Why business travel isn't a booking problem and how finance can regain control

Most business travel tools are built around one question: how do we make booking easier? However, your finance team is asking something else entirely. Every month they spend days reconstructing trips that have already happened — matching transactions to bookings, chasing invoices nobody sent, tracking down approvals buried in someone's inbox.

It's a story Boris Angelov, Product Manager for Business Travel at Payhawk, knows well from talking to finance teams. Last week a travel manager showed him her calendar: whole mornings blocked out, not for meetings, but to chase down missing receipts and match them to the right trips.

And that's just the visible part. Somewhere in that same month, a hotel invoice hadn't come through. Someone had panicked and put it on a personal card, and the team was left piecing the trip back together from three different systems. Finance had no idea what the trip cost until it was too late to do anything about it.

We sat down with Boris and Karolina Klermon-Williams (Product Marketing Manager for Business Travel at Payhawk) to talk about why the business travel challenge finance teams face has nothing to do with booking, and what it looks like when you build travel for finance from the start.

Why finance keeps cleaning up after the booking tool

The majority of travel solutions on the market today were built for the traveler first, with finance added later. Boris explains why that ordering matters:

Most travel tools out there were built for travelers and travel managers first, and then finance came later. You can see it in the architecture. Booking is the front door, policy gets applied at checkout as a final check, and the whole reconciliation is downstream.

You can try to fix this by adding a finance dashboard on top. You can add reporting, integrations, and single sign-on.

But as Karolina puts it:

You can build a finance dashboard onto a booking tool. But if finance is last in that flow, they'll just end up having to clean things up at the end of the month.

The gap nobody owns: what happens between booking and reconciliation

The problem isn't that any individual tool in your travel stack is bad. Most do their specific job reasonably well. The challenge in business travel is what happens in the space between them.

Boris describes what a single trip looks like across a typical stack:

The travel management company would usually book the flight, the corporate card pays for it, the booking platform gives the employee a nice user interface, the expense system captures the hotel receipts and the taxes. And then finance has to thread a needle through all of those tools to figure out what was the trip, who took it, what budget to report against, and what it cost end to end. That stitching is the invisible work that you have to do.

Finance spends its time doing data entry that should have never existed in the first place.

Cards plus expenses gives you visibility, not control

A common response from CFOs when this argument comes up is: we already have corporate cards and an expense tool, so we have control over travel spend. Boris hears this often, and his answer is direct:

Cards plus expenses gives you spend visibility, it doesn't give you full spend control. And it doesn't give you the spend context and the reporting after that.

Cards see transactions. They don't see context. Boris uses a simple example to show what that costs finance: “If your corporate card sees Lufthansa 450 euros, it doesn't know that was a flight to Madrid for the sales kickoff, approved by the VP of sales, against the Q1 events budget. It just sees a line.”

The expense system sees scattered receipts with no approval flow, no travel policy check, no budget link, unless someone manually assembles all of that after the fact. That assembly is the burden finance carries every month.

Watch the full video interview below.

How Payhawk approaches it differently

Payhawk's starting point was different. Rather than building a booking experience and adding finance functionality on top, the product was built from the CFO's perspective outward.

The core difference is what Boris calls trip-based reconciliation:

Every trip in Payhawk is a single object — the request, the approval, the booking, the card it was paid on, the invoices, the expenses incurred during the trip, the budget it was charged to. A finance person opens it and sees the entire story in one place.

In a typical multi-tool setup, reconstructing that story means pulling data from a TMC report, a card statement, an inbox, an expense system, and an ERP. Then, finance hopes everything lines up. In Payhawk, the story is already assembled.

But visibility is only part of the benefit. Because every trip starts as a finance workflow, control happens at the moment it still matters. “The approval is meaningful,” Boris says, "because it happens when there's still a decision to be made.”

And when the trip is over, the administrative work largely disappears. Every booking, payment, invoice, and expense remains connected to the original trip record. Invoices are attached automatically, receipts don't need chasing, and reconciliation isn't a separate project at month-end.

Why cheaper fares are the wrong ROI measure

Ask most travel vendors about ROI and they'll start with cheaper fares and negotiated rates. But those savings typically run at one to three percent of the total transaction. Boris explains why finance teams should look somewhere else: "The bigger savings lives in two places that nobody talks about. The first is leakage. The second is time. Optimising only for fares is a bit like polishing the windows in a house with a leaky roof.”

Leakage from out-of-policy bookings typically runs at five to ten percent of total spend, sometimes higher. It's invisible until close. The time cost tells a similar story:

The breakdown is roughly twenty to thirty minutes for finance, fifty to seventy minutes for the traveler. For finance, the time goes on chasing invoices that didn't come through automatically, matching card transactions to trips, and processing expense reports.

Boris heard from one CFO who had negotiated competitive hotel rates across all their key markets. Good fares, well managed. What she hadn't accounted for was the three days her team spent every month reconciling the invoices against the card statements. The fare saving was real. The time cost was bigger.

The ROI from better-controlled travel lands in the ten to twenty percent range, and it's why Boris argues most travel vendors are solving the wrong problem:

CFOs are not in the business of optimizing single line items. They're in the business of running a predictable, auditable, controllable finance function. A one percent fare saving doesn't help with that. It doesn't change your whole process.

The one question to ask in any travel tool demo

If you're evaluating travel tools right now, Boris advises skipping the booking demo and asking one question instead:

Show me what month-end close looks like. That's the question, because every travel tool's true colors come out when you ask that.

If the tool was built for the traveler, the answer will be vague: a tour of the booking interface, talk of dashboards, some hand-waving about ERP integrations. If the tool was built for finance, the answer is concrete:

• Every trip is reconciled
• Invoices are attached automatically
• Expenses are grouped
• Data is synced to your ERP and the close happens without manual intervention

If you want to see what month-end close looks like when travel is built for finance, book a demo or explore how Payhawk's AI Travel Agent embeds policy, budget checks, and visibility directly into the booking flow.