HR, IT & finance urged to align on corporate travel

SAP Concur has urged organisations to treat corporate travel as a shared responsibility across HR, IT and finance, warning that misaligned decisions create friction for employees and weaken compliance and cost control.

Business travel no longer sits neatly within an administrative function. It spans employee experience, policy, approvals, data management and risk oversight, making the relationship between HR and IT central to how travel programmes perform in practice.

Fabian Calle, Managing Director, Small and Medium Business, SAP Concur Australia and New Zealand, said travel programmes often fail when departments set priorities independently and leave employees to navigate the gaps.

"Alignment between people and technology leaders is a commercial necessity, not a cultural aspiration. Travel touches almost every part of the organisation, and when HR, IT and finance make decisions in isolation, the program cannot deliver the experience employees expect," Calle said.

Travel programmes typically combine HR-led rules on wellbeing and flexibility, IT-led controls on security and standardisation, and finance-led requirements for budget discipline and auditability. In many organisations, those elements develop through separate governance processes, leading to duplicated tools, inconsistent workflows, and unclear ownership of exceptions and support.

Employee impact

Calle said misalignment first shows up in the employee experience, particularly when approvals stall or travellers need manual workarounds to submit requests and expenses. He linked these issues to productivity and engagement risks, especially when staff avoid travel because the process is too slow or unpredictable.

"The employee experience is where the consequences of misalignment are often first felt. Fragmented systems, slow approvals and manual workarounds leave employees navigating policies that make sense in theory yet fall apart in practice. Over time, this frustration turns into disengagement, reluctance to travel, and even avoidance. No one wants to spend hours fighting procedures that don't align across departments just to submit travel expenses or requests, and no leader should want their team forfeiting that time either," he said.

Operational issues also affect duty of care. Travel risk teams and HR need visibility into where staff are travelling and how plans change. That depends on systems that capture bookings and itineraries and share them across the organisation under clear access rules.

Cross-functional asset

SAP Concur said organisations should reframe travel as a cross-functional business asset rather than a back-office process. Under that model, ownership sits with multiple leaders and policies reflect broader outcomes, including staff experience, tax and expenses, access to reliable data, compliance reporting and sustainability metrics.

Calle said collaboration does not always require structural change, but it does require a different approach to decision-making. Leaders should involve relevant functions earlier, rather than seeking sign-off after systems and policies have already been chosen.

"Collaboration does not necessarily require a reorganisation; however, it does need leadership that takes a whole-of-business view of travel. This requires a willingness to involve the right voices early, rather than after decisions have been made. Helping employees understand this change is important. New systems and policies land better when people can see how they reduce friction in their own role, whether that is faster expense reimbursement, fewer approvals, or clearer guidance," he said.

Shared measures

SAP Concur also pointed to governance and measurement as practical barriers. When HR optimises for employee experience, IT for security and standardisation, and finance for spend control, teams can end up working against each other without a shared definition of success.

Calle said organisations should set shared guidelines for corporate travel that reflect each function's requirements, and track outcomes in ways that avoid forcing trade-offs between traveller experience and cost.

"Collaboration becomes practical rather than theoretical when teams are measured against the same outcomes. For example, employee experience and travel spend should be viewed together, not traded off in isolation. Duty of care is another area where alignment can deliver tangible benefits. When HR has real-time visibility into where employees are travelling, and IT provides the systems that support that visibility, organisations can respond faster should any disruption occur," he said.

System integration

SAP Concur said the third step is platform and process integration. Integrated tools can reduce the need for travellers to re-enter information across systems and strengthen the link between policy and approvals. They can also help organisations maintain consistent documentation across HR, IT and finance requirements.

It added that systems can be configured to store travel preferences so employees spend less time on repetitive entries. Integrated data can also improve policy updates and reporting, particularly when organisations need consistent records across expenses, bookings and compliance controls.

"When systems work together, it directly impacts productivity, job satisfaction, and the overall outcomes of corporate travel. Employees spend less time chasing approvals or reconciling expenses and more time focusing on the purpose of the trip," Calle said.

"The long-term value of collaboration extends beyond today's business travel experience. Integrated data supports better policy design, stronger compliance oversight and more informed investment decisions. Corporate travel programs sit at the heart of how organisations support their people. However, the benefit depends on collaboration, alignment and integration across departments, and ultimately on the employee experience of the program," he said.