Travel managers and those in charge of organising business trips and corporate travel will need their travellers to submit a business travel report. This type of report gives travel managers an overview of expenses and budgets to help improve future business travel.
What is a business trip report?
The business trip report is an important management tool for budgeting, reporting and auditing costs. Put simply, it ensures your company has a comprehensive view of the trip, which helps improve reporting accuracy.
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This printable business trip report template provides an overview of travel expenses and budgets to help improve future business travel. It also helps corporate travel managers identify and gather learnings to improve your company’s travel policy and optimise your budget for future business trips.
What does a business travel report include?
Let’s take a look at what sections this business trip report template includes, and what information you need to add for each to it.
Business trip overview
In the trip overview section, you will give an executive summary of the business trip. The business trip summary report section includes:
Travel destination
Duration of the trip
The purpose of the trip
Participating employees
Plus any other information needed to summarise the business trip.
Trip itinerary
Right after the business trip report summary, you’ll find the trip itinerary.
The trip itinerary collects information on the places visited, flight tickets used, hotels booked and car rental information to enable efficient expense reporting.
Meetings, events and activities
Now that you’ve established all the important information about the trip, transport and accommodation, you’ll need to specify the different activities that took place during the business trip. In this section, you can add meetings, conferences, seminars and other events the travelling employee took part in.
Expense report
In this section, you’ll present the travel spend—including amounts and payment methods used for things like:
Airfare, bus tickets and other transportation costs
Accommodation expenses
The cost of your meals
This will enable the finance team to accurately report travel costs, check if the reported travel expenses are in-line with your company’s travel expense policy and process any necessary reimbursements.
For this part, we recommend you add your business travel expenses to a table or to an Excel sheet that you can import into your main travel report once done. This will make your travel data easier to process.
If you’ve decided to use our report template, you can skip this step since the report format is based on Microsoft Excel.
Of course, you can create your field trip report or sales business trip report using any tool—from Google Docs to MS Word. But, if you want to make your travel manager’s life easier, we recommend adding it to a spreadsheet.
Attachments and documents
This part of the report can be divided into two important categories:
Invoices and receipts: the proof of each expense
Other relevant documents: contracts, certificates and declarations that were produced during the business trip
Additional comments
In this last section, you can mention important things that happened during the trip, including:
Cost-saving opportunities you’ve identified
Feedback about issues encountered during your travel experience
Whether there are any important follow-up actions for the activities taken during the trip
The bottom line is that you should include any relevant information that could help optimise your company’s corporate travel policy and budget for future business trips.
Get your business travel report template
Compiling a business travel report is easier with a pre-made template—just plug your travel information into the relevant section. While using travel report templates is helpful, it’s not the best way to get the job done.
Filling out endless reports could be a thing of the past with a travel management platform like Perk. The platform enables you to book and manage your travel and automatically creates a business travel report following any trip.
If you’re looking to streamline business travel then consider adding Perk to your tech stack. You can connect Perk with your expense management solution to include expenditure details, and automatically compile travel reports that make life easier for everyone involved—travel managers, travelling employees and your finance team.
With Perk, you can organise your employees' business trips all in one place. From booking flights and hotels to controlling travel spend and automatically applying your company's travel policy—you can do it all using a single platform.
Try Perk today to experience simpler business travel management and reporting!
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