you can also support intelligent pre-approval processes based on market benchmarks rather than just dollars over the approved amount.

Keeping It Simple
The right expense solution must provide an easy way to submit expenses, facilitate communication between the approver and expense creator, and most importantly provide visibility into expense data to drive savings. Providing more visibility to travelers, approvers and decision-makers is never a bad thing as long as the solution remains easy to use.   

CFOs, business owners and travel managers are looking for more than traveler time savings. They want to drive costs out of their business. Our customers choose an integrated booking and expense solution because it gives them more tools to control spend. The time savings delivered by the solution are just a bonus.