How-To

Track Spending with Reason Codes

At A Glance

Using reason codes effectively:

  • Choose reason codes that make sense for your company.
  • Use notifications to give a heads-up to internal personnel.
  • Reason codes make data easy to sort when doing reporting.

For help setting up or optimizing reason codes in your company's Web site, contact your account manager today.

Asking 'Why?' Without Asking

Oops, Roger took an out-of-policy trip to Cincinnati; Jen booked an out-of-policy trip to New York and Steven made another out-of-policy booking with his trip to San Francisco.

What's A Travel Manager To Do?

Fortunately the Egencia site makes it easy to track the legitimacy of out-of-policy purchases by providing "reason codes".

Here's how reason codes work: simply set up the codes in the system by using our Power Tools found in Company Tools. Be sure to pick reason codes that make sense for your company, and you can do so by either using our pre-set collection of codes, by making adjustments to these codes, or by completely designing your own set of codes.

For example, if you allow exceptions based on approval by a manager, you could use our pre-set code, "AA - A have authorization to book this flight/hotel/car," or you could adjust it to fit your messaging. These codes are then displayed to the user as choices they must select when making an out-of-policy purchase. These codes are very easy to change later if you find they're not being well-understood by your travelers.

From there, it gets even easier. If you like, you can set up notifications and the reason code will be included in the e-mail that the traveler's manager receives when an out-of-policy trip is purchased. All itineraries with out-of-policy purchases can be sent to one or a set of people for monitoring this activity. Best of all, when you pull reports, all of those reason codes will be right there, making it easy to sort by code and report on the cost of out-of-policy purchases by type

When collecting the reason codes, travel managers may not have to follow up with the travelers, but they can still analyze the data to determine if adjustments should be made to the policy or if further traveler education is required.

Interested in learning more about implementing reason codes for your company? Give your account manager a call today to learn more.