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Analytics in Corporate Travel

The world of corporate travel is changing at a rapid face. Not only are there regular developments being made with respect to the core policies and operational changes in business travel, but technology is also constantly shaping how organizations going about corporate travel. A large transformation in digitizing the travel and expense reimbursement process is analytics.

Analytics is defined as the systematic computational analysis of data and statistics, and the processing of this derived data to gather meaningful conclusions. If we look at the fundamental problems associated with travel and expense management, it is the sheer expenditure of travel and entertainment that comes to mind. Apart from this, other issues such as lack of visibility of expenses, no-real time reporting of expenses and constant budget overflow continue to persist.

Travel and entertainment accounts for the second largest expenditure in organizations after payroll. Even a reduction as small as 5% can go a long way in helping an organization be profitable. In some cases, an expenditure of 5% in the domain of travel and expense can be equivalent to an increase in sales up to 30%. Monitoring expenses to this extent is not feasible manually, and if done in this way, can lead to the wastage of a large amount of valuable man hours.

Analytics in Travel and Expense Management has gone a long way in creating an avenue for corporates to monitor and keep a tight grip on travel expenditures. This is how a powerful analytical tool can be of use.

  • Key Metric Identification: The tool can identify key-metrics in your travel expenditures and can analyse them over a period of time to assist you in identifying which metrics are turning out to increase the expenditure for your organization.
  • Budgeting Capabilities: Analytic tools can allow you to set monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual budgets for corporate travel. Allocate funds to individual expenses, to teams and to projects and keep an eye on the remaining portion of the budget that has been set at all times.
  • Real-time reporting of data: 95% of organizations still use modes of communication such as email and memos to plan and execute corporate travel. A tool with an-in built mechanism for communication and status-reporting can help managers track expenditures as they happen. No delays are caused, and analytics helps managers keep a tight grip on finances.
  • Dashboards and Summary: A detailed dashboard with relevant indicators can help the CFO of an organization to immediately identify the fallacies in the current business travel policies in an organization. Analytics can also provide summaries to help them keep an eye on various metrics such as Organization, Branch, Department, Individual, Demographic, Location and Projects.
  • Artificial Intelligence in Analytics: A powerful analytical engine also uses artificial intelligence and predictive analysis to make forecasts. These forecasts are made on previous patterns after running an analysis on large amounts of data. It can also create a recommendation engine to make the best possible booking for a hotel or flight. Loyalty points can be assigned to employees who save a certain amount of money for the organization.

To know more about Travel and Expense tools, you can go to our website www.easemyexpense.com and download our White Paper publications. To know what EaseMyExpense can do for you, download our ROI Calculator.