A Guide to Travel Expense Control in Sales

There are two good reasons why it's important to control travel expenses in your sales team. The first is that your sales team are probably the people in your business who account for most of the travel expenses. So, the more accurate and more efficient your expense management and control process is, the better.

The second is that you pay your sales team to achieve sales, not to navigate a complex expense management process, which many regard as a distraction to their core role, and a waste of their time. The easier the travel expense process is, the better your sales team will feel.

How can automation improve the travel expense management process? 📱

Expense management software such as Expend can help to automate the travel expense management process for your sales team.

Expense items such as mileage tracking are fully automated, and assigned to key client meetings and events. This enables you to better track and control travel costs at client level.  

Expend management software can also manage, control and approve sales team travel expenses in real time, removing the need for claim forms, sign off and monthly deadlines.

An automated travel expense management process can also improve visibility of spend, at individual employee level,  improve accuracy and reduce fraud, all of which are very important to your net financial position.  

Customise your expense rules and limits 🔒

Automated management expense software enables you to limit the maximum claim for different cohorts of employees and means that you can configure rules for different groups of people in your business, depending on their roles, responsibilities or business spending requirements.

Real time expense processing ⏱

Your sales team does not enjoy completing travel expense forms. Expend removes this time-consuming task, enabling your teams to photograph their receipts on the Expend  mobile  app. The key travel spend data is extracted from the receipt image, enabling direct integration with your company accounts across platforms such as Xero or QuickBooks. 

Expend also enables the categorisation of expense claim types and builds the settlement of the expenses in the background for automated reimbursement of your sales team’s travel expenses. 

And the real-time processing capabilities of solutions from Expend mean that any claims which are out of policy or out of an agreed spend category can be flagged, and managed at the moment of purchase, rather than weeks or months after the event. 

This improves the process of education and policy compliance with your sales team and does not allow unsubstantiated expenses to build up, unseen, in the background. It also prevents disputes about interpretations of the expenses policy months after the spend.

So, expense management software can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team expense management process. It can help to deliver your travel expense policy through real time approval and can also ensure compliance by gathering, managing and processing sales team travel expense data and integrating this with your accounts.

Imagine, a sales team that's able to get on with selling rather than completing expense claim forms…