Business travel is an essential sales and customer engagement tactic that every company needs to have as a part of its growth strategy. Nothing closes a deal better than meeting prospective clients or customers in person.
Companies realize the importance of it and therefore they end up spending a staggering 10% of their revenue on business travel expense management, according to the New York Journal report. As much as it is important, business travel doesn’t have to be so expensive. You can minimize it to a significant percentage by using the best corporate credit card.
If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you must learn how to maximize return on investment (ROI) and control unnecessary travel expenses using corporate credit cards to ensure your travel expense management strategy doesn’t have leakages. Let’s explore the benefits in detail.
Beyond Reimbursement: Identifying Credit Card Advantages and Deductibles
- Corporate purchase cards are often bundled with special partner discounts that you can leverage to lower your overall travel spending. The discounts could be for flight tickets, lodging, or meals. However, you need to pick the right partner that offers one of the best corporate credit cards.
- You can optimize your travel expense management budget by leveraging tax deductions applicable to travel expenses. However, these expenses need to comply with two rules: 1. All of the expenses must be strictly business and 2. Your transactions must be regular and not lavish. By sticking to these two mandates, you can claim tax deductions on your flights, lodgings, and business lunches/dinners.
- Corporate credit cards provide you with reward points or loyalty score that translates into special offers like flight and hotel stay combo at a discounted price. However, you need to understand the rewards program thoroughly so that you can leverage it to its fullest.
Mileage to Milestones: Using Travel Insights to Drive Strategic Decisions
- Using the best corporate credit card for travel expense management, you can estimate the ROI of every business trip. You can align the expenses with sales revenue to assess the yield. Receiving insightful information helps you make growth-centric decisions.
- Business credit cards also help you enforce your expense policy and track if your employees are complying with the rules. You can tighten your travel expense management strategy by using insights to identify transactions that could have been decreased or avoided. It puts you in control of costs.
- Analyzing your corporate card expenses can prepare you for financial ups and downs so that you can place strategies to ensure that the cash flow is steady. Financial stability and efficient cash flow management are some of the key benefits of using the best corporate credit card since it keeps cash in the accounts for as long as possible.
- Analytics can help identify potential risks associated with business travel, such as overspending in certain categories or regions. This proactive risk assessment allows businesses to implement risk mitigation measures.
- One key benefit of using a corporate credit card for travel expense management is that you can evaluate your expenses against industry standards through a benchmarking strategy. Comparing costs with your travel budget will give you a clear understanding of your cost-efficiency.
Data-Driven Travel: Turning Expenditure Analytics into Profitable Outcomes
- All your travel expenses including flight ticket purchases, hotel bookings, and so on are recorded automatically, which you can use to generate on-demand and real-time reports for analysis.
- Some of the best corporate credit cards allow you to categorize and classify all expenses into different buckets making it easy to generate insights.
- You typically get access to a dashboard and mobile application to track the expenses being made on your corporate credit card as and when they happen improving your visibility.
- Interestingly, you can create geographic-specific spending patterns to draw budget estimates for future travel plans. It helps in optimizing your entire business travel budget.
- With the ability to analyze your travel expenses and business credit card expenditures, you can make realistic financial plans by considering near-accurate estimations.
- By analyzing travel expenses, you can derive trends, patterns, and factors that influence your travel budget. For example, traveling to some places may become expensive during tourist season. By analyzing such data points, you can schedule your meetings to make strategic financial planning.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size of your organization, it always pays to be prudent with your business expenses. Considering the chunk that travel expenditure claims from businesses, it calls for special attention in reducing the costs. Some of the best corporate credit cards, if used properly, can be a great financial tool for businesses. These cards are designed to be business-friendly, and therefore come bundled with a range of offers, benefits and discounts.
But, identifying the right card is of the essence. When it comes to corporate credit cards for SMEs, there is no better choice than the new YES BANK Zaggle Corporate Card. Besides the usual credit card benefits that we discussed above, this card has one of the best corporate credit cards that offers advantages like,
- Integrated with Zaggle ZatiX, a real-time analytics solution
- Exclusive rewards and benefits
- Fraud protection and liability waiver
- Optimizes working capital