Productivity on the Road: How Your Expense Management System Can Contribute

From language barriers to maneuvering through unfamiliar territory, business travellers have a laundry list of stressors that can decrease happiness and productivity while overseas. Your company can either add to their woes or help alleviate their anxieties – all based on the expense management solution you choose.

Adding to Woes

Choose a clunky, hard-to-use expense management system and you can watch your international business travellers’ productivity take a nosedive. Problems with ineffective systems can include:

• Not being able to file claims or receipts on the go
• Seeing a different interface depending on the device they’re using to access the system
• Extensive training required to use the system in the first place
• Struggling with multi-country claims requiring different currencies, rates and tax amounts
• Needing to memorise or constantly refer to policy manual to double-check in-policy and out-of-policy expenses

Not only can tedious, inefficient systems drastically reduce your international travellers’ productivity levels, but it can also put a big dent in their levels of contentment.

Related: How Can You Maximise Expense Policy Compliance and Maintain Traveller Happiness?

Adding to Productivity

A streamlined expense management system is one that alleviates traveller stress, not add to it. Features you’ll find in an advanced solution include:

• Deep mobile capabilities, allowing your business travellers to create, populate and complete all stages of their expense claiming from different devices on the go. They can start the pre-approval process on desktop, snap and send a receipt in a taxi, and submit a report from a tablet.
• Consistent look-and-feel, on desktop, tablet, smartphone, laptop or any other device, so the interface your employees see is always the same.
• Intuitive interface, which guides users to functions they need without excessive, or perhaps any, training.
• Conversion capabilities, with reporting solutions available in multiple languages and currencies, as well as offering a per diem wizard that tracks trip time, dates and location to apply the correct rates and tax amounts. Support for VAT and international tax policies are at the ready, with no need to pre-program or input country-specific data. All taxes and currency conversions are handled within the application, delivering accurate calculations and overall results.
• Policy compliance assistance, with the ability to deliver dynamic policy information as your travellers are working on trip pre-approvals and purchase orders. Employees can be shown acceptable hotel and rental car rates while learning to select only preferred providers. The system also encourages them to be prompt with their claims and submit them in a timely manner.

Related: 10 Questions to Ask When Considering a Global Expense Management Solution

Higher Productivity, Lower Anxiety, Happier Travellers

Equip your international travellers with an efficient, effective expense management software and the natural result is more efficient, effective employees. You can also be assured a solution that works so well for international travel is going to provide the same high-level of performance for domestic travel, making it a single solution for all your business travellers’ needs.

Related: BTN Business Traveller Happiness Index Webinar