Getting Ahead in Your Travel Receipts & Travel Card Management

When the General Manager of the Engineering & Design division saw a $325 charge at the Tilted Kilt Restaurant on a Salesperson’s card, he blew a gasket. Credit card usage (or misuse!) and receipts gathering efforts were getting out of hand at this $18M Midwest firm.

Customer Pain Points

The company had heavy travel requirement and had company travel cards for each traveler.
There was a lot of administrative work in matching Card statements with Receipts; most travelers never submitted receipts and the company did not want to hire a costly resource just to administer the card expenses.
Due to delayed or missing reports and receipts, accounting was always faced with old expenses suddenly showing up.
There was no proper verification and control on what and where people could use their card and whether they were within travel expense limits.

Our Assessment

The company had sufficient policies and procedures, however, it lacked oversight and enforcement.
When accounting did raise concerns, the travelers invariably were able to talk to sales leadership and override accounting concerns and questions with some or the other explanation.
We recommended self-pay and claim, but the company did not want to pull the credit cards from sales and operations, in fear of demoralizing them.

Methodology Adopted

We hired a travel assistant for approximately $15,000 a year and created a dedicated travel email address – [email protected].
We then wrote up and circulated a document on how to submit receipts to this resource.
Every day the Travel Assistant would comb through the card statement online and where missing, email the card holders reminding them to send the receipts back with relevant info.
She would also advise that certain expenses were disallowed, instruct that such expense not be repeated and advise payroll for claw backs on repeated non-compliance.
The Travel Assistant then created a travel report for each trip, attached the receipts, got it approved by the employees’ manager and gave it to A/P for accounting.

Results

This arrangement was a win-win-win for all the three parties concerned - the travelers, as they now had an assistant helping with their administration headache, the operational managers who got to approve and review expenses in a timely manner, and the accounting team, as the validation and verification of expense reports was already done by the time it reached them. Over a period of time, travelers also started spending within limits and that savings more than easily recovered the assistant’s cost.