One workflow instead of email and paper
Business travel software handles the filing and settling of business trips. An employee submits a single request, and that request carries the whole matter from booking through to settlement after the return.
The solution described here was built on the Lotus Domino platform, a document workflow environment. What the flow covers, however, matters more than the platform itself.
Staff data comes from a single source
The system uses an employee database supplied by the HR department, so no second list of people has to be maintained.
With business trips this weighs more than with an ordinary request, because settlement depends on the employee data. If the list of people drifts away from HR records, the settlement of the trip drifts with it.
The bookings a request covers
Flexible configuration allows the resources booked for a trip to be defined. These usually include:
- hotels,
- flights,
- company cars,
- other means of transport.
Because of that the request is not merely a plea for permission to travel. It is a record of what was booked for the trip.
Who approves a trip
The people approving a trip depend on what is being booked. Booking a flight may require the finance director to sign off, while travelling by company car may not.
This solves a problem that keeps coming back in an email based flow. The employee does not have to guess who to copy in, because the content of the request sets the approval path.
Per diems calculated from the travel dates
Per diems are calculated from the declared departure and return dates, against rates defined in the system beforehand.
Working out per diems by hand takes time and mistakes creep in easily. When the rates sit in the configuration and the dates sit in the request, the figure comes out on its own and comes out the same way every time.
Settlement goes back to HR
An approved trip is passed automatically to the HR department for settlement.
The flow closes where it started, at the HR data. Nobody retypes dates, amounts or names by hand.
What to look at when choosing
The mechanics described above produce a list of questions to put to a provider:
- whether the list of employees comes from HR or has to be kept separately,
- which resources a request can cover and whether that list can be extended,
- whether the approval path depends on the content of the request or is the same for everyone,
- where the per diem rates come from and who updates them,
- what happens to a trip once it has been approved.
It is worth checking the simplest thing as well, namely what happens when a trip changes. Dates move more often than the design of most such systems assumes.