Every company manages travel expense control differently, but the goal is the same: to reduce travel expense costs, improve management efficiency, ensure compliance, and ensure employee satisfaction.
According to statistics, travel expenses have accounted for 5%-10% of the total expenses of enterprises, becoming the second largest controllable cost after the cost of human resources, which is directly related to the overall operation and management efficiency of enterprises. However, at present, more than 70% of enterprises still use the traditional after-the-fact reimbursement and financial manual review mode to control expenses. When it comes to travel reimbursements, employees spend an average of 05-1 business days to process reimbursements, while it costs managers about 63 hours to approve the reimbursement application of subordinates.
Employees complain about this, as personal advances are often required in the course of daily travel, and the reimbursement process is cumbersome and lengthy. Finance staff also feel the pain of being unable to manually sort, inspect and identify invoices due to the need to process all kinds of consumption documents, and the data is chaotic and difficult to analyze.
So, what's the problem?
What exactly does the enterprise cost control control?
In order to strengthen internal control and improve the company's management level, enterprises often formulate a budget for the next year, but due to the lag in the implementation and control of expenses and the opacity of expenses in subsequent reimbursement, no matter how strict the reimbursement system is, it is still impossible to avoid excessive expenses incurred by employees.
In order to manage the company's business travel, the granularity needs to be refined to the traveler's alcohol, catering, and taxi, which is not an easy task. For the control of employees' booking behavior, most enterprises can only accept extensively that as long as the booking is made within the difference standard, the purpose of cost control can be achieved, such as air tickets are limited to economy class, hotels are simply classified by city, and the amount of car models is not controlled, etc., and there is a lack of more refined control rules and means.
Take flight bookings as an example, as we all know, the earlier you book, the more likely you are to get a cheap flight, but because business travel is different from personal travel, employees often can't plan their trips too early. Companies don't have the data to measure how many days in advance to balance airfare** with the travel needs of their employees. This directly leads to the habit of employees booking on the day of business trips or booking 1 day in advance, and the discount on the purchased air tickets is necessarily not low enough.
To solve this problem, more refined control rules and means are needed. Understand employees' booking habits and travel needs through data analysis, so as to formulate more reasonable booking rules and cost control strategies.
Is there an effective cost control platform?
An effective fee control platform should:It integrates functions such as enterprise expense control and reimbursement, consumption scenarios, etc.
Business expenses such as business travel and business entertainment are the main use scenarios for expense control and reimbursement. Only by incorporating these consumption scenarios into the cost control system and controlling expenses from the source of consumption can a closed-loop of the whole process of cost control before, during, and after the event be formed.
By integrating the expenses and consumption scenario resources of various enterprises, Tongcaitong has built a full-process, full-self-service one-stop consumption**, standardizing from the source of consumption, helping enterprises improve the level of digital management, so that enterprises can control expenses more efficiently and scientifically.
Tongcaitong runs through the purpose and reason of expense into the entire cost control process, from expense application, use to reimbursement, the whole process is transparent and traceable. to".beforehand"For example, if the company requires ** consumption to be applied for in advance, the employee needs to associate the application form on the booking page before consumptionEmployees can view their individual rates on the booking page and filter for products that match the differenceIf the consumption order is submitted beyond the specification, the employee needs to perform the next step according to the excess control policy configured by the enterprise: fill in the reason to make a reservation or submit an oversize application.
In the middle of the matterIn the booking process, combined with big data analysis and algorithms, the system automatically executes control to meet the employee experience and help enterprises further save expenses. For example, if an employee of the same gender is on a business trip, if the itinerary coincides, priority will be given to sharing a house. For enterprise cars, Tongcaitong can also achieve more detailed control of scenes, models, amounts, and times, so as to avoid employees' random car use.
AfterwardsThe enterprise pays in a unified manner, employees do not need to advance funds, each income and expenditure can be traced, and the expense information is clear and transparentUnified settlement and invoicing, automatic verification of invoices and weight, greatly reducing the cumbersome work of checking and checking tickets, and improving financial efficiency. Through the collection of data from these nodes, the system automatically generates data reports, providing strong data support for enterprises to adjust, control and optimize various costs and expenditures.
How to reduce costs by 15%.
Taking a financial enterprise served by Tongcaitong as an example, before using Tongcaitong, the average monthly air ticket expenditure of the enterprise reached 150,000 yuan. Among the business trip orders of employees, same-day bookings and one-day advance bookings accounted for as much as 52%, and the average discount rate of air tickets exceeded 65%. After the introduction of the Tongcaitong fee control solution, the proportion of same-day bookings was effectively reduced to 12% by controlling employees to book tickets 4 days in advance (if the reservation is not made in advance, the direct superior's approval is required to book tickets). At the same time, by booking 4 days in advance, the average discount of air tickets will be reduced to 4%, and the maximum monthly savings can reach 50,000 yuan, with a saving rate of 30%.
The company plans to continue to strengthen the minimum price requirement for employee bookings, and if implemented in place, it can save an average of another 130 yuan per ticket, corresponding to a 10% increase in the savings rate.
In addition, Tongcaitong can also combine more refined behavior control data to help enterprise managers quickly gain insight into the abnormal behavior of employees, timely discover potential expense risk points and formulate response strategies, so as to avoid greater economic losses.
A machinery manufacturing enterprise through the analysis of the data report of Tongcaitong, monitoring that a small number of employees through the company to pay for air tickets, privately to the airline to apply for a refund or change, subject to the airline information security policy restrictions, the company paid for the air ticket may be refunded to the employee's personal account to cash out the profit. Through Tongcaitong's compliance monitoring, the company effectively identified employees' non-compliance behaviors, quickly rectified and standardized the employee travel process, and directly helped the company recover nearly 60,000 yuan in losses.
Advantages of Tongcaitong
Launched in April 2023, Tongcaitong, as a product of Tongcheng Group, has unique advantages.
In terms of ** chain resources(air tickets, hotels, train tickets, cars, etc.), Tongcaitong aggregates resources such as OTA B2B airline direct connection agreement hosting. Direct supply of airline resources, aggregating 1 million+ hotels and 100+ online car-hailing brands to meet the needs of corporate travel, accommodation and other aspects. At present, Tongcaitong has established cooperation with Huazhu, Jinjiang, Dongcheng, Green, Fengyue, Kaiyuan, Licheng and other wine management.
In terms of system integrationTongcaitong has been connected with financial software such as UFIDA and Kingdee and mainstream OA software such as Qiwei, Feishu, DingTalk, and Panwei. For example, on the Tongcaitong platform, after binding a DingTalk account with a simple operation, enterprises can automatically synchronize information such as address books and approval messages to improve employee efficiency.
In the current environment of urgent need to reduce costs and increase efficiency and the implementation of digital invoices, enterprises are actively carrying out digital transformation, and financial digitalization is a key part of the digitalization process of enterprises. Tongcaitong can not only help enterprises analyze and do a good job in cost control, but also quickly integrate and open up the enterprise financial system, OA approval and attendance system, and other collaborative systems, etc., to achieve system connection and data interconnection. In the future, Tongcaitong will continue to connect with other systems, promote the digital construction of enterprises, and promote the integration of business formats.