Business trips return to agendas: Free Now For Business tips for your company to save money with them

It seems that taking a suitcase, riding on one plane and moving to another point on the map to keep meetings with people related to the company, is again an increasingly palpable reality after almost 2 years of pandemic.

Corporate trips suffered a great collapse in the first phase of the health crisis, reaching falls that exceeded 90%.Now, although conferences and trade fairs, which represent much of business trips, are still mostly virtual, optimism grows and more and more live and hybrid formats are being given, which will accelerate this fall, according to aDeloitte study.

This report, under the name return to a world transformed.How the Pandemic is Reshaping Corporate Travel, is based on a survey conducted one50 Travel Managers between May 28 and June one0, 202one.At the same time, the consultant interviewed executives of companies whose expenditure on plane trip in 20one9 was around one23 million dollars (one06 million euros).Although they are still well below pre-pandemic levels, they are expected to increase according to the results of the report: 9 out of one0 expect to reach or exceed 75% during the fourth quarter of 2022.

Given these forecasts, how can companies optimize business trips?

Free Now for Business, Free Now's shared transport solution to simplify business travel management, offers us the following tips:

one.Set firm guidelines to control expenses.Before organizing a trip, either by car, train or plane, define your travel policy and the assigned budget, and communicate it to your employees.Travel policy are the rules that must be followed for displacement, from the category of hotels, to transport management or diets.

2.Centralize payments.Opting a centralized monthly payment to group all employee expenses is the best option in the organization of business trips, according to Free Now for Business.In addition to saving costs, it allows the company to have a broader vision of workers' trips to control and monitor transportation more easily and practice.

3.Limit the number of suppliers.By giving exclusivity to a single supplier, the company automatically has more control over employee reserves.For example, it is usual for employees to go to search tools or applications with which they are more familiar, sometimes moving away from the travel policy established by the company.This leads to leaks that, according to Free Now for Business, cost up to 3.000 euros a year by traveler.

4.Do not neglect indirect costs.When organizing a business trip, the most common is to think about expenses such as transport, accommodation or food.However, it is advisable to go one step further and keep the indirect costs derived from invoices, accounting, expenses reports, insurance or unforeseen.Free Now for Business states that, on many occasions, they can be higher because "they rarely control".But how to limit them?Anticipate and automate your management as much as possible so as not to have to dedicate them some time later.

5.Analyze employee trips.We must focus on the data collected during the trips, that is, analyze the expenses and behavior that workers have to improve and optimize the programming of future trips.

6.Create an expense report policy.According to SAP Concur, companies pay an average of 730 euros per employee per year due to fraud in expense claims.To save money in this aspect, Free Now for Business remembers that establishing precise guidelines for the reimbursement of expenses, can help a lot.It is the first step to define employee expenses: automate, dematerialize and centralize them.

Free Now For Business services try to facilitate the implementation of all these tips through a single application to manage business trips.What does it consist of?The company can open an account for the travel of its employees and thus have a simple and fast time control, locations, payments, vehicle ranges or billing.

When the trip is underway, employees are those who manage all stages, from reservation to payments or expenses reports.In addition, they can make reservations simultaneously for one or more guests, which in this case can be customers of the company itself.

La aplicación puede usarse además en más de one00 ciudades europeas, lo que permite gestionar viajes nacionales e internacionales.