When employees travel on company time, it is common practise to pay them for reasonable travel expenses incurred while on company business. It’s a great way to ensure that your employees’ time and money spent on business trips is well spent. It’s good for business and employee morale to reimburse employees for business travel expenses. Learn more about the different options available for covering the costs associated with reimbursing your employees for business travel, as well as the best practises to follow.
Where are these costs going?
When an employee travels for business, they are responsible for covering any costs associated with such trip. Visiting a client’s location, attending a meeting, or checking out a different department inside the company are all examples of such excursions.
Only business-related costs, such as airfare and hotel, are included; leisure activities are excluded. To provide an example, if an employee travels on a business trip and remains a few days longer than expected, the additional days’ worth of costs are not reimbursable since they are not necessary business expenses. For travel expense reimbursement the procedures are important.
All the usual travel costs
Companies may cover a wide range of employees’ business travel expenses depending on the duration of the trip and the nature of the employee’s obligations. Typically, a company would foot the bill for an employee’s travel, housing, and food costs, but some even provide more extensive incentives like fitness centre memberships, entertainment budgets, and free flights for out-of-town relatives. Some employees may be eligible for more expensive accommodation and services due to their seniority or other factors.
How to best handle corporate travel costs
Before you can devise a plan for handling your company’s travel budget, you need to be aware of the norms and expectations about the perks and lodgings afforded to business travellers on the road nowadays. To ensure that the business trip goes off without a hitch, it is essential that your techniques for covering the workers’ travel costs are as efficient as possible.
If your staff often travels, you should institute standardised processes that are easy to understand and follow. Be careful to use these recommended practises for controlling corporate travel costs:
- Consider doing a budget review.
- Identify the policy’s aims.
- Don’t let your biases or lack of consistency show.
- Make a plan.
Check your budget
Keeping detailed records of the money spent on business trips can help you determine how much of a contingency to put aside in your budget for corporate travel. Think about how much money they have for the trip or how much they can afford to spend in general, and then divide that total up among the many things they’ll need to do or buy on the trip, including meals and entertainment.
It is important to keep a record of employees’ receipts for any purchases made with their own money if you want to repay them for these charges.
Establish the policy’s objectives
Make sure your employees are aware of the company’s policies on business travel expenses and any benefits to which they are entitled. Make sure they know how to get their money back for travel costs.
You should make sure that all the information they need to fill out a purchase order or keep track of receipts is readily accessible to prevent any confusion from arising on the road. Make it obvious when the company’s travel policy will not cover a certain expenditure, so that employees may make reasonable plans.
