Business Travel is very important for every business as it fosters interaction. Face-to-face meetings help generate trust between the two parties and ensure complete agreement on the business relationship. The Marketing and Sales Team in a company are responsible for building a productive relationship with the client and often they might go on a business trip to make a business deal.

Most of the organizations follow a traditional approach for performing travel approvals. Employees might send a travel request to the approver through email or paper documents. When there is a lot of emails in your inbox, there is a good chance to miss these travel request emails that would result in a delay in approval. There may be two to three levels of approvers such as team lead, manager, and senior manager that are involved in approving the travel request. When the person in the specified role is away on leave or in a meeting, a further delay in approval happens. Finally, the employee would end up rescheduling or canceling the business trip. Unplanned and ad-hoc management of your workflow affects your business growth.

Benefits of Cflow’s Travel Solution :

Travel Solution in Cflow helps you to manage the business travel plans effectively and execute them without any hindrance. Your travel process may involve multiple approvals and back and forth with the travel agency before all travel documents are ready. Later, the agency will send an invoice that will need further approval and your employees also will need to be reimbursed for expenses. All these workflows can be interlinked in Cflow and built as a comprehensive Solution. An overview of the workflows in the Travel Solution is given below:

  • Business Travel Request workflow manages the travel request from an employee as it traverses manager approvals and different travel options from the agency till the final travel documents are sent. After the process is completed, a request is automatically created in the Travel Agency Invoice process and Travel Expense Reimbursement process.
  • Travel Agency Invoice workflow manages the invoice reconciliation between the travel agency and the Finance department before the final payment is done to the agency.
  • Travel Expenses workflow manages the verification of the proof of expenses submitted by the employee. The Finance Department reconciles the expenses and processes the payment to the employee.

In addition to these workflows, you can make use of the lookup (Master tables) to eliminate manual entry of data that are most common in all the above mentioned workflows.

Business Travel Request:

  1. Travel Request – The employee fills in the travel details, flight preferences, and transfer information. When the request is submitted, it moves to the next stage of Manager review.
  2. Manager Review – The manager makes an approval and the request is sent to the Travel Agency.
  3. Quote Travel Options – Travel Agency provides a quotation for flight options that are available, hotel accommodation charges, car rental charges. This is then sent to the Requestor to select the preferred travel option.
  4. Select Travel Options – The employee selects from the travel options provided by the travel agency and the request is moved to the manager review.
  5. Travel Selection Review – The manager reviews the travel option selected by the employee and does the final approval. This initiates a new request in Travel Agency Invoice and Travel Expenses workflow.

Travel Agency Invoice:

  1. Travel Agency Invoice – The Travel Agency provides an invoice for flight, hotel accommodation, Car rental and uploads the E-ticket and Vouchers to the request and submits for review.
  2. Reconcile invoice – Finance department reconciles the invoice, verifying that the charges match the original approved travel request and confirms the invoice. The purpose of reconciliation is to provide verification and accuracy in financial accounts. The request is moved to the process payment review stage.
  3. Process Payment – The Accounts department processes the payment to Travel Agency and completes the flow.

Travel Expenses:

  1. Travel Expenses – Your employee may claim the expenses incurred on a business trip. Travel Expenses can include Fuel, Toll Gates, Accommodation, Car hire, Meals and Refreshments and other incidental expenses an employee might incur while traveling for work. The employee submits the proof of expenses.
  2. Expense Reconcile – Finance department reconciles the expenses by verifying the expense amount charged with the proof of expenses submitted by the employee. After thorough verification, the request is approved for payment by the Accounts department.
  3. Process Payment – The Accounts department makes an approval to process the payment for the expenses made by the employee.

The following are the lookups that are relevant to this Solution:

Countries Lookup (Master table):

When the destination country is chosen, the cities in that country are filtered so that you can select the destination city. When the country and city are chosen, the airport in that city in return flight preferences section is auto-populated.

Travel Request Approval Matrix (Master table):

When a new request is initiated, the manager field is auto-populated based on the logged in user. The Travel Agency is also filled in automatically using the Lookup configuration.

You can also create your own custom lookup and configure the condition based on your use case.