New billing module from KDS brings control over travel invoices
KDS, an international leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) travel and expense management, is today announcing an enhanced billing module for the company’s ‘KDS Corporate’ solution.
The new module enables the reconciliation of supplier invoices and traveller expenses, adding control, saving and simplicity to travel and expense management.
Visit KDS and experience the new billing module on Stand 243 during the Business Travel and Meetings Show in London, February 9-10.
The new KDS billing module meets a vital need of procurement executives: to gain visibility over the total cost of a trip. The end-to-end solution allows organisations to reduce the time and effort needed to reconcile actual spend.
Why the need? A true story…
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Jo books and immediately invoices a trip to New York next month. As often happens, however, the meeting has to be rescheduled and she cancels the booking. The airline refunds Jo but, as a busy executive, she forgets to pass the refund back to her company. Finance departments don’t like it when that happens!
With the KDS Corporate billing module in operation, Jo’s company would have been alerted about the trip cancellation.
Travel services are paid via credit cards (both personal and corporate), lodge cards (corporate account) and cash. The job of the finance and procurement departments is to understand who spent what money on which services. However, working through and reconciling an extensive list of claims from multiple travellers on a single supplier invoice – whether covering airfares, hotel stays, car rentals or any other travel service – has until now been a long and painful task.
Yves Weisselberger, chief executive officer of KDS, says: “Without our new billing module, most of our clients had to wait for their travel management company’s report and spend hours analysing the data to match every booking against the invoice.
“Knowing the real, total cost of a trip has long been a goal of the travel procurement process. With KDS, that goal can now be achieved by every organisation.”
Billing for lodge cards
Lodge cards (or a travel account) are payment tools that centralise payment for the procurement of travel services. Although lodge cards considerably improve many aspects of the travel and expense process, the reconciliation of lodge card invoices with traveller bookings is nonetheless much improved with the new KDS billing module. Organisations can now better monitor their supplier contracts, their travel policy compliance and any savings that are being missed.
Not all travel services are paid for via credit cards or lodge cards. Organisations have direct contracts with suppliers for the procurement of services such as hotel rooms, car rentals and railway travel. These negotiated contracts provide organisations with lower prices and administrative overheads, and with simpler procurement processes. However, breaking down the invoices for each traveller can be a time-consuming process. The new KDS billing module simplifies that process of reconciling traveller expenses with invoices.
KDS Corporate closes the loop on travel procurement from trip planning and booking to payment and reimbursement. Travellers manage their bookings and expenses in a quick and streamlined manner, while the procurement and finance departments stay on top of travel spend, controlling and reconciling every booking.