In the wake of a global pandemic, a new race to become more digital and automated has emerged, affecting every aspect of the enterprise. While we’ve seen this push to modernization over the last decade or more in areas such as, sales, product, and digitized contracts, travel and expense management has been left behind. Antiquated, legacy T&E management companies and platforms have long forced a compromise on finance and travel leaders, requiring they sacrifice between dollar savings and employee experience—and often positioning them to achieve neither. Never was this more apparent than with the onset of COVID-19. In that era, many organizations found themselves ill-prepared and without the real-time data from modern, flexible T&E management tools to protect their travelers, get them home safely, and do so while controlling costs.
To date, many enterprise leaders have had to stitch together multiple, disparate systems to manage T&E, and still they have limited visibility and control over spend, as their data is pushed deeper into siloed systems. As a result, some of the most cumbersome activities in an enterprise today are the processes tied to business travel and expenses, including booking travel, processing payments, tracking expenses, filing expense reports, reconciling expenses on the backend, and accessing real-time data on traveler whereabouts and business spend.
