T&E Policy Compliance Is Down. Here’s How to Change That

When it comes to T&E policy, companies have a compliance problem.

Just 16% of managers are getting 100% compliance on their T&E policies, and only 54% of them are getting 75% compliance, according to Skift’s 2024 report, The State of Corporate Travel and Expense. Even worse, those numbers are trending in the wrong direction: They’re down 3 and 5 percentage points, respectively, from last year’s report.

It's a problem because lower compliance can lead to higher costs and require additional work from employees to investigate and correct the issues.

What can you do? Turning compliance around begins with policy, which is why we created the guide 6 Key Strategies for Optimizing T&E Policy.

In it, you’ll find smart tips for creating T&E policies that fit your company's needs. We also share how to know if those policies are achieving your goals and suggest tools to help you effectively implement and enforce policies.

Improving T&E Policy Compliance

One issue in this battle is that policies may not be clearly defined, and employees can — inadvertently — stray outside of them. Or perhaps policies haven’t been updated to handle changing patterns of travel and spend, in which case, employees may have no option other than to make purchases outside of policy.

The guide serves up a list of key topics to include in any T&E policy. Remote work, for example, has brought about an evolution in how employees travel and spend. As a result, group travel is up — a whopping 51% YoY, according to Navan booking data — and policies have to take into account that different employees are traveling now than before the pandemic.

Get all the suggestions in our guide, 6 Key Strategies for Optimizing T&E Policy.

But in the battle for greater compliance, policy creation is just part of the process. Once it’s done, what’s the most effective way to handle enforcement? This guide shows that it may be easier than you think.

Of course, it’s only through analysis that you can determine if your policies are working. But that can be time- and resource-consuming work. Fortunately, it’s a process tailor-made for generative AI — if your company uses the right tools.

Here’s the good news: With those tools and some smart strategies, your company can reverse the downward trend in T&E policy compliance — and save time and money along the way.

Get T&E policy compliance back on track with our guide, 6 Key Strategies for Optimizing T&E Policy.