Name: From Resistance to Buy In: Why Travel Policies Fail and How to Fix Them
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T16:30:17.092Z
Duration: 58 min 25 s
Description: From Resistance to Buy In: Why Travel Policies Fail and How to Fix Them

Transcript for "From Resistance to Buy In: Why Travel Policies Fail and How to Fix Them": The future is here. So why are travel and finance teams stuck in the past? Chasing receipts and invoices, battling with old siloed systems, too busy reporting on yesterday to to steer towards tomorrow. Today, there's inverse expense intelligence. It's not software. It's modern financial infrastructure, an intelligent system powered by inverse AI that that gives a real time view of the way money really moves. Wow. Unify travel, expense and employee spend, AP payments, and virtual cards from what's owed to how it's paid. Imverse AI transforms dollars into insight. Oh, shit. So teams stop chasing clarity and lead with it. Leave the past where it belongs. Because when you manage the money, you manage the future. Alright. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar, From Resistance to Buy In, Why Travel Policies Fail and How to Fix Them. My name is Taylor Dekorte. I'm on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's webinar. This session is being recorded. A copy of the recording will be emailed to you twenty four hours after the event ends. To the right of your screen, you should find the engagement section. I do see some chat some people in the chat already going off. So hi. Good morning to you all. That chat feature is available in a great place for you to engage with your fellow attendees. In addition to the chat, you'll also see the docs tab where we've curated some goodies for you, related to today's session. So please feel free to also check out the resources in there. And in addition, to the chat and the docs, you should see the q and a tab there. So while we do encourage participation in the chat, if you have any questions that come up throughout the webinar, please put them in the q and a tab. We wanna make sure that they're getting entered in the q and a tab and not the chat function so that they don't get lost, and we'll be able to address those, as the webinar goes on. Another exciting, offer for today's webinar is this webinar is eligible for one CPE credit. To earn that credit, you will need to stay on for the duration of the webinar, for fifty minutes in order to, in order to qualify, and you will need to engage with all three poll questions. We will have three poll questions throughout the webinar today that you'll be able to answer. A poll tab will appear next to that chat tab, once we launch those. So keep an eye out for those, and be sure to participate in those as we go through today's session. And with that being said, I'd like to welcome Julie Blankenship and John Berkley onto the stage with me. Mhmm. Hi, Julie. Hi, John. Thank you for joining us. Julie and John are gonna be our fabulous. speakers for today. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to them and let them introduce themselves, before we continue on today's session. Julie, Thank you, don't you. start? Thank you. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Julie Blankenship. I am a principal, consultant on the extended services team here at Emburse. I focus on the Emburse enterprise, side of the house. So, a lot of my presentation will be geared towards the Emburse enterprise, products. But, where possible, I'll be sure to mention some of the the other products that are, related to that. So excited to be speaking with you all this morning. Thank you. Terrific. And I'm John Berkley. I have over thirty years in the business travel industry working for both travel management companies and start ups and inverse. And I'm gonna be starting off the, webinar today and walking everybody through about the first twenty minutes before I hand it over to Julie. And I think, Taylor, can we get started? I think we can. So our agenda for today is, you know, three key topics. You know, why have a travel policy? Why do they oftentimes fail? And things you can do to make the travel policy work better for your company, or in other words, how to fix it. We're gonna start with the poll question. So, Taylor, I'm inviting you back on to to run the poll question. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let's go ahead and get that first poll question started. Today's first poll is going to be, does your company have a travel policy currently in place? So I'm gonna go ahead and open that. In order to submit your poll responses and to get that CPE credit, do submit that under the poll tab. You guys should see that, next to the chat. Just so that you guys know, in order to track that, we do need you to submit it under the poll. So I see some answers in the chat. Go ahead and submit them under the act the actual poll tab for me, though, please. And I'm gonna share the results as those come in here so that we can see that. So, yes, it looks like most of, most of our attendees do have a travel policy in place today, but it does need some improvement. So we're gonna talk about, how to hopefully, improve that policy for you, and would love to learn more later as we go through the webinar about exactly what you guys are looking to improve. Yeah. And, Taylor, I know we have a a wide diversity of organizations on the call today, so everybody knows. Mhmm. So we have anything from small businesses to large enterprise and strategic accounts on the call today, and we also have anywhere from universities to law firms to industrial companies. And so, Yep. obviously, we can't tailor our discussion on travel policy specific to each type of account and size of account. So what you're gonna see today is more general guidelines on how to improve travel policies and how to get your travelers to abide by them. Exactly. Yep. So with that, guys, we're gonna go ahead and close out this first poll. So I'm gonna give you five more seconds to submit your answers if you haven't. Remember, you do have to submit poll you do have to answer all three poll questions to earn that CPE credit. So we're gonna do the the countdown here, and I'm gonna close this out. And we're gonna go ahead and hand that back to you, John. Okay. Terrific. Well, it seems like, most people already have a travel policy, but it might be good for those that don't or for even those that have a travel policy to just review what are the benefits of a travel policy. We'll start by looking at the benefits to the actual organization, you know, to the company or the university or the overall organization that's spending money on travel. How can a travel policy help? And you can see six key benefits here from cost control and predictability of cost, which helps obviously the finance team and their forecasting and budgeting, to improving traveler compliance and fraud with the cost objectives of the organization. It can help to streamline operations because everybody knows the rules to follow as they book travel and expense travel. It leads to better data and reporting for the organization. In the cases where you might be using a travel management company to help your travelers book travel, it can provide duty of care and risk management services for the corporation. And if you're a large enough organization where you have volume that would allow you to negotiate directly with hotels or airlines, having a travel policy gives those suppliers, the, you know, benefit of knowing that you have a way to sort of direct travelers to spend with your preferred suppliers. So these are the benefits to an organization. But in order to have a successful, travel policy, there also needs to be specific benefits directly to the travelers. And so if we think about the travelers and how they benefit from a travel policy, well, the first thing is if they've read their travel policy, they have greater clarity around what's allowed and what's not allowed when they get to the point of it submitting an expense, whether it will be approved or not. So it reduces guesswork. Having a travel policy in place for the traveler can also lead to faster reimbursement. Because if they're following the guidelines, then their expense report should move through the process much quicker, approved, you know, either automatically or very quickly, leading to faster reimbursement of the traveler if they have out of pocket expenses for that trip. The travel policy can help guide the traveler to safety and better to support. For example, if you name preferred hotels that travelers should stay at near your company headquarters or your key locations, then you can direct travelers to hotels that are in good neighborhoods, that are safe places, and provides assurances to the travelers that they'll be safe on their trip. It can lead to time savings by being able to make sure that information flows into expense reports without them having to key in all information and therefore quicker expense reports. It ensures that there's fairness and consistency across different groups within the organization. So I know if I'm following the rules and all my colleagues are following the rules, we all are allowed to do the same things, and that creates consistency and fairness. And overall, it can improve the travel experience if it's designed well. It can lead to travelers staying at preferred hotels where they have benefits such as free Wi Fi and free breakfast, maybe free transportation from the airport. And so travel policy can add a lot of benefits to the travelers. It's not only there for the corporation and its cost controls. There's a balance between traveler benefits and cost controls for the organization. So that brings us to another poll question. So I'll invite Taylor back on to help us with this. Great. Yes. And my background seems to have disappeared. Perfect. Well, I will go ahead and open up that second poll question, to get that started. So this poll question is going to be around where does your travel policy most often break down in practice? So is it out of policy bookings, ignored rules, or is it all of the above? And that poll tab is open again next to the chat, so please feel free to submit your responses there. And I'm gonna say it every time we launch a poll. In order to get that CPE crest CPE credit, you do need to respond to all three poll questions, so be sure to submit those. Now, John, it looks like, we are getting some responses in. It looks like majority are saying all of the above. Which I don't think is probably a surprise. No. You know, out of policy bookings usually result from maybe ignoring the rules or maybe it's lack of education and lack of knowledge of the rules. And so you're gonna dive into a little bit about that as we go forward into, you know, how can you ensure that travelers are educated and it's convenient for them to follow the policy so that you can reduce the out of policy bookings, hopefully. So, Taylor, do we need some more responses before we move forward? Nope. I'm gonna start I'm gonna, go ahead and stop sharing. I will allow folks about five more seconds to get those responses in, but we can go ahead and continue on, John. Okay. Great. So here are some common reasons why travel policies fail. The first one is that can they can be too complex and restrictive. You know, there are some companies that feel like they need to detail every possible situation and lay out every possible rule that traveler should follow. And they and in order to control cost, they try to can make the mistake of making those rules too restrictive so that the traveler doesn't want to follow the rules because it creates for for them discomfort or unease or inefficiency. And so one of the first things you can do to help a travel policy perform better is making sure that the travel policies are simple and accommodate the traveler. The second main problem is poor communication. Companies may create a travel policy. If it's too complex, it could be dozens of pages long. And then it's posted somewhere on the corporate Internet, which doesn't, by convenience, flow into the process of travelers booking their travel and expensing their travel. So they have to go hunt for it. And if that's the case, it's unlikely that the travelers will understand the travel policy, will actually go to the travel policy to validate their following policy. And so poor communication can also lead to travel policy failures. The third part is misaligned incentives, and this comes to the important point of balancing the corporate objectives around cost control and the traveler objectives around efficient and comfortable travel. A good example would be you could set a cost objective to select the lowest price flight, But if that flight requires a four hour layover when there was a nonstop flight available and the traveler gets home at midnight rather than at a more reasonable seven or 8PM, then travelers by nature are not incented to follow that travel policy. And so making sure that you're balancing traveler comfort, efficiency, reasonableness with your corporate savings objectives is incredibly important. And then the last point, and Julie will talk to this later, is you may not have the most up to date tools and processes. Do you have tools and processes in place that make it easy for the traveler to follow your travel policy, to understand your travel policy, to expense their trip? The more your processes are up to date and efficient, the more compliance you'll have to your travel policy. Alright. So we must remember how the employee perceives travel policies. If the policies are restrictive and rules based rather than guideline based, they can feel like policies are barriers to them having a successful business trip. They can be viewed as a lack of trust from their leadership if they feel they're being audited and held to standards that aren't reasonable. If you try to make your travel policy too complicated and try to import those rules into your travel process, either the booking process or the expense process, it can make filing expense reports or booking a trips much more time consuming than it needs to be. And it makes the travelers feel that they don't have choices on how the trip will be successful. It limits their options. And so you wanna develop a travel policy that minimize these sort of negative employee perspectives of a travel policy and accentuates the positive parts of the travel policy for the traveler. So an ineffective travel policy leads to increased out of policy spend, higher travel costs for the corporation, poor employee experiences, compliance risk, and duty of care risk. And that's why it's important to have a travel policy that works for both the employees and the organization. So now we're gonna move on to the important points of how can we make the travel policy better. I'd say there's four key elements of making the travel policy, better, more productive, more compliant with your travelers. The first is design the policy itself, the actual set of guidelines to be employee friendly, and we're gonna walk through that. The second is communicate, communicate, communicate, and considering it guidance, not finding out people who aren't following the rules. It should be about communication and guiding the traveler to do the right thing. You need to make sure that you're providing through your travel program a great user experience so that they'll follow the guidelines, use the tools that you have in place, and therefore, make it easier and more convenient for them to follow the policy. And then build in accountability. Make sure that the steps in the process continue to educate the traveler of what's in policy and what's out of policy. So what do we mean by designing it to be employee friendly? It means that the policy, when they read it, should convey to them that we're respecting their time, their comfort, and their ability to judge what is a good business trip and what works best, while still giving the company enough structure to control cost and risk. Here are free a few friendly key components. So guiding principles. The policy should read like a set of guiding principles and intents, not just set up a set of rules that you will be punished if you don't follow. It it should start with intent such as this travel policy is in place to make travel more safe, cost effective, and respectful of your time and well-being, and that we trust employees to make reasonable, good business decisions within the guidelines. By having your policy read this way, rather than just a set of rules to be followed, you shift the tone from enforcement to trust and accountability. As I mentioned earlier, many travel policies can become too complex as different people or in the organization, the audit team, the compliance team, the finance team wants you to add more and more components. But the best policies are simple and flexible booking guidelines. Instead of strict mandates, they talk about what is allowed for airfare, what is allowed for hotels, and what are the benefits of using preferred hotels. And while you should use the, you know, designated booking channel, when it might be okay to have the flexibility to book through other channels as well. The key you want to remember is that you want to install guardrails so the traveler feels that this is fair and respects them, not handcuffs of rules that, you know, they'll be punished for not following. That's what an employee friendly travel policy does. You know? So some examples. The policy should share with employee the benefits to them That if they follow the policy and if they book, if you provide a travel management company booking system, it'll make booking within policy easier and easier approvals. It means that the transfer of key travel information can happen between the travel booking system and the expense system so they have less manual entries. So that's an immediate benefit for them that they don't have to rekey in data. It provides the ability for the company and the travel management company to provide duty of care, support on the road when disruptions happens, and it leads to faster reimbursement for your out of pocket experience. It lets the traveler knows that if something goes wrong, the company has my back. And focus the travel policy on the traveler experience. Allow them to know that you're reasonable in the flight times, that you don't have to take red eyes just to save money. You know, certainly permit seat selection, maybe even an upgraded main extra seat rather than a regular if it's a longer flight and will give them a little bit more room so that they can be productive on the flight, which gets to the point of allowing Wi Fi to be expensed if the airline's still charging for Wi Fi so that they can have a productive trip and not feel guilty about not working on the plane or having to pay for it themselves. And many travelers these days look to match where they're going on their business trips with a little leisure activity, which of course is leisure travel. So make sure you include guidelines around that in your policy so the travelers know when it's, acceptable to extend their stay and what are the rules around that. So that's part of the key parts about making it employee friendly. Now we're gonna talk a little bit about the communication and guiding angle. So if we've mentioned several times, when you're communicating anything to employees, the shorter and simpler it can be, the more that they'll remember it and try to abide from by it. So even large organized global organizations like Microsoft have a two page or less travel policy. They keep it short and simple so that employees can read it, remember it, and abide by it. Focus on the key priorities that are driving the company objectives and the traveler experience rather than trying to cover everything that could possibly occur. And when communicating it, don't rely on a static PDF stored somewhere that's hard for the traveler to find. Use tools like the online booking tool if you provide it to your travelers and your expense system to educate the traveler as they're actually booking and expensing the trip as to what the policies are because then each trip they do it, they will learn those policy guidelines, you know, and it's a repeatable process that constantly reinforces your guidelines and policy. So, Taylor Dekorte, we're on to our final poll question. We are. Yep. So I'm gonna go ahead and launch our third poll question, around how do you communicate your travel policy today? So for those that have a travel policy in place, and even those that don't, you can answer this one. And I've gone ahead and I've launched that poll. So, again, you'll see that poll tab, next to the chat. Be sure to submit your answers there and not in the chat box so that we can record those. And I'll share those, responses as they're coming in here. It does look like we're leading by quite a bit with emails to the company seems to be the most responses. Yes. It seems to be. Yep. And, you know, in in person meetings are harder and harder for many companies because, you know, the travelers may be remote workers or in many different locations. And then, of course, if if you're waiting to communicate the travel policy until the travelers already incurred the expense, then it may be a little too a little bit too late in the process. So, I think, you know, the key as we discussed earlier is finding the tools to be able to communicate when the traveler's actually booking a trip and expensing a trip so that they know, the travel policy and they learn the travel policy on each trip they take. Awesome. We'll give folks just a couple more seconds here, to get those responses in. We do wanna make sure we're giving everybody an opportunity to earn that CPE credit, so please respond. If you have not gotten that response in. I'm gonna give you the five second warning here before we close it out. Three, two, one. Alright. We're gonna go ahead and close that poll as well, and I'm gonna turn it back over to you, John. Thank you guys for participating in our polls. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Just wanted to share one quote. Steven Van Overmeyern is one of the leading, travel consultants in the travel industry. He works with with many enterprise and middle market size accounts, not just on their travel policy, but helping them design their entire travel program. And he himself has been a travel manager at a couple of different organizations including, Apple, which obviously everybody knows that brand name, and then Baker McKenzie, which is a global, law firm. So he's worked both for technology companies as a travel manager in law firms, which comp companies like those have different cultures, but he's worked at both. But you can see his comments above is that the modern travel policy have evolved from the multipage PDF stored on the Internet and instead is now providing clear, consistent guardrails, This concept of trusting travelers, allowing them to make prudent business judgment is sort of the trend across most organizations that wanna have a lot of compliance with their travel policy. And it should include workflows and educate the travelers on those workflows that if they follow the policy, it will mean that their expense reports will be approved quicker, that they'll have to key in less information, that all of that should be part of the communication of the policy so the travelers want to engage with the policy and follow it because it it creates real time guidance to them and efficiency for them. So we're now gonna move on to discussing some of the ways that companies can actually guide the travelers into following their policy as they use different tools. And, you know, policy is a structured approach to laying out guidelines to follow, but traveler's behavior usually is dictated by following convenience. The more it is convenient to do something, the more they will do it. So let's look at how we can make it convenient. What are some of the tools and processes that we can put in place? So for those companies on the call today that have an unmanaged travel program, which means that you don't have a centralized online booking tool where all travelers are expected to book their travel and you don't use a travel management company, it doesn't mean that you can have a travel policy and does not mean that you can't put in tools to help travelers follow the travel policy. So while your travelers may be booking directly at an airline website or a hotel chain website or with aggregators such as booking.com or Expedia, you can still make sure that you put your travel policy someplace convenient, easy for them to find, such as attached to the, you know, portal for the expense tool your company using. Could be Emburse Expense or it could be another one. You can usually, through your expense system, even if you don't have a travel management company and booking platform, put in place pre trip approval processes so that the traveler can get, basically preapproved compliance to the policy before they take their trip. And another tool that can make the process easier for the traveler is implementing a corporate card program, could be inverse corporate cards, because then all that corporate card data can flow directly into the expense report, again, making it easier and faster for travelers to file their expense reports. Now in an unmanaged program, there is not a centralized service like a travel agency, travel management company to help with on with during trip changes, so the traveler's on their own. And the traveler, because they haven't used a centralized purchasing portal like an online booking tool, will have to provide all the receipts to the, expense system themselves. But as Julie will walk through, there's some compliance checks and some audit processes you can put in place to make sure the policy has been, followed. And then for those members of the finance team or travel team that would like to see analytics so they can adjust their travel policy and and help those travelers that are having trouble complying, your expense system can provide lots of good analytics there. If you're in a managed travel program where you do have a travel agency or travel management company, which is basically a corporate travel agency, then you can bring your policy all the way into the booking process. So you can have policy guidance provided in the online booking tool. And today, many travel agencies are starting to deploy agentic AI tools where the travel policy can can be embedded within the agentic AI to give travelers the context and guidance, you know, as the agent is booking the trip. Or if you happen to call to book your trip, your travel agents will have your policy and will only present options and the supplier content as does the OBT and the agentic AI. All of that can be filtered so that travelers only see within policy, options. Of course, with the TMC, if you're using a travel agency, your travelers would have duty of care for their trip changes, one number to call for disruptions or changes in their travel across air, hotel, and ground transportation. And most travel management companies link up with expense companies like Emburse to flow the booking data directly into the expense tool, which reduces the keystrokes for travelers. And you get two levels of program visibility. You get the expense analytics, but you also get a more detailed set of travel analytics from your TMC. And many expense companies like Emburse can provide t and e analytics where we combine all those analytics into one set of dashboards so you can see what was booked within your TMC channel and without your and outside of your TMC channel and how those compare. So that's how you can accentuate your travel policy compliance if you used a managed travel program. So with all that as a setup, I'm gonna hand it over to Julie now who can walk us through some of the tools on the expense side and other tools you can use to help foster greater travel policy compliance. Julie? Thank you, John. So now that we know the benefits of having a travel policy and some tips on how to make it successful, if I could switch gears a bit and take a few moments to talk through the tools available within Emburse that will help you enforce that travel policy. So what you're looking at here is the Emburse Enterprise homepage, which we refer to as the message of the day. This page is customizable. It can be tailored to to show to specific departments within your organization so you could have different messages based upon your policy and what you're wanting to convey to your employees. And as I'm showing here, we also have QR codes that can be provided on this page so that your employees can easily download the Emburse Enterprise mobile app, along with helpful links to your travel policy. So this landing page is what your employees see right when they log in to Emburse. So this provides clear and concise guidelines to them immediately upon login, making it readily accessible. So, if we wanna look through the life cycle of a a traveler in planning this trip. So prior to the trip, we offer preapproval, also known as spend request for our Emburse Professional clients. This lets employees capture anticipated travel spend before they book it. So this gives your organization a chance to provide real time policy guidance before any money is spent or any travel is booked. So this is really... Preapproval spend request is really helpful for organizations, particularly that don't use a TMC because you can build compliance rules here, have approval flows that can help enforce your policy. So, in regards to the approval flows, preapprovals that are within your policy, they can be automatically approved so that it reduces the administrative burden and bottleneck. If the preapproval is within your policy, we could automatically approve it. And then the data within this preapproval is automatically linked to the inverse expense module for easy post trip reconciliation, making that burden a little bit easier on, on your travelers. Alright. Within preapproval, we also offer the ability to connect directly to Emburse cards, which I know John, mentioned briefly. Emburse cards is our corporate Mastercard program. We also have a client funded option. So a traveler can request a physical or virtual card, or they can replenish funds on an existing card as part of this pre trip, preapproval process. So within Emburse cards, your organization can set controls around spend dates, making sure that it lines up within the traveler's trip, merchant categories so that they're not spending things on... That are that are not business related. Obviously, spend limits and any other policy requirements are baked into the Emburse card module. So, the traveler doesn't need to use any personal funds upfront, and then the finance team can apply those policy restrictions, ensuring that there aren't any out of policy, purchases. So these inverse cards, much like corporate cards, and receipts, these will all flow into the traveler's e wallet so that they're ready post trip for easy expense submission. Alright. Another pre trip experience that we have baked into our tool is a travel booking link. So you can get here from our home page by clicking on the hamburger icon in the upper left hand side. You can see it at the bottom here, travel booking. So this links directly to your preferred online booking tool or TMC. So the employee can easily use this link to book travel directly with that preferred OBT and TMC. This link is configurable, so you can ensure that only the right groups see the right OBT and and TMC. So travelers don't have to search for the right channel and guess where they go to book their travel. It's all here in one place. So it provides a guided, consistent experience to those travelers, making policy compliance feel natural and easy. So that... That's the goal. We wanna make it simple. So make the approved path for your employees the easy path. And then I did also wanna note that this link is specific to the person logged into Emburse. So if you're acting as a delegate for someone else, you won't see the travel booking link associated with that person. You only see the travel booking link that's associated to you as the person that... That's logged in to Emburse. So those are the pre trip experience tools that we have readily available, now during the trip. So once the traveler's on the road, the experience needs to stay connected and easy to manage. So, the Emburse Enterprise mobile app, travelers can see their upcoming trips and expense actions. There is a personalized home screen as well. You can see at the bottom of the screenshot here too, there is a travel section, which includes active and past trips. You can also get flight status such as delays or cancellation, any sort of terminal updates, baggage claim, etcetera. Travelers can also forward their reservations directly into the app via trips@go.inverse.com, or share their itinerary with colleagues or family members, so providing that duty of care for the organization. So it gives them one place to manage the trip instead of having to move between, you know, app... Apps and evil... Emails. It's all there, readily available on their smartphone. And, obviously, to have the the the travel link, you would need to have a a TMC program. Another exciting feature within the mobile app, which should make, a lot of you guys who have administrative assistants and delegates that do a lot of the the work, We also support mobile delegate access. So users can use the switch account feature and then move between their own profile and then the profiles that they manage. So it'll keep the visibility, into the work that needs attention right there at their fingertips. So within the app, they can capture receipts, view reports, submit expenses, manage workflows, all from the Inverse Enterprise mobile app. So you don't have to wait until either yourself or, the person that you're... The profile that you're managing, you don't have to wait until the trip is over to start the expense reconciliation process. So as I mentioned, this was really a game changer for those organizations that rely heavily on delegate support and those, administrative assistants. So very excited about that. Alright. So now the trip has ended. So post trip experience, we still have some tools in place that'll help with adhering your travelers to your travel policy. So expense submission, it is much more straightforward. So that preapproval data is present within Emburse Enterprise Expense along with any travel data. Corporate credit cards and receipt images are also readily available within the traveler's e wallet. And then as you can see here from the image, our Emburse AI can automatically merge all of these transactions and receipts into one, into one expense line. So the traveler can control these transactions. So if they need to to unmerge them or separate them, they can. But they can take these, merge transactions right from their e wallet and just drag and drop them into their expense report. So it really makes the manual effort a lot less burdensome on the traveler. And then the final layer is building in that compliance and assurance. So we have line item and submit compliance rules that let you apply your policies and business controls consistently as expenses move through the process. So as you can see here, we have, the top is a violation. So the expense owner has to make that change before they can proceed with the, submitting their expense report. And then below that is a warning compliance rule. So, that may just need additional information from the expense owner in order to submit their expense report. You know, maybe it's just partially outside of of policy and you have some exceptions to the rules. So it makes it not as, as rigid. Emburse Assurance also adds that additional level of fraud detection and risk visibility, which can occur both before and after submission, which has really been, a game changer. So so by having these alerts, you know, reviewers are able to... They don't have to inspect everything manually. They can just focus on the the alerts and where it really matters and needs their attention. So this gives your organization stronger compliance without adding unnecessary manual effort, making the reconciliation process, that much more efficient. Alright. So the the goal when policy, process, and technology all work together, then it benefits everyone. So employees are more likely to use the process because it's easy. It fits into the flow of their work. And then compliance improves because the right guidance appears naturally along the way. So your organization sees lower cost through fewer exceptions and less manual rework. And then as an employee, they have a better experience as well because the process feels faster and less frustrating. So it's it's the outcome that we're all working toward. Right? Smarter controls that create better results for both the business and the the people who travel. So, I will open it up. I think you guys have been, communicating via chat thus far. So if anyone has any questions. Yeah. We've had some awesome questions coming through, and? we're, doing. our best to answer them. But, and I know we've gotten to a couple, but there are, some that I want to flag for the broader audience here. So, while I'm sorting through those, I just wanna remind everybody, I the chat has been very active. We're really appreciative of that. But with that being said, we wanna make sure we are able to address your questions. So the best place to submit those is the q and a tab. That way we can ensure that they're not getting lost in the chat, and we can actually get to get to your questions. So please be sure to submit any questions that you have for the team, under that q and a tab so that we can make sure we're getting them addressed. Also, I wanna make sure that it's said, if we don't get to your question today, we will reach out after the webinar, and we'll make sure to get everybody's questions answered here. So be sure to submit those. We'll do our best to get to them. Alright. So the first question, I want to relay, I wanted to relay here, was somebody asked, if the travel booking feature was available globally, to all countries. And so I do want to flag that, and and answer that yes. It is avail it is available, and supported regionally, based on the, TMC and o b t or OBT that your organization has partnered with. So there are, so it is dependent on that relationship, but it is available. We also had some questions about about the travel booking. So let me see here which ones we can bring up. Yes. Let's see if we can address this one. So how, how do hotel folios, or car rental final invoices get imported into the Emburse Wallet? Julie, are you able to speak to that a little bit? Sure. So, typically, the hotel folio and car rental folio, that's emailed from the hotel or car merchant after the trip so so that it captures all of the expenses during the trip. So, dependent upon which, we have different we have different, email addresses that you could forward that to. So even if you get that folio receipt sent to your personal email address, you can add a personal email address as a secondary email so that you could simply forward that to the appropriate email to to send it into Emburse. And then we we recognize that email, whether it's your company or your or your personal email address, and then we map it so that it's just automatically in your e wallet. And it... Like you said, if you have Folio, it'll automatically have all of the the dates split out, making it that much easier whenever you add that to your expense report. Perfect. So short answer, for... You you forward that via email after the trip. Great. And I know that there and there are a couple of questions in here, about, getting access to certain things or having questions about what's available to you guys, with your packages. So for our lovely customers who have joined, I some of these, we will pause. We will probably take offline just so we can address your specific concerns or questions, as it relates to your account. So if we don't get that, if we don't get you answers, on this call, we will reach out separately. Here's one, that we can possibly flag up. If a traveler books a flight and requires approval, does the price of the ticket get saved at that rate until the approval? So I think that would be a... Yeah. I think that would be a question for your TMC since. that would be on... Yeah. Go ahead, exactly. right, Julie. Mhmm. So it can be saved for up to twenty four hours for sure, and sometimes longer by the TMC and its guidelines of when they do the ticketing. A TMC has a certain number of days before they need to ticket the reserved flight with its, corresponding airfare. And so to Julie's point, you should probably check with your travel management company to, to see what their timeline is and therefore, you know, how long an approver has to approve before that airfare may change. Great. Thanks, John. Let me see. Alright. And as I'm going there are a lot of questions here, guys, so bear with me. As I'm coming through them, I wanna make sure, I love the engagement. to address the ones. Yeah. The engagement's great. We love to see. it. I will say too as I'm going through some of these questions, if you're interested in learning more about Emburse and some of the things that we've covered today, and how you can get access to these programs. Or, if there's something specific that you would like to dive into that we we can't show, on today's session, please be sure to go, to that learn more about imburse link in the docs tab. That will, fill out that form to request a follow-up from us, and we'll be sure to reach out. We love to do customized demos where we can actually speak directly to your needs, and your questions here, guys. So while today, we're gonna kinda keep it broad for the larger audience, if there's something specific that you would like to address, be sure to fill out that form so we can get you connected with the right folks. Right. And then I'm gonna flag, one more question here. I think, before we we close out today's session. Just around, how do you address foreign currency credit card charges, from foreign travel? So I know we work a lot with international markets. Do we wanna maybe address that one? Sure. So so foreign current... Currency, that would be determined at more of the account level, like, and then, you know, if it's a corporate paid, a company paid corporate card, then, you know, we would receive we would receive that that credit card charge in the currency with which it was spent. And then, you know, the employee wouldn't be reimbursed for that. So there wouldn't be any sort of, like, exchange on that. So I guess from a foreign currency perspective, I would say it depends on your card program and the currency with which it was set up, and then whether it's a company paid corporate card because, obviously, you know, we wouldn't we wouldn't do a currency exchange to reimburse the employee on a a company paid corporate card. So, hopefully... I don't know if anyone has anything else yet. Hopefully, that answered the question there. Follow-up to that is what about companies that do not have a company issued card? How to handle foreign currencies? So within inverse enterprise, it is... It's it's largely driven off of the traveler's profile. So their preferred currency, which, as a traveler, you can have you can have a preferred currency and a secondary currency on your profile. So, if you make a purchase out of pocket charge in a different currency, then we'll convert that to the, expense owner's preferred currency. Perfect. Great. Well, guys, a lot of these are, are fairly technical. So, well, you don't have time to dive in into the specifics of some of these questions. So, there are quite a few questions I'm not gonna raise, for Julie and John here. We wanna make sure we're connecting you to the right folks who can address your specific questions, and get you, answers, that are more relevant to your direct concerns here. So, I am gonna go ahead and and just thank our lovely speakers for joining us for today's session. Thank you to all of our attendees. We for any questions that we have not gotten to, we will be sure to reach out after this session and get you connected with the right folks. And if you are interested, in future Emburse webinars, please also, check out under the doc session, our registration link for our October 22 webinar around, compliance best practices. And be sure to also sign up for our webinar subscription program using the never miss another webinar link. That will get you automatically enrolled for not only that October 22 webinar, but all future Emburse webinars as well. So be sure to check that out, and hopefully, we will see you on Emburse webinars in the future. Thanks, everyone. Thank you all.