For Travel Managers
5 Important Things That Happened at GBTA 2021
It’s true—GBTA 2021 happened November 17–19th in Orlando, Florida. Emburse was one of the exhibitors and we were lucky enough to host our own Conference sessions. Everyone who attended had a blast.
The New Reality of Travel Management Part 1: 8 Ways You Can Adapt to The New Financial Landscape
Just when we thought we were finally putting the pandemic behind us, new COVID-19 variants like Delta and Lambda emerged. A global supply chain snarl led to delays with Costco inventory and Amazon shipping speeds. Some countries have already reinstituted travel restrictions. But make no mistake—business travel spending is still increasing.
Sessions, Travel Tips and Booth Activities You Won’t Want to Miss at GBTA 2021
Remember the last time you flew to a convention? For some of us, that may have been as recently as last week. But for many more, the pandemic put a damper on our business class adventures. That’s why we’re happy to announce that—for the first time in nearly two years—the countdown is on. The 2021 GBTA Convention is happening from November 17–19th in Orlando, Florida. Emburse is one of the sponsors, and we can’t wait to see you there.
The Future of Travel Part 2: Five Predictions for Post-Covid Business Travel And Expense Management
For over half a century, millions of people have been flying between cities and across borders to meet potential clients and close deals. Most of us are so accustomed to the rinse-and-repeat ritual of business travel that we couldn’t imagine going a whole year without seeing the inside of an airplane.
9 Signs it’s Time to Switch Expense Management Systems
It’s not too long ago that the panacea to everyone’s expense problems was “get expense management automation software.” Anything was a quantum leap from having to staple or tape your receipts to a spreadsheet, then hand it into your accounting team, and then wait a pay cycle (or two) for them to be reviewed, and then go up the approval chain, and then finally to the payroll team who would often cut you a paper check... that you often had to take to the bank or ATM to deposit.
Managing Traveler Safety in a Post-Coronavirus World
For organizations to remain strong when the coronavirus pandemic begins to ease, business travel must restart. How can they ensure that employees aren't traveling into infection hot spots?
Controlling Car Rental Spend With Car FOLIO
Many organizations have negotiated corporate rates with their preferred car rental providers. But with potentially many thousands of rentals each year, how can they verify that each traveler receives the appropriate rates? Chrome River is making it far easier to analyze the data with the launch of FOLIO for car rentals.
Solving the Travel and Expense Management Dilemma for Job Candidates and Non-Employees
While many traveling employees have benefited from automated expense management solutions for several years, one group remains almost universally underserved: non-employees. Abacus REACH helps ease expense issues for this group.
How to Avoid an ‘OK Boomer’ Reaction to Your Corporate Travel Policy
In the era of bleisure travel, ride-sharing and electric scooters, expense policies of old sound positively archaic. Any travel leader who expects their team to follow the policy down to the letter will likely be met with eye rolling and mutterings of “OK Boomer.” How can organizations keep their business travelers happy without killing the bottom line?
Delivering Value from Shrinking Corporate Travel Budgets in Uncertain Economic Times
Travel budget growth is stalling and increasing numbers of organizations are cutting their travel budgets. As potential economic clouds are gathering, how can organizations avoid hampering their own growth by slashing team travel?
Is Your Travel Expense Policy Keeping Up With the Times?
Your organization must ensure that its travel and expense policy stays updated, to support the requirements of both the employer and also those who need to submit expense reports. With services such as Uber/Lyft and Airbnb now in the mainstream, is your policy keeping up?
Banishing the Hotel Bill Nervous Breakdown
Tired of having to enter line after line of expense items for a simple overnight hotel stay? You're not alone... and you need not suffer any further, says Karen DeLucia.
The Four Most Critical Reasons Why Native Apps Don’t Work for Expense Management
There are two approaches to deploying business apps to employees: native apps and web apps. For both approaches, the end-user experience is – at least at first glance – outwardly very similar. However, that’s where the similarity ends, and the inherent weaknesses of native apps soon become apparent.
Alternative Facts and The Fallacy of Offline Expense Management
There has been a lot of discussion in the business software market about the benefits of browser-based, responsive web (RWD) apps versus native Android and iOS apps. Even though there is evidence showing that more and more organizations are moving toward RWD for mobile software deployment, the debate continues as to which is better, just like Mac vs. Windows, Peyton vs. Tom and Pepsi vs. Coke.
7 New Year’s Resolutions to Make Expense Management a Breeze in 2017
The worst thing about most New Year's resolutions is that they're so easy to break. To make your expense management easier in 2017, here's a list of things that you should not do, along some a couple of one-and-done fixes that will benefit you throughout the year.
Congratulations Cindy Heston – 2016 Business Travel Hall of Fame Inductee
We're thrilled to learn that Cindy Heston, director of travel and events at Chrome River customer, Anthem, has been honored as a 2016 inductee into the Business Travel Hall of Fame.
Best-of-Breed or One-Stop-Shop? Five Questions to Consider for Expense Automation
When selecting travel booking and expense solutions, organisations have two choices: a single vendor for both elements, or individual vendors for each. All parties will say that their solution works best, but which will work most effectively for you? Here are five questions you should ask yourself.
Creating an Expense Policy that Helps, not Hinders Your Employees
Creating an effective expense policy is a balancing act. You need to walk the fine line between eliminating unnecessary costs and establishing a policy that is reasonable and workable for employees and managers alike. Create a policy that’s too lax and you’ll watch travel costs skyrocket. Create one that’s too stringent and you’ll end up with impractical restrictions, unhappy business travelers, and an increased risk of expense fraud.
5 Things Travel Managers Need from Expense Management Systems
As with all good business tools, an expense management system should make everyone’s job a lot easier. However, you need to ensure that you select a solution that works for your organization's requirements.
How to Make the Business Case for an Expense Management System
As we move into budget planning, it’s time for team leads to start creating wish lists for the coming year. One of the most critical questions is, “how much will it cost, and what’s the ROI?” This is essential decision-making information every year, but many CFOs will be reluctant to provide a budget for any new spend that doesn’t deliver tangible ROI. Therefore, you’d better make sure you have a rock-solid business case.
How the Olympics Gets me Thinking About Expenses
Unless you live in a cave or have just woken up from a months-long coma, you’ll have noticed that the Olympics are in full swing. However, in addition to marveling at the athletes' exploits (go Team GB!), seeing participants from more than 200 countries and territories competing made my mind spin in terms of the sheer logistics when it comes to the expenses that each team must incur, and how these will all get reimbursed into the currencies used across those nations once everyone returns next week
6 Key Expense Management Best Practices
Whether you are writing your organization’s first travel and expense policy, or you are a corporate travel veteran who has had one in place for many years, it's always good to look outside your own immediate network and see what other world-class organizations are doing to effectively manage their employees’ spend.
Cost-effective Perks to Minimize (and Maximize!) Business Travelers’ Airport Time
We recently talked about how to keep your business travelers happy while maintaining cost control and avoiding expenses spiraling out of control. One of the biggest challenges many companies face is that those who travel the most are more likely to have specific preferences (hotel chains, airlines, etc.) that may not tally with your organization’s negotiated rates. While this can lead to friction, there are several ways that can both make your road warriors happier and more productive, and also keep the CFO smiling.
One-Stop-Shop vs. Best-of-Breed: What’s Best for Travel and Expense?
One of the most common discussions in business software procurement has been that of one-stop-shop versus best-of-breed. Choose a single vendor for all aspects of a particular function, they say, and your organization will see wide-ranging benefits, from lower costs, to smoother integration, more straightforward support resolution, and so on.
How Can You Maximize Expense Policy Compliance and Maintain Traveler Happiness?
Corporate travel and expense policy compliance is a constant theme in the business travel industry. Although using the corporate expense policy manual as a stick to beat your travelers may be a short-term solution to enforce compliance, it doesn’t address the underlying issues of why employees don’t adhere to the policy, and could also alienate travelers by imposing regulations that reduce productivity and create frustration.
Seven tips for creating an expense policy that your employees will love (well, almost)
We’d all love to fly first class and eat steak dinners on somebody else’s dime, but if everyone did that, many companies would run out of cash pretty quickly. Therefore, creating a sensible expense policy is a must for any organization to both control costs and, as we recently said in our white paper, reduce business expense fraud. Without a clear policy, staff are left in the dark about what is and isn’t allowed, and will just assume how much they can spend. And we all know what “assume” does.
Integrate Corporate Cards with your Travel and Expense Solution
I know, I know. The thought of employees running rampant with activated plastic in their hands can sound a little scary at first. Especially when we hear some of the real-life stories of poor decisions with corporate credit cards like lottery tickets, cosmetic surgery, and pet food! But the flip side includes benefits for both your company and your weary business travelers. So whether your company calls them company cards, travel cards or T&E cards, consider these benefits:
Expense and Invoice Management Ethics 101
There are plenty of news items about corporate fraud involving supplier kickbacks and dishonest expense report schemes. Most of the examples are concerning because of the depravity, but some are rather funny.
CFO Should Hire Givers, Not Takers
It’s natural for most of us to want to do things better. We want to be better managers, better co-workers, better employees and, in general, better people. Unfortunately, it’s also just as easy for us to get lost in the hassle of daily life and simply waste time. As any executive knows - time is money. The less your department or team procrastinates, the more productive your organization will be and the more it will benefit. Whether it’s making sure each employee enters data accurately into your expense management software or delivers the weekly report your client needs - here are some surefire ways to curb procrastination and increase efficiency.
BYOD – Bring Your Own Device For Expense Management
A recent survey of 173 corporate travel and expense managers found that they receive more and more bookings via mobile devices. Clearly, business travelers are becoming more comfortable with booking flights and hotels using their mobile devices. To that end, travel and expense management systems from top providers are becoming more vital components in corporate travel managers' toolboxes.
What’s the Buzz for Corporate Travel and Expense Managers?
In July, the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), a trade organization for corporate travel and expense managers, held its annual meeting in Los Angeles, California. Topics that generated the most buzz at the meeting were the huge increase in corporate travel globally and the risks of managing corporate travelers across disparate global destinations.
5 Easy Steps To Take Your Office Nearly Paperless
In our current digital age, you might think going paperless is all the rage. However, paper still seems to be cluttering a good number of workspaces. Regardless of where your company is on the paperless continuum, going paperless can make your office more efficient, isn’t that difficult, and does not cost absurd amounts of money. It can also offer your business good PR and good ROI. Here are five tips to help get you thinking and acting in a paperless mindset.
Big Data Visualization - Are You Visualizing Enough?
Is visualization the key to proper use of big data? Bar charts, treemaps, scatter plots – these are all visualization tools that put data into perspective, but do they drive the point home for those looking to extract meaningful information? The answer is to create a multidimensional view of the data that is more intuitive. This approach is Interactive Visualization.
Why Your Water Bottles Should be BPA-Free but Your Business Should Not
OK – we understand that we don’t want the chemical known as BPA in our water bottles. But when it comes to the BPA that stands for ‘business process automation’ – well that’s a good thing. A recent survey from CompTIA revealed that more and more businesses are using workflow automation to boost efficiency and overhaul existing business processes. Technologies like direct deposit are streamlining activities, and helping businesses get more done faster, growing their scope and market share. The industry of business process management (BPM) and business process automation (BPA) is projected to grow to $7.6 billion in 2016, up from $4.4 billion in 2012.
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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care.
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.