With 33,000 employees and 6,100 extradition centres, PostNord is a company with intense business travel. With the help of Travel Clearing, those who travel no longer have to pick up the hotel, rental car or taxi bill – and consequently the travel administration has been greatly reduced.
PostNord is one of an increasing number of companies who have started to use Travel Clearing – a payment service, used by thousands of Nordic companies, that almost completely eliminates the need for personal expenses and handling of receipts when on a business trip.
– Win-win is maybe an overused term but with Travel Clearing this is really the case. All involved parties can save a lot of time and money, says Per Johansson, Group Travel Manager at PostNord. With Travel Clearing everything from taxi to railway and hotels are booked and paid for in apps and through Travel Agencies. Each booking or ticket is “linked” to the traveller’s profile, containing necessary data to make the process from booking to accounting completely digital. The traveller doesn’t have to handle the receipt since all expenses are centrally paid through the company’s travel account. Something that almost all companies have but few are aware of.
– It is never popular to pay for business expenses with your own money. We wanted to get rid of that process and at the same time improve our control over hotel spend. Today, with the help from Travel Clearing, personal expenses are no longer required and our cost control has improved.
Per Johansson has long experience in the field of Travel Management and is quite familiar with the advantages of Travel Clearing’s services. He points out that it is a flexible and well working solution, available in the booking channels that PostNord was already using.
– Our business travellers don’t have direct contact with the payment service, they just experience that the administration process is now much smoother. All invoices we used to receive directly from the hotels have now also disappeared, which significantly reduces the burden on internal administration.
Another advantage is that Travel Clearing’s centralised payment makes it easier for employees who don’t have sufficient credit on their credit card to cover for all expenses during a business trip. Travel Clearing ensures that hotel expenses approved by the company, e.g. accommodation, are kept apart from other expenses, like dry cleaning and bar tabs, which must be paid directly by the traveller.
– We are very pleased. We save time and money, it is a very smooth payment process and the implementation has gone very well. The next step is to evaluate the possibilities to recover VAT from international trips. With a centralised and digital process we now have the data required to enable this across the entire company group.
The collaboration with Travel Clearing has also led to that PostNord now has further demands when sourcing travel services. Suppliers must have Travel Account as a supported method of payment.
– There are many advantages, but above all we now have all travel expenses in the same eco system. Suppliers get paid faster and we have the ability to better analyse and identify travel patterns. One disadvantage, and I know that Travel Clearing is working on this, is that the ability to communicate additional requests to the hotels is limited. I hope that his will soon be solved.
