• Travel & Entertainment Best Practices

best practices
Travel & Entertainment
Overview
With travel and entertainment considered one of the largest controllable indirect
expenses in an organization, Visa Commercial Solutions has complemented its Travel &
Entertainment best practices with new strategic alliances that facilitate their adoption. By
incorporating these Visa best practices, which were developed in partnership with Deloitte
Consulting, companies may gain:
• Increased process effectiveness and efficiency
• Increased user satisfaction
• Improved vendor management
• An overall reduction in travel and entertainment costs
About the Best Practices
Visa’s best practices encourage companies to establish a travel management discipline that
will be successful regardless of changing economic conditions. The 13 best practices call
for implementation of sound fundamentals in travel management and organization, and
with the help of key partners, can be streamlined and incorporated nearly seamlessly into a
company’s operations.
Travel & Entertainment Best Practices
1. Institute a centralized travel management function
2. Develop and distribute a company wide travel policy
3. Coordinate event planning through the travel management function
4. Source, select, and implement a T&E card program
5. Establish T&E card issuance criteria for optimal distribution to business travelers
6. Mandate and enforce use of the T&E card
7. Optimize number of suppliers by selecting and monitoring vendors through a formal
Vendor Management program
8. Implement an in-house, Web-based booking tool
9. Establish well-defined expense report audit parameters
10. Standardize and pre-populate expense reporting
TrAvEl & EnTErTAinmEnT | BEST PrACTICES
11. Standardize and automate data interfaces between expense management and As a company’s travel volume
accounting applications increases, the importance of
12. Capture, report, and analyze comprehensive, company-wide travel data managing travel-related expenses
13. Implement post-trip exception reporting and distribute lost savings report and associated issues escalates.
Forming Alliances
Implementing these best practices can seem daunting, particularly for companies that are
starting from scratch, but the process can offer a worthy return on investment with almost
immediate results. One study participant transitioned to centralized travel management,
which consolidated spend, reduced rates, and streamlined the vendor relationship effort,
all as a result of following best practices guidelines.
Incorporating the best practices is dependent in many ways on third-party providers
that can help. That is why Visa has formed alliances with Concur Technologies, Outtask,
PeopleSoft, and other companies that can make the transition to a best practice travel
function easier. Additionally, Visa has completed integration with SAP for corporate file
feeds relating to expense reporting and business analytics. With these strategic alliances,
companies can obtain detailed commercial card transaction data and integrate that data
into expense management systems.
In particular, some of the best practices benefit from (and sometimes are made possible
because of) insight from these partners, who can simplify tasks like developing and
distributing a company wide travel policy. For example, SAP through mySAP ErP Human
resources or Financials can enforce policies as part of the overall travel management
function. This element, with a centralized travel management function, is a corner-stone
of all the other best practices. It can lead to improved travel coordination efforts,
enhanced negotiating strength and consistency, and efficiency in terms of vendor
communication and reporting.
Other examples of strategic alliances facilitating best practice implementation include:
• Mandating and enforcing use of a corporate T&E payment card (critical to capturing
accurate data for integration), is possible through Visa member banks. Consolidating
travel payments into a single payment vehicle can improve a company’s ability to
capture and analyze data for vendor negotiations and compliance reporting, and allows
automated pre-populated expense reporting.
• Alliance partners are able to develop and launch Web-based travel booking tools,
applications that drive overall savings while capturing comprehensive travel data for the
expense reporting process. Implementation of tools, such as Outtask’s Cliqbook
travel management and Vinnet expense management, can improve a company’s ability
to manage business travel expenses. Software can be modified based on company
policy and rules are built into the tools restricting users to specific vendors or allowing
users to evaluate vendor offerings that benefit budget and/or travel schedule. Based
on comprehensive travel data, a large sampling of corporate customers saved $196 in
average ticket prices over traditional travel planning.
• Visa cardholders receive increased access to transaction detail from over 5 million
Level II and Level III data-capable merchants worlwide.
• Many of the leading hotel chains in the U.S. provide enhanced folio data to Visa
Corporate cardholders.

TrAvEl & EnTErTAinmEnT | BEST PrACTICES
• More than 100,000 fueling locations provide enhanced data for vehicle fleet
managers through use of the Visa Fleet card.
• Visa payment cards provide data on trips actually traveled, not only on trips booked
and not traveled.
• Five of the world’s major airline reservation systems provide enhanced data, representing
95 percent of all airline tickets purchased globally.
• Best practice companies require solutions that are easy to deploy, don’t require lengthy
or expensive implementation, and can be widely adopted in a short amount of time,
maximizing their rOI. One of the most time-consuming administrative tasks for both
traveling professionals and the financial departments that support them is the processing
of travel expense reports and reimbursements. An automated expense-reporting
service, like that provided by Concur Technologies, provides best practice companies
with powerful tools that enable employees, supervisors, A/P managers, auditors, and
even senior management to generate, review, approve, process, and even audit every
employee expense report – online – at any time and from anywhere. One large corporate
study participant reported the average time to complete a pre-populated, automated
expense report is two minutes – a 93 percent improvement from the industry average
for completing a manual report. But beyond making it easier for travelers to submit
reports, best practice companies using expense report automation can enjoy a significant
reduction in back-office processing time, enabling finance departments to focus on more
mission-critical tasks. Combine this increased efficiency with the increased visibility into
every facet of their travel spending and it’s easy to see why best practice organizations
are able to better control travel spending and even use expense data to negotiate more
favorable terms with travel vendors.
• Automating data interfaces between expense management and accounting applications
can streamline the reconciliation process by removing the time-intensive activity of
manually entering expense report data into the accounts payable and general ledger
systems. Visa’s partners offer expense-reporting packages to help companies looking
to implement this best practice. PeopleSoft has demonstrated that well-planned and
tested interfaces reduce errors and processing time, enable timely payment, and
provide decision-makers a view of consolidated and consistent information.
Best practices can empower employees and lead to several new efficiencies, including
cost reductions, improved use of preferred travel vendors, improved data, and improved
vendor management.
For more information on the Procure-to-Pay Best Practices,
visit www.visa.com/commercial.
Best practice recommendations are intended as informational tools and should not be relied upon for marketing, technology, legal, tax, financial, or
other advice. The information is not intended to advise you of strategies applicable to your specific situation, but rather to highlight issues for your
consideration. Therefore, you should consult your own advisors. Visa is not responsible for your use of the best practice recommendations and the
information contained herein, including errors of any kind, or any assumptions or conclusions that you might draw from their use.
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