Seamless and secure business travel payments

Challenge

While on the road, a mid-sized industrial firm’s contractors use their personal credit cards to pay for hotel expenses. Because of this, the firm must manually reconcile employee expense reports with hotel invoices.

A recent audit revealed that some hotel expenses exceeded the firm’s travel policy. Additionally, the firm’s travel policy stipulated that unless approved by a manager, employees are financially responsible for expenses that exceed policy limits. Manually identifying these overages, reconciling the overages to each contractor, escalating it to management, and tracking repayment (often unsuccessfully) wasted time on tasks that added little value to the firm’s bottom line.

Solution

When it comes to business travel, there is a lot to manage – especially when travelers don’t have a corporate credit card. U.S. Bank Travel Virtual Pay provides many benefits for organizations looking to streamline the travel booking payment process for individuals, like contractors, who don’t have a corporate-issued credit card.

Travel Virtual Pay is a centralized virtual credit card program that reduces the risk of fraud and the misuse of company funds. It also provides automatic reconciliation and includes robust reporting features. Plus, Travel Virtual Pay consolidates travel spend, which can qualify for bank rebates. When issuing physical cards for all employees isn’t possible, Travel Virtual Pay saves time, simplifies processes and adds additional rebate revenue to your travel process.

Result

Rather than having their contractors pay for travel expenses out-of-pocket and seek reimbursement, the firm, using Travel Virtual Pay, provided a unique virtual credit card to each individual with specific controls to ensure adherence to company travel policy. Consequently, the firm was able to cut the administrative time spent reconciling expenses, reduce potential errors and save money overall.