Many corporate travel companies claim to save you a lot money in the beginning but with time the costs keep shooting up. This is because of the lack of cost monitoring. Consistent business reporting and monitoring is a necessity for many companies, as the customers may demand to view weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual reports to get a good sense of what is working for the company’s travel plan and what is not. For all sorts of businesses, from ecommerce to the service industry, cost monitoring and reporting can save time and money as well as improve processes in the long run.
Companies faced with the intense increase in business travel costs must implement a rigorous and clear policy on business expenses. In many cases, managing expense accounts can be time-consuming, resulting in a financial overload, not to mention additional spending which may be incurred (for example due to extended stays or extended rental agreements). This is why companies need to optimise costs and ensure accurate monitoring of their business travel budget.
- Management Insight: Business reports collate a lot of data around your company which can provide useful information for management. Insights around spending, growth and profits will be included, which can be used to help create future projections, marketing plans and budgets. Management will also use business reports for tracking growth and the company’s progress, identifying trends and any anomalies which may need investigating. Having a thorough and reliable set of data about your business means it can be regularly consulted and shown to potential investors, for example.
- Identify Problems: Routine monitoring, and reporting should help highlight any issues there may be in your business before they have chance to escalate. If it’s only an annual report which your company produces, then problems and anomalies may be easily missed and could be draining your business of finances and time without your knowledge. Monitoring an area that has problems and comparing data collected over time should help point out what has triggered any issues or where they began. This can then be used to provide a fix or come up with ways to improve.
- Highlight Opportunities: Along with highlighting problems within the business, monitoring and reporting over time can identify any opportunities to expand. Reports work as a good way of recording past activity and times when expansion has proven a success. These can be used to help define future growth opportunities, identify what worked well and what more could be done in the future. Monitoring and reviewing competitors on a regular basis can also assist with this.
- Transparency: More regular reporting can offer additional transparency throughout the year, possibly making the savings more doable. It allows businesses within the same sector (other corporate travel management companies)to be easily compared around their cost.
SMEs in the UK account for £2.5bn of business travel spend, but according to a survey carried out by the Business Travel Show earlier this year, up to £500m of that is wasted because they simply don’t have the know-how to ensure they get the best deal and travel costs quickly add up.
Many travel management firms will aim to make a 10-20 per cent saving on your travel spend, but the cost of using their services has to be justified. You have to do an appropriate amount of business travel to ensure that a travel management business can save you money in the long run and you have to justify spending that money on their services. Savin Corporate travel will ensure that you get the best travel rates because our business relies on cost – monitoring. Get in touch with us today, by clicking here.