Best Practices for Travel and Expense Management: From Control to Optimization
Based on the author's cross-industry experience, this article points out that abuse of travel and expense (T&E) is a common pain point for enterprises, and suggests pairing it with advertising spend analysis to optimize resource allocation. The article proposes effectively managing travel expenses through policies, processes, and principled approaches, while avoiding harm to sales expansion.
Throughout my career, I have worked across multiple industries and fields, but one issue has remained constant: the abuse of travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses, especially during business trips.
In fact, T&E is the first issue I address at any new company (the second is advertising spend). Is this arrangement reasonable? Often not—T&E spending tends to be too high, while advertising investment tends to be too low. By pairing these two categories of expenses for analysis, I am able to defuse the concern that "cutting travel will hurt sales," because when you deeply analyze where T&E funds go, who uses them, and when, you find that most are spent on existing clients rather than on new business development.
Without advertising investment, how do you attract new clients? This may seem somewhat circular, but sales teams often only see the free lunches and dinners...
So, what policies, processes, or rules of thumb do you use to control travel expenses? Feel free to share.