Making your Business Travel in Low Cost

Business travel is unavoidable for many firms, and so are the high costs that come along with sending your workers to different parts of the country, or even the world. Expense management software can help managers and other affected individuals to tally up the costs after the fact - but what about businesses that are hoping to preemptively curb travel costs?

The expenses will always pile up after a business trip, but they need not pile too high. Listed below are a number of tips that could aid your firm in keeping its employees travel expenditures - and as such, its overall bottom line - at an acceptable level.

Assess any potential fees ahead of time When considering the total cost of an upcoming business trip, it's very easy to underestimate. One of the reasons for this is fees - they crop up everywhere, unannounced, driving the total expenditure count unreasonably high. Luckily, with a little research, you can protect yourself, and your business, from unexpected costs.

Ensure that you investigate any baggage fees or other additional fees levied by the airline your employee is using for your trip. The information may not be available on your ticket itself, but each individual service provider will have to notify you of their fees upon request. Make similar checks on any other services your employee will be using over the course of the trip, such as with your rental car provider. The best way to combat fees, and as such, to keep costs low, is very simple: be prepared.

Determine the need for travel - and eliminate trips outright when possible With the advent of video conferencing technology, the need for many business trips has been erased. Before each individual trip is booked, you and your team should ask: is the task this trip is aimed at completing something that could be completed via email, conference calls, and/or video conference meetings? If so, you may be able to eliminate the trip altogether - and reroute the expected costs to another area of your company.

Establish expenditure policies Many businesses establish policies about what expenditures their employees can incur while traveling, instituting caps on specific costs, and sometimes even outlining the specific hotels and rental cars the employee can use. This is a great way to achieve consistency in your expenditures - so if your firm sends employees out of the area on assignment on a regular basis, you may want to consider instituting a policy that governs their behavior, and their costs, while they do so.

Consider "extended stay" hotels For longer business trips, you may want to encourage your employee to investigate whether or not they'd be better served at an "extended stay" hotel. These locations are designed for individuals who are staying more than a couple nights, and can offer in-house meals, lower week long rates, and other perks that can help your firm to keep costs low during a particularly long business trip.

Keep an eye on each individual expense with automated expense reporting software All businesses are surely aware of the need for expense reports - to help them analyze and track each individual expenditure, for the sake of optimizing the use of future funds. However, with automated expense reporting software like the programs offered by Certify, employees can report their costs in real time, using only a smartphone and the attached camera. Better yet, managers can track the costs as they occur, and then make alterations to policies or allotted funds as is necessary.

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Cloud Technology Makes Small Business Global

Today most of the business small or big ones have no limit in the market. Most of the small business have a big space in the online world since the online world have no limitation what kind of business that you have in the market. For small businesses, the digital revolution has put the whole world within grasp. With online stores, mobile technology, and an increasing worldwide reliance on cross-border trading, even the smallest service can expand toward a truly global operation.

Certify's global expense management software better allows you and your employees to make this transition. When traveling, there's no easier way to log your expenses. Certify's software allows an individual to log a cost with one click of a smartphone - take a quick picture of your receipt, and our automated software will quickly update your overall expenses spreadsheet.

It's also optimized for use in a global business market, as our expense management tools offer over 60 different language options and numerous currencies, with implementations and translations made easy. We're even prepared to help you adapt to small cultural shifts: the receipt management software is hardwired to format numbers, dates, and currency amounts to whatever locale you're currently operating out of. It's just another element of the business world constantly evolving, allowing you to turn your mom-and-pop corner shop into a worldwide retailer.

Cloud technology helps small businesses break into the global marketing

Certify's wireless expense management software is optimized and driven by cloud technology - you can update your reports, anytime you want, from anywhere you want, and managers can access the data at any point. You can upload an image of a receipt in Europe, and moments later, in America, your manager could access our server to approve the cost.

John Mason, writing for IBM's Smarter Planning blog, argues that cloud technology is the primary tool allowing small and medium size businesses to expand at rapid rates. Considering the 6.8 billion subscribers to mobile devices across the world, and the skyrocketing profits derived from online shopping, he predicts that always-connected technologies will allow stagnant businesses to achieve large expansions. He also argued for the necessity of strong technologies with proven track-records.

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How to Make Business Travel Fun?

When it comes to business travel there are a lot of thing that you must need to consider to go for it but sometimes you don’t have the choice because it is needed by the company and you are sent by the company. Some of the employee consider that business travel is a stressful thing to do exactly it is always in my mind that you need to travel to the other place just go for the meeting or other business functions. Being in the trip considered to be hassle making reports with it.

It is very essential to the any business travelers that after the trip to make all the expense reports and need to be pass in the office but somehow most of the employee find it really hard in their part especially if some of the credentials that are needed for the reporting are missing such as the receipts. Receipts are very important if you are making reports after your trip. Travel can be very expensive. When you travel for business, many of your expenses can be written off at tax time. This will save you a lot of money if you know how to do it correctly. But you don't want to overdo it and risk being audited. It's a careful process and some areas have thin lines. You'll want to know exactly what you're doing.

The most important thing to know is what is deductible and what isn't. A lot of things can be written off as business travel expenses, but you don't want to get ridiculous with it or you could find yourself in trouble. Ask yourself if your trip is primarily for business, or pleasure. Even if it is primarily a business trip, things you do for pleasure on the side may not be deductible.

When a purchase IS business related, you can write it off. Nearly anything counts. Hotel rooms, airfare, travel documents, meals, cab fare, dry cleaning, and business related long distance calls. But you'll need to save all the documentation. This mostly pertains to receipts. While you may not need to send the receipts with your tax claim, you will need to have them in case you get audited so that you can back up your claims if they are called into question.

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In Flight calls Still not Possible for Business Travelers

When you are making a business travel and when you are inside the plane surely you are not allowed to use your phone. Most of the business people in the market make the phone as their best buddy all the time in staying connected to the other business people but most of all inside your business company. Some of the business travelers are having the hard time with this kind of situation as they are traveling but it is really prohibited to use phones while on the plane. Mostly the business travelers are making the best that they can in order to make the all best for the company and since they are travelling all the time to monitor their expense travel expense programs are one of the most travelers widely used to know the expenses that they have while on the trip.

Current government policies prohibit individuals from making calls on their cell phones during the course of air travel. Many business travelers who rely on their mobile phones to stay connected to the office, however, wish that this rule would change. After all, they can use their cell phone's applications while they're in the air, to check their email, update their expense report or complete other tasks. However, they're not currently allowed to call into the office to check in.

That certainly may change soon. A recent report from Business Travel News detailed how the U.S. Department of Transportation began soliciting public comments this week on whether or not they should lift the ban on in-flight calls. Though most were against the idea, some individuals - such as Jason Rabinowitz, quoted below - were in favor of the change, and supported the idea of phone calls being allowed during the course of a flight.

"I believe that voice calls should be allowed on aircraft," said Rabinowitz, according to the news outlet. "Many airlines across the world have had this feature for years with not a single recorded instance of abuse or passenger fights."

Though most respondents came out against the proposed change, some individuals did argue for the cause of making cell phone calls from the friendly skies. One other supporter cited by the news source noted that other transportation services do not require comparable restrictions, for example.

"As it stands now, cell phones are not banned in similar situations on other forms of transportation, and it seems to be an unreasonable intrusion into the freedom of both the airlines and their passengers for the government to ban their use," claimed respondent Matthew Walters, according to the Business Travel News Report.

In the other hand for the meantime using the phones while on the flight is still prohibited but maybe somehow sooner this law will allow most of the business travelers to use their phones as they are needed.

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