Business trips and business trips are a standard expenditure article of companies at different levels and size. It seems that there is nothing complicated in planning, but, nevertheless, there are a number of errors that may cost you dearly. More often they are characteristic of small businesses in which processes are not fully worked out and described or not sufficiently controlled. But sometimes such errors arise in large companies.
Check if there is one of the listed in your company: perhaps, having spent 10 minutes on reading, you will save up to 30% of the budget for business trips.
Your company has no travel policy
Trevel Politics is a business management system. In some organizations, it is called the Regulation on business trips or a set of rules for organizing business trips. In fact, this is a document answering all questions regarding business trips. A properly drawn up Trevl Policy makes business processes related to business trips understandable and helps to save the budget.
What is worth prescribing in the Trevl-Policy? The deadlines for submitting an application for a business trip, the deadline for applying for a visa, when it is worth buying tickets and booking rooms in hotels. What documents and checks should the employee who returned from a business trip should have. What to write in the report on the trip, and also when and where to hand it over. It is also worth prescribing restrictions on the cost of tickets and numbers for various categories of employees.
It is advisable to attract not only managers responsible for business trips, but also a lawyer, an accountant, a specialist in personnel, and most importantly, employees who often go on business trips. It is also worth remembering that Travel Politics is a living document that changes with the development of the company.
Of course, a small business does not make sense to develop a complex multi-page travets. Often it is enough to prescribe the main points, and set all the restrictions in the service for business trips – it is useful for companies of any size. In it, by default, you can set restrictions on the price of hotel rooms or a airline category.
There are no tools for monitoring business trips in your company
If you do not control the costs of business trips, it may happen that there will be employees who want to use it. According to Vedomosti, an average of 20% of business employees reflect in advance reports a minimum of expenses that exceeds the established limits or goes to the employee’s personal needs. Due to such abuse, the organization can incur impressive losses.
For example, often employees do not pay due attention to the cost of the ticket. Moreover, this is not necessarily an evil intent: sometimes the employee acquires a more expensive ticket, because he has a card of loyalty to the airline and he wants to accumulate bonus miles for his vacation. But even the difference in price of a couple of thousand rubles on the scale of the entire business for a year can result in a large amount.
More unscrupulous employees draw up tickets for resigned colleagues, hand them over through agencies or to the station office and take cash for themselves.
You can also “earn” on hotels: it is enough for an employee to book the cheapest number, and when settled, ask for an increase to luxury. The accounting department knows that the business trip is agreed with the leadership, but does not know which hotel room was allowed. As a result, according to the documents, everything is clean, and in fact an employee stole several tens of thousands of rubles from the company.
Frauds are also carried out by the agency shutters: some unscrupulous market participants make changes to electronic tickets, adding non-existent dachshunds and large service fees to the price, which are put in their pocket. The final price of a ticket can increase by one to two thousand rubles, which is formed in a very decent overpayment in a year.
You can avoid these losses if all purchases and payment pass through the electronic reservation system to which the company is connected. By default, there are tools that help control the costs of tickets and hotels. For example, the system reflects all offers available on the market with real prices without commissions and cheating. The manager at any time can see how much the employee spent and set the limits, and the accountant can quickly check all the data if he has doubts.
You order tickets and hotels in one travel agency
If the last few years you have been issuing tickets and hotels through one agency or buying directly from suppliers, it’s time to see what other options are on the market. There is nothing wrong with offline travel agencies, but sometimes they offer limited options and do not allow to see a complete picture of prices.
Try to work with the online travel agency, for example, Onetwotrip for Business. This and similar services give access to all flights and flights to the right dates, and also allow you to immediately book a hotel or buy a train ticket. In fact, this is a familiar search engine of tickets and hotels, only working taking into account the needs of legal entities.
The online agency is convenient in that it allows you to independently compare prices and choose the most profitable options. You can also check the cost of tickets for neighboring dates, and if the difference is significant, and the business trip can be shifted, save even more.
Another saving article is a service collection: at the online agency it is fixed and transparent, and you do not need to pay in addition for the discharge of each ticket.
In addition, you can build a trip more flexibly, for example, an employee flies one day: in the morning he will fly away Aeroflot, and in the evening S7 will return. This is possible because the online agency can glue tickets of different airlines in one order.
Following business trips are not automated
In many companies, the organization of a business trip involves a lot of correspondence. First you need to write off with an agent, sending him a request to find tickets and a hotel through an email. After getting options. Send them with a separate letter to the leader, wait for the approval. At the same time, it is easy to get confused, skip some letter or spend extra time on organizing work. And if not one person flies, but a group of employees from different departments, the number of letters may increase in proportion.
There is a more significant minus: during the correspondence, the price of tickets or a hotel may change (and, unfortunately, most often in a large way).
Online travel agencies simplify this process. In fact, there will be no correspondence in agreement of tickets and the hotel: only an employee who has the right to do so, within the framework of a pre -established limit, can make a purchase.
Thus, the process is fully automated. It is enough at the very beginning to spend a certain amount of time choosing responsible employees and installing limits on the cost of the order and the star of the hotel (if they are already registered in the Trevt Policy, there will be no difficulties) to then buy tickets and book hotels without clogging the nobody with extra chains of letters. Prices in your personal account are always relevant, they do not need to be confirmed and checked. And the leader in the report will see what was the best price for a given direction at the time of purchase.
Your employees buy tickets and hotels as individuals
This error is more likely to occur in small companies where an employee can buy a ticket, having paid by a card of a manager or business owner. The minus here is one: you pay extra money. The fact is that when buying from a legal entity, you can return the VAT ticket, and if the payment has passed from a personal card, there will be no return.
Online agencies allow you to easily return VAT: all documentation for accounting is formed automatically after purchase. It is convenient and saves the time of employees – and, of course, money.
You do not plan business trips in advance
Of course, this is not always possible – but if it turns out to draw up a schedule of business trips and buy tickets and book hotels in advance, the savings are significant. According to Onetwotrip, spontaneity can cost expensive: a ticket purchased a couple of days before the trip can cost 50% more than the same ticket bought in 2-3 months. The hotels have a similar statistics: many give a discount of up to 20% only for the fact that you booked a number earlier than a month before the settlement. Railways and other railway carriers does not lag behind: tickets purchased on the day of the opening of sales (60 days before the trip or more) is cheaper by an average of 20%.
So, if you have the opportunity to make schedules of business trips in advance, do this by immediately buying tickets and boiling hotels. If the plans change, the hotel’s reservation can be canceled (and in most cases it will be free), and for tickets – to return at least part of the money (which exactly depends on the tariff).
In our experience, planning business trips are most profitable at the end of winter and early spring: at this time, many airlines have various promotions with discounts. Moreover, discounts often act on tickets with the date of departure before the end of the year.
