The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2022 19 SKIFT + TRIPACTIONS travel shutdown afforded us the time to focus on finding a new solutions partner, with an emphasis on the end user experience. Ease of use was critical, from booking travel and making flight changes to helping our people with any situation at any phase of their trip. That’s how we ended up transitioning to TripActions. From the traveler perspective, their intuitive two-way app is second to none.” Illinois-based metal parts manufacturer and vendor Bystronic is another company that recently integrated TripActions Liquid as part of its spend management solution set. “We experienced some instances of abuse with another company’s corporate cards,” said Brody Fanning, Vice President of Sales for the Americas Market Region. “That motivated our accounting team to investigate TripActions Liquid, which has done a great job of reducing our exposure and shutting down loopholes that other people were able to exploit. TripActions Liquid has also helped us to control costs, including providing greater visibility into when people overspend.” The result is a seamless, powerful system for the post- pandemic context that allows companies to better manage employee business trip spending, helps set more automated approval processes, and cut unnecessary costs. “The end-to-end solution of combining and automating the travel and expense pieces saves time and money, which is why we are seeing so much growth in our TripActions Liquid offering,” said Govern. “People are really embracing the change. Instead of trolling through paper receipts, you take a picture of the receipt in f ront of you and it’s automatically submitted. It’s one and done in real time.” And TripActions Liquid is producing real-time benefits for Zennify, as Barker explains. “While we are still coming to terms with what a holistic view means to us f rom an operational perspective, we have embraced how TripActions Liquid allows us to set our own policies and eliminate human intervention for each individual transaction,” said Barker. “The ability to trust our policies and people without having to ask people about expenses all the time is a major new eff iciency. With our recent growth, managing expense reporting and reconciliation was not scalable. TripActions solved that challenge by integrating TripActions Liquid with our QuickBooks accounting software, and it works amazingly well.” Another area of opportunity related to spend management is assisting with a broader range of company payment solutions. As companies try to gain a better handle on rapidly evolving employee spending habits, more are exploring opportunities to provide company-issued payment solutions. By using these payment products instead of employees’ personal cards, organizations can more easily track and reconcile spending patterns, providing greater insight and control to financial decision makers. But has the industry caught up with this strategy? In the 2020 survey, travelers and CTDMs agreed that a mix of company credit cards and personal cards was the most common payment method for business trips. That alignment has since appeared to shift. More (56 percent) CTDMs now report that their employees pay for travel expenses with a company card, while business travelers are more split (48 percent) between using personal cards and company cards. The larger trend line here suggests that adoption of company-provided payment solutions is increasing, thanks to a growing preference for the arrangement among business travelers. In this year’s survey, 71 percent of business travelers preferred to use a company card over their personal card, reinforcing employee interest. CTDM sentiment is much the same; 69 percent of respondents would like employees to pay for their trips with company cards (next page, left).