Receipt Data Makes Corporate Travel Expense Management More ‘Hospitable’

The road warriors are returning to airports, hotels and restaurants in droves.

And, curiously enough, in an age when consumers can book and pay for travel (and all the stops during the trips) with just a double click, for corporate travelers, the hospitality business is still anything but hospitable.

At least when it comes to expense management.

Banyan CEO Jehan Luth told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that the reality of life on the road is full of friction, particularly when gathering and presenting receipts for reimbursement.

Paper receipts abound, expense reports can take time to turn around, and in the midst of it all are the CFOs, who are taking a closer look than ever at day-to-day expenses. The inefficiencies have become even more pronounced for smaller companies, where 10% of an employee’s time might be spent filling out (or reviewing) expense reports. Photos of paper receipts uploaded into corporate back-office systems are not always legible or usable.

“Merchants in the hospitality business can help travelers and their employers eliminate the hassles inherent in expense management,” Luth said. “That benefit can be realized by harnessing receipt data itself to organize and make sense of all the business trip lunches, dinners and hotel stays.”

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He noted that the same merchants who have enjoyed loyalty from individual consumers should take a cue from that seamless experience they offer. In 2022, corporate travelers should not have to resort to calling front desks to try to get copies of their receipts emailed (or even faxed).

At the same time, those client firms — the companies sending their employees on the road — have been rethinking their own internal operations and automating their expense management processes.

“That becomes difficult in an environment where, after a two-year pandemic-induced lull, employees are booking their trips in a variety of ways, such as through aggregators,” Luth said. “Or they may be used to wielding paper tickets at the airport gate.”

Simpler Ways to Get It Done

There are simpler ways to get it all done, Luth told Webster. Several FinTechs are reimagining expense management and helping client firms reimagine business travel.

“Automating the item-level receipt process is the future of expense management,” he said, and change tends to happen when there are alternatives to in place-processes that are demonstrably faster, more efficient and cheaper.

Two-sided platforms such as those on offer from companies like Banyan can serve as the interface between companies and merchants (including, for example, restaurants) as employees travel. “For the merchants,” he said, “Banyan exists as a single point of interface. Travelers swipe cards at participating merchants and itemized folios automatically are pre-populated into users’ expense reports. The data flows directly, so there is no need to match against paper receipts or emails.”

“Making this simple to the merchant and the traveler is the way to change the norm in the industry,” Luth said.

For the merchant, especially, there’s a net benefit in the fact that calls into their customer care staff (now more than likely understaffed) are minimized as travelers do not have to backtrack to try to hunt down those transactions.

As Luth told Webster: “If you, as a traveler, had a choice where you could dine at a place where you don’t have to worry about the expense report, it’s all taken care of … or at a place where you do have to worry about it, we really believe people’s preference will be to choose the more convenient location.”

See also: How Banks and Merchants Are Working Together to Design Better Loyalty Programs