Travel Manager: Customisable Solution for Travel Expenses

According to the National Visitor Survey Results in June 2022, 86 Million visitors travelled across Australia for a domestic overnight trip. Yes… It’s  probably safe to say that travel is back!

The majority of these travellers took personal trips – where they were in control of the what, the where and the how. They unwound, went with the flow and even made changes to their itineraries as they saw fit. If you’re a part of the 15.9 Million travelled specifically for business though, the story is quite different. You’re travelling on your employer’s dime, for purposes often defined by the employer, adhering to tight schedules set and maintained yet again by the employer. Businesses need to accurately reconcile with their books and statements, every dollar being spent. It needs to be tracked, coded and reconciled, from the bookings through the cab rides, from the bag of peanuts through the many client lunches. Suffice it to say, your business travel tends to be far more hectic than personal travel, and usually generates a lot more paperwork.

When you extrapolate this scenario across all the people travelling for business from the same company, that business suddenly has a whole heap of work arising out of travel. For just 50 employees travelling once a month, that’s at least a 100 flights, 50 hotels, 100s of cab rides, 100s of lunches and many more generic receipts that all need to be reconciled before the end of each month. That’s a lot!

And so, businesses book through Travel Management Companies (TMCs), who take away this pain of having to deal with so many requests. They also tend to find the best prices, are able to get real-time reports from most vendors that they work with and even go as far as providing 24/7 support. Suddenly, all you have to do is say where you want to be and when you want to be there, and voila, everything is booked and the invoice is sitting in your email. For any additional spending done with the same vendors that the TMC works with, the resulting invoices and receipts become part of the summarised report they provide, often called a travel report. A stone left unturned by TMCs though is the ability to match your invoices and receipts with each individual transaction showing up on the bank statement, automatically.

That is where expensemanager’s Travel Manager, a mobile and app based spend management system, comes into play. 

What’s Travel Manager?

Travel Manager streamlines the claim and travel reconciliation process. On the one hand, it integrates with any travel agent or travel management company to receive enhanced trip data and auto-generates invoices and receipts. On the other hand, it automatically receives a daily feed of transactions from card issuing giants like Visa, Mastercard and AMEX. Using its smart, proprietary technology, Travel Manager then automatically matches each transaction from the card issuer with its matching invoice or receipt generated from the TMC data, ensuring that travel related spend is fully reconciled, automatically – saving many hours each month, for many employees across the business.  

With a deep understanding of business spending deeply, the expensemanager team (full of ex travel people) built the Travel Reconciler with variations to the process in mind. Some of the common ones are being able to match the TMC invoices and receipts against transactions on one shared corporate card VS being able to match transactions from the same TMC feed to multiple separate corporate cards VS creating a separate claim from the TMC all together so that it flows through approval flows and paid later. No matter your use case, Travel Reconciler is likely to work for you.

Further bolstering Travel Manager's functionality is its ability to work alongside standard expense manager features like the Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) Wizard and our digital receipts module. While the FBT Wizard helps you to capture tax related particularities for each individual expense line as you are capturing the expense, the Digital Receipts module allows you to digitally and automatically receive invoices from other regular vendors, particularly those that aren’t linked up with your TMC already. The Digital Receipts module helps you to ensure that as much of your process around expense reconciling is as automated as possible – receipts automatically flow in from one end, card transaction records from the other, and the system automatically matches and reconciles without you having to lift a finger.

To summarise, with our Travel Manager you get:

• Accurate data
• Faster, automated reconciliation process
• Complete ease-of-use 

From hotel bookings to FBT bill on meal entertainment, Uber cab receipts to flight bookings and more – simplify business travel with Travel Manager and expensemanager! 

To know more, Book a Demo and talk to us about your needs and we’ll help provide a customised solution to fit your needs – travel and all business spend management!