Several employees of a software company needed to travel to a customer’s location to facilitate multiple days of training. Because of the size and scope of the software implementation, the training team included many employees that travel infrequently. Employees paid for the travel with a mix of payment forms including corporate credit cards, personal credit cards, and, for some, their manager’s corporate credit card. As a result, reconciling travel payments required a great deal of manual effort.
The company experienced a lot of tedious, and often confusing, backend work reconciling expenses with so many employees traveling and using different payment types.
The company did not want to completely rework their travel booking and management process and was looking for a payment solution they could integrate into their existing, centralized processes. They wanted a solution that was easy to learn and required no training. The company also wanted comprehensive reporting with an easy-to-use dashboard that all employees could use.
U.S. Bank Travel Virtual Pay checked all these boxes. After a quick implementation process, the company was able to realize benefits immediately as they began assigning virtual cards to their employees for travel.
With Travel Virtual Pay, the software company now has a centralized program that improves how they pay for employee travel. Rather than use tradition payment methods, the company deploys single-use virtual cards to all their traveling employees to pay for hotel and airfare expenses.
On the backend, expenses are automatically matched to payments, which significantly decreases the amount of time spent on reconciliation. Consolidating all travel spend into a single program provided the company with a greater degree of visibility into overall travel spend and created rebate opportunity because more spend was captured through their Travel Virtual Pay program. Also, the increased visibility into spend coupled with the use of virtual account numbers significantly minimized the company’s fraud risk.