Travel has become an integral and inseparable part of businesses today. With professionals and executives constantly on the move to discharge their duties, travel expenses factor prominently in cost center budgets. However, manual reporting of travel expenses has been extremely challenging for organizations due to loss of documents, usage of spreadsheets and more. The lack of visibility over business trips also delays their approvals, which could be a liability for companies. In order to mitigate these problems, an increasing number of organizations today are seeking to automate the entire process by deploying advanced Travel Expense Management (TEM) software solutions.
The adoption of web-based TEM has proven to be beneficial for organizations. With the ability to obtain quotes from hotel groups and upload invoices online, the time taken for approving the expenses has improved significantly. Also, some of the latest products support the creation of travel itinerary to offer greater clarity into the business trip. This has reduced the time taken for pre-trip authorization substantially. Further, with the scope for monitoring the competitive rates offered by different hotels and airlines, among others, TEM software is instrumental in reducing the cost of business travel. Being able to convert expenses between multiple currencies simplifies the tracking of expenditures through corporate credit cards. While the latest TEM offerings come with numerous features, the cost of processing travel expenses is cheaper when automation is embraced.
In order to help the enterprise CIOs choose the right TEM solution provider, a distinguished panel comprising CEOs, CIOs, analysts and the CFO Tech Outlook editorial board has reviewed companies with proven expertise in assisting enterprises with TEM solutions and services. The panel weighed their ease of deployment and generation of reports, among other capabilities, in order to catalog the finalists. In this edition of CFO Tech Outlook, we present to you the Top 10 Travel Expense Management Solution Providers 2017.