Coupa Travel & Expense Transformation
Request this brief on-demand demo video (15:16) to learn how Coupa unifies your T&E processes to drive savings and ensure employee compliance.
Why people love Coupa Travel & Expense
Why watch this brief on-demand overview?
Learn how to:
- Improve employee compliance by providing them with an easy-to-use travel bookings tool
- Attain 100% control and visibility of employee travel expenses
- Use continuous spend monitoring to ensure optimal expenditure on travel
- Treat your employees to a seamless and enjoyable travel booking experience
- And much more.
If you struggle to get employees to comply with your travel booking process, you're not alone.
The first step is to provide your employees with a booking platform that is easy-to-use and facilitates rapid reimbursement. Find out how Coupa does just that.
Not only will Coupa improve employee compliance, but you will also gain end-to-end visibility and control over T&E spending, one of the largest categories of controllable spend for most organizations.
Request this on-demand demo to find out how Coupa’s unified T&E management solution provides immediate value by optimizing your processes.
FAQ
What are the advantages of Coupa Travel & Expense for booking employee travel and managing corporate travel expenses?
Coupa Travel & Expense provides intuitive travel booking, comprehensive expense management, full traveler support, and an integrated mobile app.
By using Coupa to book travel and manage travel expense, you seamlessly connect to comprehensive access to all company expenses via Coupa's Business Spend Management (BSM) capabilities. Companies thus have much greater visibility and control over their T&E spend alongside all other business spend.
Coupa makes it easy for employees to book great travel options both on the web and on their mobile devices, and at the same time streamlines corporate travel management for administrative teams.
Our top goal was to create a platform on which your employees would enjoy booking business travel. After all, you cannot gain full visibility into your travel program if your employees aren't using the tool that allows you to easily track their travel.
With Coupa's smart travel recommendations, users can book trips in less than five minutes. The powerful Coupa Travel mobile app provides them with live travel agent support while on the road. And your employees will also find that it is quick and easy to submit an expense report and get reimbursed quickly.
What's more, in the background of Coupa Travel & Expense is a cost-savings capability that will automatically rebook your travelers at lower rates when they appear. Coupa T&E customers therefore automatically save an average of 1-3 percent of their air and hotel spend.
With Coupa, organizations can dramatically improve visibility into travel expenditures as well as their control over travel expenditures. The Coupa platform provides a single end-to-end place where employees can book travel and obtain travel support, and where travel managers can control expenses and source travel vendors
Unifying T&E with the Coupa BSM platform creates unique spend optimization opportunities, such as the ability to easily identify expenses that can be moved onto contracts for future savings. Or you can benefit from Coupa's continuous AI-based expense fraud detection. Moreover, Coupa Pay enables employees to be quickly reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses.
As part of the Coupa BSM platform, Coupa Travel & Expense will enable you to negotiate airline and hotel contracts and make those rates instantly available to your employees, while auditing their usage over time — all from the same platform. Over time, Coupa can analyze your travel booking data and automatically recommend what contracts you should negotiate by automatically.
With Coupa Community.ai, customers have the power to compare their performance against KPIs such as platform adoption, expense approval cycle time, and corporate card adoption rate. Coupa can then provide you with intelligent prescriptions for recommended next steps to improve your T&E program.
Coupa Advantage travel rates, negotiated across all of the travel spend of Coupa customers, also provides you with access to thousands of pre-negotiated private rates with hotels, airlines, and rental car companies around the world.
By using Coupa to book travel and manage travel expense, you seamlessly connect to comprehensive access to all company expenses via Coupa's Business Spend Management (BSM) capabilities. Companies thus have much greater visibility and control over their T&E spend alongside all other business spend.
Coupa makes it easy for employees to book great travel options both on the web and on their mobile devices, and at the same time streamlines corporate travel management for administrative teams.
Our top goal was to create a platform on which your employees would enjoy booking business travel. After all, you cannot gain full visibility into your travel program if your employees aren't using the tool that allows you to easily track their travel.
With Coupa's smart travel recommendations, users can book trips in less than five minutes. The powerful Coupa Travel mobile app provides them with live travel agent support while on the road. And your employees will also find that it is quick and easy to submit an expense report and get reimbursed quickly.
What's more, in the background of Coupa Travel & Expense is a cost-savings capability that will automatically rebook your travelers at lower rates when they appear. Coupa T&E customers therefore automatically save an average of 1-3 percent of their air and hotel spend.
With Coupa, organizations can dramatically improve visibility into travel expenditures as well as their control over travel expenditures. The Coupa platform provides a single end-to-end place where employees can book travel and obtain travel support, and where travel managers can control expenses and source travel vendors
Unifying T&E with the Coupa BSM platform creates unique spend optimization opportunities, such as the ability to easily identify expenses that can be moved onto contracts for future savings. Or you can benefit from Coupa's continuous AI-based expense fraud detection. Moreover, Coupa Pay enables employees to be quickly reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses.
As part of the Coupa BSM platform, Coupa Travel & Expense will enable you to negotiate airline and hotel contracts and make those rates instantly available to your employees, while auditing their usage over time — all from the same platform. Over time, Coupa can analyze your travel booking data and automatically recommend what contracts you should negotiate by automatically.
With Coupa Community.ai, customers have the power to compare their performance against KPIs such as platform adoption, expense approval cycle time, and corporate card adoption rate. Coupa can then provide you with intelligent prescriptions for recommended next steps to improve your T&E program.
Coupa Advantage travel rates, negotiated across all of the travel spend of Coupa customers, also provides you with access to thousands of pre-negotiated private rates with hotels, airlines, and rental car companies around the world.
What are some components of an effective corporate travel policy?
It is extremely important to implement a well-defined corporate travel policy that will outline procedures and rules for employee travel and reduce your corporate travel expenditures.
To develop this corporate travel policy, we recommend these ten steps:
1. Identify what your employees need with respect to travel. What are the common places they will travel? What types of hotels do they prefer? For what types of activities will they be traveling?
2. Determine the objectives of your travel policy. You may want to treat your employees to perks such as higher-end hotels or upgraded flights in order to retain top talent, or you may want to limit corporate travel to only the essential activities and target the lowest rates.
3. Provide options to your employees within their needs and your objectives. By using an app that allows your employees to select from a variety of options to suit their needs, you can ensure they stay within your overall travel objectives.
4. Make the corporate travel policy easily accessible and easy to understand. The corporate travel policy should be a live document that employees know how to check regularly for updates.
5. Include details in your travel policy. Be sure to think about all of the questions your employees will have when they book travel. For example, how do you recommend employees get to and from the airport? Should they rent a car or use taxis and ride services? Additional details include:
* The approval process for travel plans.
* How to make airline, train, hotel, and rental car reservations.
* How to use of other transportation, such as ride share programs or taxis.
* The rules for gifts to partners, customers, and other third parties.
* The rules for meal expenditures, entertainment events, and extended travel stays.
* The procedures for reimbursement of travel expenses.
6. Ensure that employees book all travel using your booking platform of choice. Ideally, you will have a digital travel booking platform that provides your employees access to the rates you have pre-negotiated. In this way, you'll be obtaining the lowest rate, and you will also have complete visibility in one place into your travel expenses.
7. Clarify what constitutes business travel versus non-business travel. Make it clear what types of activities are justifiable for travel reimbursement, such as events, conferences, meetings, training activities, and so forth. Explain how will you reimburse employees for a trip that also contains some leisure purposes.
8. Decide how you will reimburse for meals. Some companies limit their employees to a certain daily limit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, while others provide more freedom to their employees. Clarify when alcoholic beverages are reimbursable, perhaps if the meal is with a client or partner.
9. Take advantage of insights from travel data. Some key metrics to measure are the average nightly hotel rate, the average cost per flight mile, the average daily meal expenditure, ground transportation costs, and so forth. Using data from your previous travel expenses, you can also renegotiate fares to the most common destinations or hotel chains and make more accurate forecasts for travel expenses.
10. Use a T&E platform to rapidly submit and reimburse expenses. To minimize headaches for everyone, it is best to use a travel and expense automation solution that will make it simple for employees to record and submit their expenses, and for the company to reimburse them quickly.
To develop this corporate travel policy, we recommend these ten steps:
1. Identify what your employees need with respect to travel. What are the common places they will travel? What types of hotels do they prefer? For what types of activities will they be traveling?
2. Determine the objectives of your travel policy. You may want to treat your employees to perks such as higher-end hotels or upgraded flights in order to retain top talent, or you may want to limit corporate travel to only the essential activities and target the lowest rates.
3. Provide options to your employees within their needs and your objectives. By using an app that allows your employees to select from a variety of options to suit their needs, you can ensure they stay within your overall travel objectives.
4. Make the corporate travel policy easily accessible and easy to understand. The corporate travel policy should be a live document that employees know how to check regularly for updates.
5. Include details in your travel policy. Be sure to think about all of the questions your employees will have when they book travel. For example, how do you recommend employees get to and from the airport? Should they rent a car or use taxis and ride services? Additional details include:
* The approval process for travel plans.
* How to make airline, train, hotel, and rental car reservations.
* How to use of other transportation, such as ride share programs or taxis.
* The rules for gifts to partners, customers, and other third parties.
* The rules for meal expenditures, entertainment events, and extended travel stays.
* The procedures for reimbursement of travel expenses.
6. Ensure that employees book all travel using your booking platform of choice. Ideally, you will have a digital travel booking platform that provides your employees access to the rates you have pre-negotiated. In this way, you'll be obtaining the lowest rate, and you will also have complete visibility in one place into your travel expenses.
7. Clarify what constitutes business travel versus non-business travel. Make it clear what types of activities are justifiable for travel reimbursement, such as events, conferences, meetings, training activities, and so forth. Explain how will you reimburse employees for a trip that also contains some leisure purposes.
8. Decide how you will reimburse for meals. Some companies limit their employees to a certain daily limit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, while others provide more freedom to their employees. Clarify when alcoholic beverages are reimbursable, perhaps if the meal is with a client or partner.
9. Take advantage of insights from travel data. Some key metrics to measure are the average nightly hotel rate, the average cost per flight mile, the average daily meal expenditure, ground transportation costs, and so forth. Using data from your previous travel expenses, you can also renegotiate fares to the most common destinations or hotel chains and make more accurate forecasts for travel expenses.
10. Use a T&E platform to rapidly submit and reimburse expenses. To minimize headaches for everyone, it is best to use a travel and expense automation solution that will make it simple for employees to record and submit their expenses, and for the company to reimburse them quickly.
Why are insights into travel and expense so important to a company's financial health?
Travel expenditures are the second-highest controllable expense for most organizations (second to payroll). Therefore, when economic difficulties arise or uncertainty is on the horizon, companies can have an immediate impact on expenses by placing tighter reigns on Travel and Expense (T&E). Corporate travel managers will go through their programs with a fine-toothed comb, eliminating any unnecessary spend.
As a result, it is extremely valuable to collect and analyze travel program data--ranging from travel spend and supplier performance to employee policy adherence and beyond. With Coupa Travel & Expense, corporate travel managers have access to advanced analytics to identify new opportunities to reduce travel expenses, improve negotiations with travel suppliers, and improve the performance of travel programs. The Coupa solution provides full visibility into prices throughout the travel lifecycle, thus improving the overall effectiveness of travel sourcing programs.
Travel managers can then use Coupa Travel & Expense to answer questions such as:
* Are there specific suppliers with which I should renegotiate?
* Which fare class is most utilized?
* Are my negotiations targeting the right fare class, market, and airlines?
* How often did my travelers purchase the fare we negotiated?
Coupa Travel & Expense has great potential to lower your bottom line, since it provides travel managers with the comprehensive view they need to control costs across their entire program.
An additional way that Coupa Travel & Expense drives cost savings is through community intelligence. By anonymously aggregating pricing data across thousands of itineraries, Coupa Travel & Expense creates datasets that can be used for benchmarking program performance. Travel managers can then use this data evaluate the how well their vendors' rates compare to those of similar companies, thus improving negotiations and the resulting program performance.
As a result, it is extremely valuable to collect and analyze travel program data--ranging from travel spend and supplier performance to employee policy adherence and beyond. With Coupa Travel & Expense, corporate travel managers have access to advanced analytics to identify new opportunities to reduce travel expenses, improve negotiations with travel suppliers, and improve the performance of travel programs. The Coupa solution provides full visibility into prices throughout the travel lifecycle, thus improving the overall effectiveness of travel sourcing programs.
Travel managers can then use Coupa Travel & Expense to answer questions such as:
* Are there specific suppliers with which I should renegotiate?
* Which fare class is most utilized?
* Are my negotiations targeting the right fare class, market, and airlines?
* How often did my travelers purchase the fare we negotiated?
Coupa Travel & Expense has great potential to lower your bottom line, since it provides travel managers with the comprehensive view they need to control costs across their entire program.
An additional way that Coupa Travel & Expense drives cost savings is through community intelligence. By anonymously aggregating pricing data across thousands of itineraries, Coupa Travel & Expense creates datasets that can be used for benchmarking program performance. Travel managers can then use this data evaluate the how well their vendors' rates compare to those of similar companies, thus improving negotiations and the resulting program performance.
