Whether you’re working for a small business or a larger corporation, business travel can be a large expenditure, second only to payroll. With 84% of business travelers expected to take at least one trip in the next 6 months, making corporate travel cost effective has never been more important.

If you want to optimize your business travel budget, having real-time data to hand will help you set benchmarks for your travel costs, create future budgets that reflect reality, and help you make smart decisions that will affect financial decisions in your current month and quarter.To gain better control of your budget, you need to have full visibility of all

business travel expenses

and be able to visualise the spend of every business trip by various categories. This will help you work out the

average cost of business travel

for each department, team, person, and/or office location. If you’re used to more manual, labor-intensive processes, this sounds like a dream, right?

The easiest way to get the data is to let your

business travel booking tool collect it

for you.This means moving away from allowing travel managers and office managers to book their trips on

business travel booking sites

and apps designed for leisure trips and vacations. Avoid using traditional travel agencies to book your business trips too. Instead, we recommend using a

modern booking platform

specifically designed for business travel and most importantly, keeping the finance teams’ needs in mind.Ideally, the booking platform you choose should automatically report on the total cost of travel by individual employee, team and office location. and also provide insights such as average trip price, date range, and spend type (airfares, hotel rates, etc.).The tool should also include labels so that you can collect more tailored information on your travel expenses, like how much money is spent on a particular client or event, for example.At TravelPerk, we offer a flexible reporting solution - allowing you to see where spend is going in real-time. Our tool allows you to choose a mixture of automatic filters and manual labels, so you’ll be able to see all the data you need at a click of a button.With reporting tools you can separate your business travel spending and costs by:Being able to categorize and separate these expenses is the key to making smart operational decisions and optimizing your business travel budget.Travelperk's reporting tool also allows you to configure reports or schedule alerts centered around the data that matters the most to you, meaning you can make more informed financial decisions.

In addition to sophisticated reporting tools, your travel management company, should allow you to

integrate your business travel booking tool with your expense management system

. This way, you have all expenses consolidated within one platform to make your spending analysis much simpler.Tools like

Ramp, Divvy, Mobilexpense Group, Payhawk, and Yokoy

enable you to add in other data such as meals or event tickets to get a full overview.Learn more in our comprehensive guide about how to

streamline your expense management process

.In addition to real-time data and streamlined expense processes, here are 3 more tips to make your business travel budget work harder for you.

To control real-live bookings, you should be able to integrate your business travel policy into your booking tool. This not only benefits the finance team but allows employees and travel managers to be better informed of what’s in budget. Meaning you’ll have better chance of

improving travel policy compliance

.When setting up your travel policy inside of your booking platform, create the minimum number of policies possible. We recommend most business owners to apply a standard policy, and an

executive policy

if needed. This will help make travel policy management and coordinating travel expenses a lot smoother.

It helps to define approval workflows so that travel managers can review and validate requests more efficiently. If your travel policy is integrated into a

booking tool like TravelPerk

, you can set up your preferred approval workflow. For example, if a traveler books an upcoming business trip that falls within the travel policy you’ve set, you can set it to be automatically approved. Leaving you to get on with more important tasks!

Small and medium sized businesses lose millions each year from unclaimed VAT on their business trips. With so many different tax regulations in the UK and around the world, the refund process can often be confusing and drawn out for many finance teams. Luckily, TravelPerk has created a

simple VAT recovery solution

allowing you to keep travel costs down and save up to 25% of your annual travel budget. TravelPerk collects invoices on your behalf from service providers so no cash is left on the table.