Pack your bags and track all your business travel expenses with Payhawk

Business travel has picked up recently, with countries eliminating almost all restrictions and in-person conferences already booming. Surely you've missed those trips? The ones where you meet your colleagues and clients in real life, close deals, discuss business, and maybe even enjoy some good food and drink. But one thing is for sure; you didn't miss the expense reports and receipt reconciliation waiting for you when you got back to the office.

Well, we have good news for you….

Introducing Payhawk's per diem feature

At Payhawk, we're excited to share the launch of our latest feature with you: per diems.

Per diems are a fixed daily allowance companies provide to their team to cover business travel expenses or subsistence expenses. The new feature has several benefits:

• Finance teams can set custom per diem rates.
• Employees can create a per diem expense by entering a few trip details (destination/s), dates, time) and identify any free meals they had during the trip (if meals were free, deductions will be applied for the per diem). Then, Payhawk will calculate the exact (per diem) amount they should be reimbursed.
• Once the per diem request is created, team leads can approve or deny it, depending on the approval flow they have set.
• Finance teams can reimburse approved per diem expenses via bank transfer, on the go, and in different currencies — all of this within Payhawk. So, there is no need to go back and forth between spreadsheets, emails, online banking websites, or even real-life paper.

With this new feature, we aim to eliminate the stress and effort companies must put into manually figuring out and reimbursing daily allowances. We calculate per diems automatically, massively reducing the admin burden (and saving time in doing so) so businesses can reimburse their employees quickly and efficiently with direct reimbursements via Payhawk.

The Payhawk per diem feature is compliant with German regulations, too. The German Government sets specific per diem rates for companies to follow for their employees. These rates are based on the amount of time away from home. And they don’t include any costs already covered by the employer, such as accommodation.

Manage all business travel expenses in one tool

With this launch, we now cover the whole spectrum of travel expenses: mileage, reimbursements, and per diem. So your finance team can track and control travel expenses at the touch of a button, and your employees feel empowered to focus on their actual job and objectives, not expense reports.

My story (a note from Raquel at Payhawk)

As a seasoned business traveller, this new feature is what I call the DREAM.

Before joining Payhawk, I used to work for a big international organisation based in Washington D.C. We used to travel 60-80% of the time to countries, mainly in Africa and South America, so trips could be 3-5 weeks long.

As a consultant, you had to pay for all your expenses and then get reimbursed. This process meant keeping every single receipt. Not only that, before the trip, we had to use a system to request approval for the trip. Then, another system to book our tickets and hotel. Then, you also had to check the per diem allowance of every city and hotel list we were allowed to stay in. It was madness.

After the trip, sometimes I had more than 5,000 USD in reimbursable expenses and around 100+ receipts. I had to take pictures individually and add them to an envelope.

Many other big organisations follow similar processes. Wasting time and resources on mundane tasks, going from one tool to another, adding zero value to the business. However, if they started using an expense management system and company cards like Payhawk, they could streamline travel expenses easily.

How?

1. You have total control over spend with integrated spend policies and workflows, even as you distribute company cards to your team.
2. Payhawk has a direct integration with Travelperk, so all receipts from travel bookings are directly matched to spend on the Payhawk company card.
3. When employees need to add a per diem or mileage expense, they can do so directly on the App, and simply input the trip information as required.
4. Finally, any expense that needs to be reimbursed can be added to the App. Once approved, the finance team can instantly transfer the funds to the employee's bank account (as we support SEPA Instant and Faster Payments).

Ready to save time and money with an all-in-one business travel expense tool?

The 2023 Global Business Travel Forecast, a report that helps companies build and budget their travel and events programme, mentions that meeting and conference prices are expected to rise in 2023. Flight tickets and hotel bookings will also surge due to increased fuel prices, lack of raw materials, and staff shortages.

These cost increases mean taking control over travel spending in the next year will be crucial. Book a demo with us today to learn how we can help streamline business travel finances at your company.