As critical as ground transportation is for companies moving employees from A to B, it may be surprising to hear that only very few organisations have a true understanding of the hidden costs surrounding their business travel.
Whether your business requires travel services for customers staff movement or for delivery and collection of company materials, you’ll find the time and cost impact this can have on your business to be significant.
Here we consider those implications in greater detail addressing both the common challenges businesses incur and the tips to help solve them.
1. Put adequate expense policies in place
Travel expenses are the second most difficult operating expense line item for businesses to control so how best do you control them?
The most common areas abused are increasing mileage expenses, falsifying taxi receipts and claiming unpaid tips.
Your employees are not intentionally setting out to defraud your company however pushing the boundaries is an expensive business, which is why companies are requiring more assistance in approaching the issue.
Tip 1: Ensuring you have a relevant and up-to-date expense account policy is an essential component of preventing the embellishing of company expenses. So too is implementing a managed transport service for your business, helping to remove the risk of claiming ‘errors’, while gaining a consolidated invoice, offering better visibility of transport costs (such as taxi costs) across the business.
2. Reduce time spent processing expense claims
The admin task of processing expense claims is a weight most organisations carry, in fact, new research shows UK employees spend 441,827,088 days a year on ‘time wasting’ office tasks such as completing unnecessary admin.
The ‘Productivity in the Workplace’ report states that ‘too much admin’ takes up a whopping 38 per cent and comes in 2nd place of the top five areas employees confirmed to restrict them from doing their job well, others include:
- Too many meetings take place and go on for too long (46 per cent)
- Too much admin (38 per cent)
- Too many emails (29 per cent)
- People management i.e. misbehaving colleagues (25 per cent)
- Technology is slow (24 per cent)
Tip 2: Finding a system that reduces the time your staff spend on completing time-wasting admin is a necessity. Swapping paper receipts and spreadsheets with super-fast and accurate technical processes reduces the time your staff are filling in expense claims when they can be growing your business.
3. Gain control with accurate reporting
Hidden travel costs contribute to a large factor of wasted time and money for a great deal of UK based businesses. For instance, providing a blank receipt leaves organisations exposed to a number of issues when reconciling expense claims. Other common problems include:
- Companies not having a defined travel expense policy
- Employees forgetting their travel charge before writing it down
- Staff rounding up travel expenses on average by up to 25%
- Employees over-claiming on tips
Such challenges can lead to potential discrepancies and over-claiming, whether intentional or not, particularly when concerning the rounding up of taxi receipts and tips. Poor reporting can also contribute to a lack of control and bad visibility.
Tip 3: Using a managed service that includes a reporting facility will help to increase overall visibility of travel expenditure within your business, helping to remove the risk of lost receipts, round up fares and gain a better view of tips given.