Among the most stressful activities, an office supervisor or personal assistant must cope with, is reserving and organising travel for the group. Managers often waste a lot of time coordinating travel plans with employees and going back and forth due to communication errors and lack of planning. There are many things to consider, such as favoured airlines and contradictory schedules. And of course the continuous battle between the comfort of the traveller and also the office manager who wants to keep down costs. You probably already have time sheet software and other quality management software in place to control the business operations, but you may not have thought about the following tools. We’ve compiled the greatest collection of resources which will assist you, the office supervisor, perform your job quicker and better while keeping your staff happy and effective effortless and organised.
1. Google Forms for organising and collecting information
Smart office supervisors utilise Google Forms whenever they will need to rapidly collect information from many individuals regarding their forthcoming business trips. Let us say which you will need to receive a listing of passport numbers, airline loyalty application amounts, preferences for prepared meals and other information. How would you collect this info from your group? One way, of course, would be to make use of email. But you might be bombarded with emails you’ll have to analyse, summarise and document for future reference. The arrangement of an email is not well-structured so you’ll need to go back-and-forth together with the staff till you get them to supply the ideal info. Prevent this mess and install a Google Form to gather the information you need; you’ll have access to some well-structured Google Spreadsheet including all the info.
2. TravelPerk for reserving travel
TravelPerk is a brand new small business travel platform which lets you seamlessly plan and coordinate business trips for your employees. You are able to look, reserve and handle flights, hotel lodging, and car rental all on one platform, not flicking around and remembering multiple accounts and logins. Your accounts can be configured along with your company’s travel policies, saving you a lot of time by highlighting the flights and resorts that match the travelling coverage defined.
The program also lets you forward the completed booking itinerary together with confirmation details to everyone in the travel group. So as soon as you’ve got the travel requirements such as dates and times clear, you are able to login into TravelPerk and hunt for the fitting flights, hotels and car leasing for your excursion. You are able to reserve and get one complete statement rather than having to chase unique providers for invoices.
You may also request one monthly statement, detailing all of the flights, hotel and car bookings performed by you and by the staff within the entire month. The service is totally free, so why not take advantage of this well-constructed service.
3. Expensify for management of travel funds and expenses
As soon as you’ve booked the trip for your employees, you may make an investment report on Expensify. The cellular app given by this provider is simply wonderful. The employees, on the business trip, will merely have to take photographs of any receipt they receive (taxi receipt for example) along with the Expensify program will examine the spend and categorize it properly to the cost report.
After the traveller returns from the venture, they click on a button to send the cost report for you for compensation and to the office supervisor documents. Another cool benefit of utilising Expensify is fantastic because of the fact that it is incorporated to TravelPerk, therefore any trip booked on TravelPerk is automatically created within a cost report on Expensify. The integrated nature of these two programs makes it super simple to use and understand, now you can keep track of all the money spent at a lunch cafe for a client meeting without scrounging around for crumpled receipts.
4. TripIt for itinerary monitoring
This instrument is actually fantastic, particularly for the company traveller. TripIt will scan the email inboxes of people who authorised it to do so and will find a flight, hotel, car, and train bookings. It is going to then automatically import these reservations, and allow the user know they can log-in to TripIt to handle the trip. By TripIt, the traveller could see whether there are any flaws on some of those flights, exactly what the weather will be like in their own destination, plus even more. Review and look at flight and hotel options all on one screen without even touching a search engine, it is all done for you. They’re also able to synchronise the whole company trip to their own calendar, so every flight, hotel booking, and car rental will show up on their calendar, which makes their life simpler and their trip a whole lot more manageable.
This concludes our listing of must-have resources for the wise office supervisor when reserving and managing business travel for your group. It can be a big task to coordinate business travel, but hopefully, these programs will make travel less of a headache and more about the valuable business interactions.