Are you ready to take your contract business travel to the next level but maybe your boss isn’t? We’ve outlined 5 reasons to support your business case for an integrated travel booking and expense system but, before we get started, let’s walk through the following questions:
- Do you have a corporate travel policy in place to ensure compliance?
- Are you using multiple credit cards to book travel and use for expenses on trips?
- Are your employees tired of the manual time-consuming process of submitting expense reports? (And are you tired of hearing about it?)
- Are you able to answer critical questions about your business’ travel expenses quickly and confidently?
Worried about your answers? Have no fear, learn how ARCH can help!
1. Simplified Travel Booking
Whether you have a designated staff member booking all your corporate travel or your employees book their own travel, it is difficult to ensure your employees are following your corporate travel policy and staying compliant.
ARCH allows to you:
- Customize your travel policy, default flights, hotels and rental cars at per diem rates.
- Set up an (optional) automated approval process.
- Ensure your employees are charging their travel directly to the appropriate project code to automatically populate into their expense report and AP.
- Eliminate the financial burden of cancelled trips. Did you know 24% of purchased airline tickets go unused? ARCH saves your unused tickets and applies the balance to your next flight!
- Lastly, your company will lower travel expenses by receiving exclusive discounted rates through the volume of travel bookings.
2. Gained Benefits of a Corporate Card Program with Reconciliation
Automation: ARCH captures descriptive billing field information which feeds directly into your expense report and AP for simple reconciliation. AKA taking the burden off your employees manually loading their expense costs.
Insurance: A lot of people are unaware of some of the insurance headaches that can take place during business travel. Example: Joe Smith is the manager of Kathy Green. Joe books Kathy’s travel for her on his credit card. If Kathy’s airline loses her bags, she has no insurance coverage since it was Joe’s name on the credit line. ARCH eliminates this liability.
Funding: Employees no longer have to fund their corporate expenses on personal cards.
3. Make Expenses Easy for Current & New Hires
On average, we are seeing that submission of expenses can take employees up to 3 hours to submit their expense reports. Let’s say you have 13 employees filling out timesheets, that could be an upwards of almost 40 hours spent on expense submissions. No company wants their employees wasting a full work week on expense submissions.
Having a centralized travel booking tool and credit card reconciliation process in place not only sets up your company travel program to be compliant and saves your employees time, it also allows you to have a system in place for potential growth.
Many of our customers have mentioned they are waiting to be awarded a new contract and need a compliant and automated travel program in place. There is no better time to set ARCH up than before your company grows. Having a system already in place will prevent unnecessary stress during the onboarding of your new employees.
4. Visibility into your Travel Spend & Travelers
Through the online portal, you will have access to simple reports incurred during an audit, including real time viewing of statements. Another awesome feature is the ability to track your travelers. You’ll be able to identify if your employees are safe if a crisis arises in real time!
5. Final Points
With all the information above, it should be an easy sell internally, right? If leadership still has some hesitation, here are the final details of your argument:
- Budget – Automation solves problems and provides saving opportunity. ARCH is affordable, easy to use and (on average 6 months) the system basically pays for itself with the amount you end up saving on travel costs.
- Change is GOOD – Your current processes are costly and time consuming and this may delay business growth. A successful business is constantly changing and putting new processes in place to ensure you’re not wasting time, money and resources.
- Partner in Success – PCI is here to support you in this journey. Our team is here if any questions, comments or concerns throughout the implementation and post live process of ARCH.
Interested in learning more about ARCH? Contact us today!
