Take the hassle out of travel expenses.

Challenge

A large percentage of employees for a web development company work remotely. Whenever the company hires new, remote employees, they fly the employees to their headquarters to meet their colleagues in person and promote a positive working environment for everyone.

However, since these employees are new hires, they don’t yet qualify for a company-issued credit card. Although the intention of the company is for their remote employees to have an enjoyable time at headquarters, it often results in headaches and unnecessary stress because the new hires have to use their personal cards to book and pay for travel. Then, the new employees have to deal with compiling receipts and submitting an expense report. This, multiplied by many remote employees flying in at the same time, creates hours of manual work for the company’s finance and accounting team to reconcile all expenses.

Solution

By implementing U.S. Bank Travel Virtual Pay, post trip expense reporting and manual reconciliation is a thing of the past. The company simply follows their existing travel booking process, which now automatically generates a virtual card for their employees’ hotel and air travel.

At the end of their trip, there’s no expense report for the employees to file and no need to worry about when they’ll be reimbursed. The expense data the company needs to effectively manage their travel program is available through comprehensive reporting and user-friendly dashboard.

Result

After executing Travel Virtual Pay, every aspect of the travel experience – from booking flights and hotels to reporting and reconciling expenses – was covered in a single, centralized program. Employees easily booked travel through the company’s Travel Management Company (TMC), and the company was able to streamline reconciliations.

Since the process is so efficient, the company is now looking to fly in their remote employees multiple times a year. Thanks to Travel Virtual Pay, they can scale this solution to incorporate more trips per employee and still not have to issue plastic cards to their infrequent travelers.

And, because the company set specific dollar amounts with each virtual credit card, they prevented overspending, mitigated unauthorized card use and minimized their fraud risk. Plus, by switching to Travel Virtual Pay for travel expenses instead of using a personal credit card, the company captured more transactions that normally would have fallen outside of their card program in the past.