According to statistics, travel expenses usually exceed the planned budget. This isn’t just for family trips when you need to book a 9 seater car hire, find a large hotel room, and organize entertainment for everyone. As a rule, business travel is also associated with unnecessary expenses. Being away from the office, people often relax and lose control over their expenses.
Is it possible to avoid overspending? Keeping track of every purchase is correct from a financial planning standpoint, but it’s hard to act so efficiently on vacation, even if it’s a business trip.
In order to solve the problems of financial planning on a trip, we have selected some great apps. They will help you make financial calculations easier and let you think less about money on a business vacation.
Expensify
According to Business Insider, Expensify is among the best apps for business travellers. It helps to quickly collect all information about spending on your working trip: you can enter amounts manually or read from a receipt. The application scans the receipt, automatically highlighting the purchase amount and its purpose.
Another option is to attach a bank card to Expensify. In addition, if you hire a car and drive it on toll roads, you can turn on the GPS location option or take a photo of the odometer. The app will automatically calculate how much does it cost.
At the end of your trip, Expensify collects all of your expenses in one PDF report and sends it by email. You can define the currency of the report yourself: this is convenient if, for example, you spent in dollars, while the company reimburses you for expenses in British pounds. In this case, the application will carry out the conversion for you.
Budgy
This app helps friends or co-workers who travel together to avoid disputes about money. Budgy works like this: one of the travellers creates a budget and chooses the currency for it. After that, he adds other travel participants to the budget.
Then, travellers simply enter each waste into it – the application offers to give it a name and attach a photo of the receipt. For example, “dinner at a restaurant”, “car hire”, and note exactly who paid for it. After that, the application automatically divides the amount equally among all participants, and it becomes clear who and how much spent.
This data and photos of receipts can be sent in the form of a report to everyone’s mail directly from the application. The only drawback of the app is that it’s not tied to a bank card, and you need to enter all the values manually.
On the other hand, you don’t need to have an Internet connection: you can enter data on spending offline. When the network is available, it will load automatically.
Award Wallet
Award Wallet collects information about all travel loyalty programs: bonus miles, discounts at hotels and car hire companies, etc. After registration, Award Wallet offers to attach any number of loyalty programs: for this, you need to enter a login in the bonus system or a discount card number, as well as a password from your personal account.
After that, the application will start displaying the status of the program member, the number of bonuses, and their validity period. In the free version, the user sees the expiration date of only three programs, but in the paid version you have access to information about all of them.
On the Award Wallet website, you can also create a travel plan and link all bonuses to it so that you don’t forget to use them. All this information is displayed in the application, but you can add it only through the website.
Trail Wallet
Your business trip has many expense items, including a hotel room, hire car, lunch at a restaurant, and more. Therefore, it’s very difficult to properly plan your spending.
Trail Wallet helps you not spend more than you expect during your trip. During the registration process, you choose your home currency and the currency of the country you are travelling to. In offline mode, you indicate the approximate course by yourself, and when connected to the Internet, Trail Wallet does it automatically.
Then you set the amount you would like to spend on a daily basis. Further, regardless of whether you spend in dollars, Euros, or British pounds, the application will calculate how much you spent in the currency of your daily budget. Trail Wallet has one drawback: as in most similar applications, all expenses must be entered manually.
Trip Budget
This application is very similar to the previous one. It also requires you to enter the amount of spending, which will be converted into your domestic currency. The main difference between Trip Budget is that it tracks expenses for all categories in more detail and knows how to divide them among several trip participants.
It also helps you make a plan even before you start your trip. In Trip Budget, the user can plan how much he will spend in each of the assigned categories: transportation, accommodation, food, and entertainment.
You can also add your own types of expenses, for example, “conference room hire”, “car hire” or “business lunch.” Already during the trip, the user adds real expenses in each category and tries not to exceed the limit.
Strict adherence to the travel budget is one of the main requirements of a business trip. If you want to make your trip not only productive but also financially efficient, use one or more of the above-mentioned applications!