Traveling for business is sometimes an expensive endeavor.
And unfortunately, every trip has a budget.
Avoiding overspending will be crucial to making your trip as successful as possible.
But how can you do this—especially with inflation on the rise, and with travel costs continuing to increase as the months tick by?
This is a great question.
And in this blog post, you’re going to learn 5 methods that you can use to help manage your business travel expenses quickly and easily.
Believe it or not, you can actually be massively successful in your endeavor to keep travel costs low.
In fact, this may be crucial to the future success of your small business.
Money doesn’t grow on trees. And sticking to the budget is often a major factor that can mean the difference between small business success and failure.
It matters! So let’s dive into it.
1. Make A Plan
Making a plan for how you’re going to manage spending while on your trip is crucial.
If you just turn your teams loose with corporate credit cards, you’re probably going to end up racking up quite the bill. And that’s not going to do anybody any good.
For best results, communicate with your team about the plan and make sure that they understand all of the different parts.
Make sure they understand what they should and shouldn’t be spending money on (especially when it comes to things like entertainment costs), and make sure that you itemize everything as well as possible.
2. Create A Detailed Budget
Creating a detailed budget based on your plan is crucially important for making sure that you avoid confusion while communicating the budget to your team.
If you can lay out a detailed budget for your team to see—or even better, for them to take along with them—then they will have a much better idea as to how to manage the money according to the plan.
This will help to make crucial in-the-moment purchasing decisions—and will help them to determine what their working budget is for just about any activity or expense that might come up.
3. Check Prices And Make Bookings In Advance
Doing as much research as possible to equip you for creating a detailed budget will be highly beneficial.
For example, you can research hotel room costs, extended stay costs, flight costs, rental car costs, etc.
Also, make sure to research state by state and location by location, as rates may vary.
You’ll also want to look into per diem for different states and how much is allowed for expenditures like meals, rooms, etc.
If you need to cut costs, you can always price-check different companies to see who is offering the better deals.
4. Plan Conservatively
Always create your budget tending more toward conservatism.
This way, you can keep a little bit held back as extra just in case there’s some extra money needed for the budget in an area that you didn’t plan to spend money on.
For example, things like parking costs and incidental charges related to entertainment can sometimes add up to more than you ever expected—due to nobody’s fault but the whims of chaos and unforeseen charges.
And in such cases, it’s always good to have a little bit of money held back and in reserve.
5. Make Backup Funds Available
It’s also always a really good idea to make sure that your team has some ‘backup money’ set aside just in case they do need a little bit of extra.
Your budget may not go as far as you plan on it going.
And it’s always better to plan on spending more than you think you’ll need to spend.
Tell your team to keep it conservative—but also, make sure to hold back enough so that you’ll be covered if the spending needs to increase for some unexpected reason.
Conclusion
There you have it.
5 ways to easily manage your business travel expenses.
With this plan in place, you should be able to easily equip your team for success as they travel abroad and conduct business.
Hey, every project has a budget.
Just make sure to stick with it, and you should be fine.