5 Advantages Gained by Establishing a Centralized Billing Program with a Credit Card Company

Saving time and money is the key to travel procurement and while other more expensive solutions exist to automate all T&E expenses, this is a very good first step in capturing more travel data with actual spend versus simply booked spend.

1. Gain Efficiencies with a Card-less Solution. Save your travelers from having to pay out of pocket and simplify your company’s payment and reimbursement processes by allowing these expenses to be on a company card. With less credit cards in use, less changes to numbers and expiration dates saves time.
2. Gain control and visibility over more travel spend. Have more complete data on spend including air, hotel, car rental and rail costs. Effectively monitor and manage traveler’s expenses by consolidating virtually all your travel expenditures into one account, one bill, and one payment. Ensure preferred supplier and travel policy compliance, access spend data that is meaningful to your company and improve spend visibility to assist with supplier negotiations.
3. Reduce traveler responsibility for payment without issuing cards. Travelers do not have to use their cards for a large portion of travel and this service can be provided without issuing cards for travelers. This can be especially useful when you have contractor and other non-employee types requiring payment for travel. This system can be combined with a program that includes the issuance of cards for certain employee types.
4. Provide Travelers With Access to Benefits. Many of these programs offer enhanced business travel accident insurance, baggage insurance, and some 24-hour emergency service. Points can also be a benefit.
5. Streamline Reconciliation. Account Reconciliation systems enable you to streamline and reduce the reconciliation cycle by days or weeks. It can be configured to the requirements of your financial systems to lessen IT programming time and costs. You can even have the capability to reconcile transactions and edit multiple transactions in a single step. You can enhance individual BTA transactions with your organization’s HR data. Allocate transactions to the appropriate cost center through account code validation. Save time by not having to request and receive missing data.

There are many ways to process travel payments and many times of cards and brands of issuers. Seek a consultation on the options and time and money can be saved while helping travelers facilitate the payment of this significant line item.