Budgets are a Pro feature designed to better control your travel expenses.
- Only admins have access to the Budgets page from Company settings.
Budgets help travel and finance managers, approvers, and budget owners to collaborate and hit company financial goals. They allow your company to move from retroactively checking budget compliance, to proactively changing traveler behavior to stay within the budgeted amounts.
With budgets, you can:
- Easily allocate a maximum spend per cost center
- Show current budget status to approvers when booking trips, so that before confirming any bookings, they make informed decisions based on the budget already spent
- Receive timely compliance reports at the end of the period
Let's imagine your company has finished the yearly budget and has decided to allocate €400,000 for travel next year, or €100,000 a quarter.
With budgets, you could further split this €100,000 into 4 different cost centers (Sales, Marketing, Product, and Recruitment) and assign quarterly budgets of €25,000 each.
Now, whenever someone books a trip using one of these cost centers, it will count toward the previously defined budget.
If you have an approval process for any of the travelers on the trip, the approver will see how much budget is remaining before approving any trips. Additionally, the budget owner will receive notifications when certain budget milestones have been met (e.g. 50% spend). This helps your company stay within the established budget by providing additional visibility and control.