Corporate travel payments just got a whole lot easier for road warriors and finance teams thanks to TripActions

This story is part of a sponsorship paid for by TripActions — one way that TPG continues to provide our readers with free news and advice about travel.

Sick of floating work travel via your personal bank account? TripActions, a corporate travel-management platform, just launched a new travel payments solution, TripActions Liquid, that just may be the answer to employee frustrations with paying for work travel. And it looks to relieve a lot of the headaches for their companies, as well. In the same way that TripActions reinvented corporate travel management, they’re at it again revolutionizing the next biggest pain point in business travel: payments.

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Launched this week, TripActions Liquid enables finance teams to get better visibility and control into work travel spend by their employees while dramatically minimizing time wasted on back-end reconciliation of that spend.

So how does it work? TripActions Liquid is a modern corporate travel-payments solution that allows employees and employers to manage business-travel payments in real time. It includes a virtual corporate card that employees can use inside the TripActions corporate travel-management platform to book flights, hotels, trains and rental cars. It also includes a physical corporate card that employees can use for flight ancillaries (think checked bags, Wi-Fi, inflight food, etc.), ride shares, meals, and other spend while on a work trip.

Finance teams love it because they can set the cards to work only when employees are booking trips and when they are actually traveling for work. That’s all thanks to the seamless integration with the TripActions booking platform. As a result, TripActions Liquid knows when employees are traveling and can be set to automatically light up on the dates of work travel. Plus, finance can set the cards to only work for certain travel-related purchases so employees can’t use the card, for example, at a liquor store.

Finance teams can see and approve the spending in real time, helping to eliminate traveler angst and frustration about whether something is in or out of policy. And the approval process is driven by company policy and AI (artificial intelligence) in partnership with AppZen to ease the burden on finance teams while giving them greater control. Plus organizations get a competitive rebate on spend using TripActions Liquid.

TripActions is already receiving praise from large public and private companies using the revolutionary new travel payments solution, including Zoom, Lyft, letgo and Toast.

“Everyone who touches accounting knows that travel payment reconciliation is an issue, but it was always one of those ‘necessary evils’ you had to deal with,” said Vik Shah, corporate controller at Zoom, a TripActions customer. “I wasn’t surprised when TripActions came to me with a solution. What impressed me though, was how effective it is. TripActions Liquid is a major time saver -- we’ve been able to reduce travel payment reconciliation time from weeks to minutes each month."

Here at The Points Guy, we’re fans of anything that makes the traveler experience better. If your company is already using TripActions, ask your CFO about TripActions Liquid. If your company isn’t using TripActions yet, ask your CFO about it and TripActions Liquid.