Travel and Expense Reporting Pains Persist Despite Industry Advances
Stephanie Dula 11 Nov 2015In advance of the publication of the latest report in our proprietary Navigator series, the Travel and Expense Management (TEM) Navigator, our analysts have been busy conducting extensive research into the current state of corporate travel. They’ve discovered that organizations still struggle with common expense reporting challenges, some of which are the focus of a recent study conducted by the Global Business Travel Association entitled Expense Reporting: Global Practices and Pain Points.
According to this study, “each year companies around the globe spend, on average, approximately half a million dollars and nearly 3,000 hours correcting errors in expense reports.” Travel buyers surveyed identified the beginning steps of preparing an expense report as particularly burdensome, “including setting up the expense report (24 percent), entering the data (33 percent) and attaching receipts (37 percent).”
Do these pain points sound familiar? The reality is that travel and expense reporting remains a costly problem area for many organizations, despite a market that offers affordable, scalable solutions. According the GBTA study, the problem remains especially prevalent in Europe, where traveling employees are still most likely to submit paper expense reports.
Despite the pains that persist for corporate travelers and their employers, this year we’ve seen evidence that things are changing for the better. In July of this year, we reported on the growing popularity of networks with corporate travelers with networks that enable collaborative consumption, like Uber and Airbnb. According to an analysis of second-quarter expense reports from the TEM provider, Certify, Uber overtook taxis as a preferred mode of transportation among business drivers, while Airbnb experienced a 143% growth in receipts over the first quarter of the year.
We’ve also seen some positive new trends emerge in regards to the TEM features that employees have, or will have, at their disposal. It was announced this week that Concur, a provider of expense management solutions, will “expand its relationship with Booking.com by making it a TripLink partner in the coming months. This will allow expense reports to be pre-populated with bookings made on Booking.com.” These types of partnerships enable employees to reduce or eliminate the time they spend on travel expense reporting.
Click here for a sneak peek at more of the exciting advancements we’ve been seeing in the TEM space, and watch for the full TEM Navigator report to be published next week.
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