Large Indian corporates see mobility, visibility and control as a challenge when it comes to managing travel and expenses of staff.
But processes and technology are changing the landscape.
Concur spoke to more than 100 major Indian companies to understand current levels of automation and challenges they face when it comes to travel and expense management, including finance and other C-level executives in companies with over 500 employees and with an average turnover of over $85 million (INR 500 crore).
Business travellers - frequency, T&E contribution
About 75 companies have 21 or more people in their organization who travel for business. 50% of the CFOs say more than 50 people across all functions in their companies take domestic and international travel.
Eight out of ten of the respondents say their employees travel once a week (24%), once a fortnight (32%) or once a month (24%).
10% of the companies are in the "highest expense band" where T&E equate to more than 10% of organizational revenues.
28% of companies allocate more than 4% of annual revenues to spending on T&E.
About 50% of respondents say 75% of their business travellers travel with smartphones.
T&E system - current issues, expectation
Among the companies that use a T&E system:
- 32% use an on-premise packaged software
- 35% say that all approval stages can be cleared in a single day
- 58% use systems that are built in-house
61% of respondents say their current T&E system does not allow the company to extract better rates from suppliers.
Further breaking down the specific category that makes respondents unhappy:
- 31% want the system to request and approve T&E anytime, anywhere
- 27% want to track who is spending, how much, how frequently and where
- 27% want to act on spend before it takes place
- 39% report an impact on productivity due to time consumed
- 30% highlight the lack of control over spends
- 30% face issues during audit
54% of respondents say their company does not receive updated information about the most frequented destinations, nights spent in particular hotels and seats booked in particular airlines.
T&E automation
While 51% of the respondents use cloud-based services in their personal life, only 32% use the cloud for business processes.
68% of the respondents say that by automating the T&E processes, companies can save on increased airfare and other travel-related expenses. Because, a delay of five days in a travel approval can push up airfare costs by 10%, according to the study.
39% of companies have an automated T&E system in place, 37% handle it manually, and 23% use a mix of both manual and automated systems.
34% of respondents say they are comfortable with storing T&E data in third-party data centres, and 24% say they do not have any data security concerns about the cloud when it comes to T&E.
NB: Business travellers image via Shutterstock.