A study from KTH reveals a big difference in how companies in the Nordic re-gion handle their employees' travel expenses. Centralizing and automating your corporate travel management is one way to simplify and gain increased control.
Fully developed automated and centralized systems are not only more cost effec-tive compared to manual handling. They also give companies and municipal operations increased control of employees' expenses while minimizing the risk of violat-ing their policy.
Businesses that are financed by taxes, such as municipalities, county councils and state authorities, are scrutinized by the media on a regular basis. Executives and employees' tabs from business trips are not seldom reviewed and end up in the tabloids. With better systems for controlling expenses, scandals could probably have been avoided and would never have been allowed to damage the brand.
Clearer rules regarding expenses during conferences and business trips, combined with automated and centralized expense management systems, is one example of how one can minimize the risk of something going wrong.
”Centralized processes where the company owns and controls the expense management, improve control and compliance with policy rules. This can also have a potential effect on the brand and the confidence stakeholders' have in the business, ” says Niklas Arvidsson, professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Together with his colleague and doctoral student Richard Backteman, he has commissioned Eurocard to investigate how companies in the Nordic region handle employees' travel related expenses. In the study, they point out how efficient automated systems also can support better business – like making sure that travels are efficient and that sales represeantatives meet the right customers.
Another great advantage of robust and efficient systems is that they enable monitoring of the environmental impact of a company's travel. Perhaps employees are flying on unecessary or inefficient business trips, thereby contributing to increased emissions.