How can you better manage your employees' travel expenses?

In the course of their work, your employees are often required to travel. This generates mileage costs, subscriptions, tolls, insurance, meals...

Expenses that accumulate and quickly become unmanageable, energy-consuming and irritating.

Let's take another look at this issue, which is often synonymous with a mental burden, to dissect all its aspects and give you the keys to better management of mission expenses.

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Background: what are mission expenses?

There can be no mission expenses without a mission order.

The mission order is a document that you must give to your employee so that he or she can travel with the assurance of being covered in the event of an incident. Coupled with receipts for expenses incurred during the business trip, the employee can be reimbursed for mission expenses on his or her return.

For a valid mission order, remember to indicate :

• The employee's identity,
• The name of your company,
• The location of the mission/trip,
• duration,
• The means of transport used to get there.

To draw up a mission order, you can use this model as a guide:

Source : https://droit-finances.commentcamarche.com/

What expenses fall within the scope of business travel expenses?

All expenses relating to the business travel of your teams are considered as mission expenses. This means everything from mileage accounting to meal budgets, hotel nights and means of transport used during the trip.

You can set the budget for this mission with the employee before departure, and specify it in detail in the mission order. However, this does not guarantee that this budget will be respected: many unforeseen events can occur during business trips - whether they are suffered or chosen, for example: a cancelled flight necessitating the purchase of a new ticket, or a bill in excess of the budget set at the restaurant...

It's up to you to identify the employees you can trust to make the best use of your budget.

What tools do you need to manage mission expenses?

Well aware that mission expenses now represent a major financial challenge, a number of solutions are available to help you manage these business expenses more effectively.

Most traditional banks now offer corporate payment cards, directly linked to the company's bank account.

In this way, the employee does not have to advance any personal expenses on behalf of the company when traveling.

On the other hand, you have no direct control over the expenses incurred with this card. Employees can use it wherever they like.

Other alternatives include special-purpose cards , such as fuel cards and restaurant cards. Although widely used, these cards are restricted to specific areas of expenditure, and can generally only be used in certain establishments. Some fuel cards, for example, can only be used in a single distribution network.

Restaurant cards are generally allocated a strict budget.

More geared to business travel: American Express or the Logée card are solutions to offset mission expenses. These deferred debit cards allow you to receive a single invoice at the end of the month, specific to the trip made.

Another option, which is still very widespread, is to use employees' personal bank cards. To be reimbursed for mission expenses, employees send their expense reports to the company's accounting department, which then sorts the receipts.

Very often, this sorting of receipts is a tedious and time-consuming task. Worse still, receipts are sometimes lost, which lengthens or cancels the reimbursement process for the employee.

Mooncard has taken a close look at the mental burden that employees can suffer when they have to worry about expense claims. The fintech has developed an online manager linked to a Mastercard, which helps to control and streamline business expenses. The bank card can be fully configured, and expenses are transmitted in real timevia the manager: a step ahead of mission expense management!

Reclaiming VAT: the real challenge of mission expenses

To keep employee travel costs as low as possible, companies can claim back the VAT on these expenses (provided they have proof!).

💡 Good to know: for business expenses that belong to the "transport" family: train journeys, plane tickets, cab fares, there is no VAT, so reclaiming it is impossible.

On the other hand, parking and toll charges are subject to 20% VAT, which can be reclaimed on the basis of receipts. The same applies to hotel expenses: VAT generally varies between 10% and 20%.

VAT on meals is only refundable if the meal is a business lunch, or if your employee is away on business. For day-to-day expenses linked to meals, use a restaurant card.

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Three questions for Pierre-Yves Roizot, CFO at Mooncard

What are the main issues related to mission expenses for management teams today?

Pierre-Yves Roizot:

Mission expenses, expense reports, travel costs. No matter what you call them, there's one common denominator: everyone involved is fed up. From the executive afraid of discrepancies, to the manager who feels he's wasting time on non-value-added "policing", to the user who no longer understands why he or she has to pay for travel expenses.From the executive who is afraid of discrepancies, to the manager who feels he is wasting time on non-value-added "policing", to the user who no longer understands why he has to advance personal cash for business expenses, the hassle is found at every level of the company.

Add to this the extraordinary amount of time spent on accounting entries for these expenses, even though they are not the most significant in terms of amount, and the cup is full.

And the icing on the cake? The risk of URSSAF and tax audits, which can make the bill even more expensive. Everyone loses time, the mental load impacts every player in the chain, and stress spreads to the whole team.

Expense management: Many companies are used to sorting out their expense claims by hand. If there were three arguments for them to go digital, what would they be?

Pierre-Yves Roizot:

More than 80% of French companies still use a manual solution to manage their expense accounts, based on Excel sheets that are more or less well-printed, and tickets whose ink has sometimes quickly faded (when they haven't disappeared en route, in the case of the French company, for example).have not disappeared en route, in the long administrative process imposed by this archaic process) and recalcitrant staplers (the famous 26/6 size that doesn't fit into 24/4... who hasn't already experienced this nightmare).

With digitalization, there's no more time wasted chasing after tickets, which are saved for several years (and therefore do not fade) thanks to a simple smartphone photo.no more stress sweating when the URSSAF confirms that this erased ticket cannot be checked, and no more papers gathering dust in a storage area (and therefore incurring storage costs).

In 2020, wouldn't it be better to look ahead and envisage an interconnection with merchants, saving the forests that have already been largely cut down by no longer printing tickets? Let's save our planet: everyone's efforts, even when it comes to expense management, are symbols of modernity and civic-mindedness that we owe to future generations.

Are employee meal expenses considered as mission expenses?

Pierre-Yves Roizot:

What sales director, financial manager or manager of a small or medium-sized business hasn't faced this dilemma?

"Jean-Jacques, you spent €53 on your dinner on Tuesday, during your trip to Marseille, even though you knew that the maximum amount allowed for dinner was €39!
- Yes, but I'd had a sandwich for lunch!"

Even if it seems obvious that meals constitute mission expenses, it's just as hard to give them a simple, clear and effective framework. The exceptions are legion: to what extent is alcohol authorized? Is it permissible to invite guests, and to what extent?

As for the previous question, in 2020, wouldn't it be better to focus on constructive, positive reasoning? For example, how can we encourage our team to be reasonable in their spending? By transforming constraint into a positive movement, many questions disappear.

Some useful additional information:

• How can I reduce VAT on my purchases?
• All you need to know about VAT from Bercy Info
• Information on VAT from Service-Public.fr