The traditional process for managing travel and expenses comes with obstacles that can throw up efficiency roadblocks, from the nuances of business travel to the speed of reporting expenses. The result: Office workers spend a staggering 58% of their time on busywork, according to Asana. Fortunately, companies looking to remove roadblocks and streamline their travel and expense processes have options for doing just that. Here’s what can help.
T&E Process Challenges
While the complex process of T&E management offers many opportunities to streamline operations, a few processes stand out as big time wasters, such as:
Booking travel. Many corporate travel tools were not designed with the end user in mind. When that happens, business travelers require more time to navigate booking their flights, hotels, and cars than they would on, say, a consumer travel site.
Analyzing data. Effectively managing spend comes down to understanding what the data reveals. But analyzing reams of data can be incredibly time-consuming.
Reconciliation. Collecting data from multiple sources and chasing down employees for explanations about their expenses may require several days of work every month.
These are just three of the areas where companies waste time and money. See all of them in the ebook, 5 T&E Processes That Waste Your Time — and Company Money.
How to Improve the T&E Process
All of these time- and money-wasting processes are things that Navan can help with. For example, Navan was designed from the ground up for the user. So when it comes to booking trips, for example, the experience feels more like a consumer-travel site. After all, if that experience isn’t intuitive, booking will take longer, costing employees time; and if it’s cumbersome, employees will be less likely to use it — costing the company money.
When it comes to expense processes, Navan can also help customers save time and money, especially when it comes to reconciliation. In a Navan survey, employees performing reconciliation spend at least 33% of their time on manual processes. But with Navan, reconciliation is automated, eliminating the traditional manual process. It also means that finance managers can see spend in real time, enabling better forecasting.
Navan also gives a boost to companies when it comes to analyzing data, thanks to our early movement in generative AI. Our GenAI-driven personal assistant, Ava, can pore over vast amounts of information across a company’s databases and instantly turn the findings into recommendations — a process that would take human analysts days or even weeks.
But those aren’t the only time- and money-wasting T&E processes companies struggle with today.
See more ways Navan can help save time and money in the ebook, 5 T&E Processes That Waste Your Time — and Company Money.