Role
Business travel
How many times a month do you chase a missing receipt? There is one travel policy and it is usually sensible - and settling a trip comes apart over documents somebody lost or threw away.
Intro call
Four questions we would start with
How many times a month do you chase missing documents?
If it is with most settlements, then settling travel consists of chasing people rather than of counting costs.
What happens when a trip departs from the policy?
If every exception needs an email to a manager and a wait, some people book their own way and ask for approval afterwards.
How many people does one trip touch?
The traveller, their manager, administration, accounting. With four people the settlement takes weeks, and the employee waits for their own money back.
Where does data about travel costs go?
If it goes only to accounting, nobody sees where and why you travel most often - and that is material for negotiating with suppliers and for deciding which trips are needed.
We take over the paperwork, you keep the decisions about trips
Requests, bookings, collecting documents and settling can be taken off the desk. Approving a trip and decisions about departures from the policy stay with a person.
- The document is collected during the trip, not after it. - A photo of a receipt at the moment of the expense solves most of the problem - the rest is reminders.
- A departure from the policy has to be fast, not impossible. - If approval takes three days, the policy will be worked around. If it takes a tap, it will be followed.
- Repaying the employee is a deadline, not goodwill. - Delays here cost more in morale than in money.
Scope
What can be taken off travel administration
Eighteen example tasks. Each one has a human approval point. Below is a selection, and the scope we fit to your process.
The request and approval
- A request with the purpose, the route and an estimate of the cost
- Checking it against the policy and pointing out departures (approval: the manager)
- Information about the team's travel budget
- Reminders about requests waiting for approval
Bookings
- Proposed connections and accommodation within the policy (choice: the traveller)
- Linking a booking to the request
- Handling changes and cancellations
- Information about the travel documents required
Documents during the trip
- The set of documents required for the destination
- Collecting receipts and invoices by photo, at the moment of the expense
- Recognising the amount, the date and the type of expense (approved by: the traveller)
- Reminders about missing documents during the trip
- Handling expenses in a foreign currency
Settlement and review
- A signal when a settlement is not filed on time
- Preparing the settlement from the documents collected (approved by: the traveller and the manager)
- Calculating per diems and allowances under the regulations
- Watching the deadline for repaying the employee
- Travel costs summarised by destination and purpose (conclusions: the specialist)
A day's work
Today
- Requests arrive by email, in various forms
- A departure from the policy needs an exchange of several messages
- After the trip you collect receipts, asking several times
- You assemble the settlement by hand, calculating the per diems
- The employee waits weeks to be repaid
- You do not know where and why the company travels most often
With AI assistance
- Requests come in one form, with departures flagged
- Approving a departure is a tap, not an exchange of emails
- Receipts are collected during the trip, not after it
- The settlement is built from the documents, you check it
- The repayment deadline is watched
- Travel costs are summarised by destination and purpose
- Time to settle a trip
the employee is repaid sooner
the documents are collected during the trip rather than chased afterwards
- Following the policy
fewer bookings outside the process
a departure is fast, so working around it is not worth it
- The cost of travel
it is visible where and why you travel
the spending is summarised by destination and purpose
- The traveller's burden
less paperwork after the trip
the settlement is built from what was collected along the way
We start with the documents, because that is where the friction is greatest.
- Step 1
Collecting receipts during the trip
A photo at the moment of the expense. That change alone removes most of the chasing.
- Step 2
The request and approval in one form
With departures flagged and fast approval.
- Step 3
The settlement
Assembled from the documents collected, with per diems calculated under the regulations.
- Step 4
Reviewing the costs
Summaries by destination and purpose. It needs a few months of data.
Common questions
Questions that come up at the first meeting
Will travel administration stop needing a person of its own?
In many companies it already does not - it spreads across assistants and the travellers themselves, and that is where the mess in settlements comes from. Taking over requests, bookings and settlements puts that spread in order. If you do have a travel person, they will start working on the difficult trips instead of retyping receipts.
Does this fall under the AI Act?
Travel administration is not a high-risk use. The point to watch is data about employees' trips: it is data about their activity, so the scope of processing and access should be limited to the settlement.
Still have a question that is not here? Book a call
Next step
How many weeks does an employee wait to be repaid for a trip?
We will show you what travel administration looks like when the documents collect themselves during the trip and the settlement is built from them.