Top tips: how to create a business travel report
How to create a business travel report, featuring valuable tips like what to include and resources to make the whole process smoother.
For those who manage business travel, reporting can be a stressful process. Gathering business travel expenses and other data can be both tricky and time-consuming but luckily there are ways around this. Read on for our top tips to make business travel reporting clear and simple.
Business travel reporting refers to the documenting of the corporate travel process to improve the overall strategy and efficacy of a corporate travel programme. Collating patterns in spending, trip purpose, general learnings and other data, these reports give an overview of business trips in their entirety. They also help justify the cost to the company, proving how your business can benefit from travel.
Usually these reports are created by business travel managers within the administration or finance teams of a corporation.
Using business travel management software is one way to make your life as a travel manager much easier. Manually adding expenses into spreadsheets is not only arduous but also creates a margin of error. Modern software solutions like the Booking for Business app allow you to gather all your platforms and policies in one place, providing a one-stop-shop for booking business travel as well as being easy to manage.
You can monitor travel expenses, arrange itineraries, book hotels and flights, and integrate tools like dashboards. Tools and apps like these mean you can access data anywhere, easily adjust trip details and create travel reports.
If you want to ensure that your company’s business travel is smooth and efficient, analysing ROI is a smart way to use data to impact decision-making. Depending on the metrics used, ROI can give you insight into a number of aspects of corporate travel.
Business travel can have a considerable impact on a company’s carbon footprint and, therefore, the environment. Business travel reporting can minimise this negative impact by monitoring and using data to reduce the overall energy consumption and production of waste from corporate trips. But how do companies track their environmental impact?
Collating feedback from employees into digestible reports can significantly improve the efficiency of business travel in terms of traveller satisfaction. Running surveys on the success of a trip and analysing mistakes that might have been made is a key way to streamline the process.
Listening to employees’ insights is not only a great way to make sure you don’t waste money on unreliable means of transport or inconveniently located hotels – it also boosts engagement and employee recognition, helping to build a culture of business travel policy compliance.
To do this, you should:
Running regular expense or process efficiency audits is a fundamental way of preventing the risk of fraud, increasing compliance and cutting costs by finding where overspending might have taken place and then updating policies accordingly. Conducting these audits on a regular basis allows you to analyse long-term trends and constantly improve upon your processes so that your business travel remains efficient and effective.
Using a template is an easy way to make sure you don’t miss any aspect of organising business travel. A standard template should include the following:
The development of modern business travel solutions and management software has been a real boon to business travel. It has allowed a level of delegation in the business travel organisation process and lightened the workload of business travel admins, with business travellers able to use business travel mobile apps easily on the go. They’re a great way to make business travel considerably more efficient, improving compliance and traveller satisfaction.
And there’s a huge range of apps available. From those for expenses where photos of receipts can be uploaded on the go, to multi-purpose apps where you can book every aspect of a business trip on one single platform. Even after the trip, the apps have you covered; extensive features often include in-app 24-7 customer service messaging and compiling business travel data into a neat post-trip report.
In summary, the reporting process is a fundamental part of business travel. If you want to ensure that your company uses corporate travel to its maximum advantage, it’s important to stay up to date with the latest industry innovations. And thanks to the changing business travel sphere and developments in technology that have made it all a whole lot smoother, it’s much easier these days.
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