As businesses tackle growing skills gaps in local markets, more companies are hiring across borders to fill critical roles. However, while this shift to global employment can open up exciting opportunities, it’s not without its challenges. One of the biggest is figuring out how to support employees who need to travel for work. That’s where a well-structured travel and expense policy comes in.
Whether it’s for client meetings, industry events or team meetups, a solid travel and expense policy keeps things organized, helps control costs and takes the stress out of travel for everyone involved. It’s not just about rules; it’s about creating a system that supports your global team and takes the guesswork out of travel.
In this article, we’ll explain why you need a global travel and expense framework and show you how to create your own policy using our template as a base.
Why you need a travel and expense policy
Managing travel and expenses for a global team can get tricky without clear guidelines. At Multiplier, we understand this better than most. As an EOR company with workers across the globe, we’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of managing travel and expenses for a distributed workforce. Over time, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, and we’ve put all that knowledge into a practical template that we’ll share with you in this post.
A solid travel and expense policy makes everything simpler for everyone. It streamlines processes, saves time, and keeps things fair and stress-free for everyone involved. With over 60% of travel and finance managers still relying on manual processes for expense reporting, and more than half of employees finding the process more stressful than doing taxes, having a clear policy is key to making the whole process smoother for everyone.
Don’t believe us? Here are some of the specific benefits of creating a global travel and expense policy.
Specific benefits
- Consistency across regions: A global travel and expense policy keeps guidelines for spending and reimbursements. It also clears up any confusion caused by different regional practices or expectations.
- Compliance with local regulations: Different regions often have unique tax laws and rules for business expenses. A clear travel and expense policy makes it easier to stay compliant by outlining what’s allowed in each location. This helps avoid fines, penalties, or other legal issues down the road.
- Cost control: A defined policy reduces the risk of overspending on travel. It includes spending limits, preferred vendors and negotiated corporate rates, helping to reduce costs. This is especially important as business travel expenses are predicted to soar in 2025, with global hotel average daily rates (ADRs) expected to jump up by a staggering 2.9%.
- Efficient approval processes: A travel and expense policy helps streamline the approval process. Instead of wasting time going back and forth for approvals, everything gets processed quickly and smoothly.
- Clear reimbursement guidelines: A solid travel and expense policy spells out exactly what’s covered and what’s not, so employees know what to expect. This helps speed up the reimbursement process and keeps things fair for everyone.
- Reduced employee stress: Filing expense reports shouldn’t cause stress. But when the rules aren’t clear, it can feel like a huge headache. A clear policy removes the guesswork, giving employees confidence and reducing stress.
- Improved data visibility: Over a quarter of companies don’t have real-time visibility into their spending, which can make managing costs a nightmare. A policy helps you track spending consistently, so you know exactly where the money is going.
- Transparency and accountability: When everyone follows the same policy, it’s easy to see who’s spending what and why. This kind of clarity builds trust in the team and helps employees make smart spending choices. It also gives managers more confidence when approving expenses.
Key components of an effective global business travel policy
Putting together a business travel and expense policy isn’t always easy, especially if you hire foreign workers. You’ve got to find the right balance between keeping things consistent and allowing for cultural and regional differences. On top of that, the policy has to be simple and clear enough for everyone to understand, especially if your team includes people with different levels of English. Not only that, but how you present and share the policy matters just as much as what’s in it. It needs to be easy to read, simple to access, and something your global team can rely on.
With this in mind, let’s dive into the key components of a travel and expense policy.
Scope
This introduction outlines who the travel and expense policy applies to, such as employees, contractors, or consultants, and the types of travel it covers. Keep the language straightforward and clear to avoid any confusion.
For example:
This policy applies to all employees and consultants traveling on behalf of the company. It covers all business trips including client meetings, conferences and internal events, whether within the country or abroad. Personal travel, like commuting or vacations, is not covered.
Process
This is where you explain how your request approval process works. This includes who needs to approve travel, how employees can submit a request, and any tools or forms they should use. Be clear about timelines and any specific requirements to avoid confusion.
For example:
To get your travel approved, submit a travel request through the company’s online portal at least two weeks before your planned trip. Your manager will review and approve it first, followed by the HR team for final approval. Make sure you include details like the purpose of the trip, estimated costs and travel dates. Requests submitted less than two weeks in advance may require additional approval from your department head.
Booking responsibilities
Usually, when an employee travels for work, they’ll either book the trip themselves or HR will take care of it. How it’s handled depends on the company’s policies, the type of trip, and the surrounding circumstances. For example, HR might step in to arrange travel for complicated international trips or important client meetings, while employees might book their own travel for simpler, local trips or events where the schedule is more flexible.
Make sure you clearly outline what happens in each scenario. A well-structured travel and expense policy should:
- Detail the protocol for situations where HR is responsible for booking travel on behalf of employees.
- Provide clear instructions and requirements for employees managing their own travel arrangements.
Expenses
This is where you explain the types of travel-related expenses that the company will cover. Make sure you list categories like flights, hotels, meals and other costs, and mention any limits or exceptions. For example, you could say the company covers economy flights, standard hotel rooms and a daily meal allowance, but doesn’t cover things like room upgrades or personal purchases unless approved ahead of time.
Daily allowances
If your company offers travel per diems or daily allowances, make sure you explain how they work. This includes how much employees receive and whether the amount changes based on where they are traveling or how long they will be away. For example, you might provide a set amount for meals and small expenses with a higher rate for international trips.
Expense reimbursement
Finally, it’s important to clearly explain how employees can submit claims and get reimbursed for their travel expenses. Make sure you include step-by-step instructions, explain what documentation employees need to submit, and define how long it typically takes to process reimbursements.
For example, you might ask employees to submit receipts and a completed expense form within two weeks of their trip and let them know they can expect reimbursement within 10 business days. Clear guidelines like this keep everyone on the same page.
Additional information
This is where you include any extra details, reminders or guidelines that don’t quite fit into the sections above but are still important for employees to know. This is your chance to address things like safety, professionalism and responsible spending in a friendly and supportive way.
For example:
- Your safety is our top priority. Please choose secure, reputable accommodation and travel options to ensure your wellbeing.
- Remember, you represent the company when you travel. Always act professionally and respectfully when interacting with others.
- Please try to spend wisely. Thoughtful spending helps us manage costs and also reflects positively on our culture, relationships and business.
Exception management and governance
The final section of your travel and expense policy is all about exceptions and how they’re handled. This is where you explain what happens if someone needs to bend the rules and who’s responsible for approving those exceptions. It’s important to be clear here to ensure consistency, prevent misunderstandings and provide a clear framework for addressing these situations.
For example:
We understand that sometimes exceptions to the travel and expense policy are unavoidable. If that happens, you will need to get approval from your manager and HR and include a note in your expense claim explaining the situation. For bigger exceptions, like going over budget limits, the finance team will need to review and approve before travel can be booked.
Tips to improve your policies
It’s one thing to include all the right information in a policy, but making sure everyone can access and truly understand it takes more effort. You can’t simply share a document and expect it to work. You need to think about how it’s presented, how it’s communicated and how easy it is for employees to understand.
We’ve experienced this firsthand with our own travel and expense policy. While it was detailed, it wasn’t serving us as well as it could. We were getting too many questions about things that should have been obvious. Employees struggled to find the policy, and when they did, the way it was written made it harder to follow than it should have been.
To address this, we made significant changes to our travel and expense policy. We focused on making it clearer, easier to access and more user-friendly. Along the way, we learned a lot about how to create a policy that people can actually understand and follow. Here are some of the tips we picked up to help you craft a policy that truly works.
Readability: Make it clear, keep it simple
Let’s be honest, if a policy is hard to read, no one is going to bother with it. That’s why we focused on making our travel and expense policy as clear and easy to follow as possible.
Here’s what worked for us:
- Stick to bullet points: Long paragraphs can be a turnoff. Bullet points keep things simple and help readers get straight to the information they need.
- Use visuals: Adding images, infographics and tables is a great way to break up text and make complex ideas easier to understand.
- Keep the tone casual: We moved away from overly formal language that made our policies feel rigid. A conversational tone makes things more approachable and easier to digest, especially for employees with varying levels of English.
- Guide the reader: We restructured the policy to start with the most important steps, like how to book travel, and saved the less critical details for later. This pyramid approach makes it easier to follow.
- Simplify long sections: For policies with a lot of detail, dropdown lists or collapsible sections can help. This keeps the focus on what’s relevant and stops readers from feeling overwhelmed.
- Make it fun: Emojis might not sound like a big deal, but they help break up text and add some personality. They also keep readers engaged, which is always a win.
All these improvements have made a big difference, but we’re always looking for ways to do better. Policies shouldn’t be static, so we’ll keep tweaking and updating ours to make sure it stays as user-friendly as possible.
Distribution: Easy to find, impossible to miss
Even the best policy is useless if no one can find it. Making our travel and expense policy easy to access was just as important as writing it well. Here are a few things we’re doing to improve how it’s distributed:
- Make it easy to find: We’re working on creating a central hub where all our policies are stored. Employees shouldn’t have to go hunting through emails or old files to find what they need.
- Offer different formats: Not everyone wants to read a PDF. By making the policy available as a web page, a searchable document or even a quick-reference guide, we’re meeting employees where they are.
- Spread the word: We’re making a point to promote the policy during company meetings, in internal newsletters and through chat channels. People need to know it’s there and why it matters.
We’re committed to making sure everyone has easy access to our policies. Whether it’s through a central hub or shouting about them more during company gatherings, we want employees to feel confident they can find and use the policy whenever they need it.
How to create your own global travel and expense policy
We decided to put our updated policy to the test by seeing how well it resonated with our team. Half of our volunteers reviewed the old policy, while the other half read the new one. After ten minutes, they answered ten questions about the content and one about how easy the policy was to understand. The results? Information retention increased by 40%, and the new policy was rated 16% easier to understand.
Let’s face it, policies aren’t anyone’s favorite reading material, so we’re thrilled with this improvement in readability. But the real win is the boost in retention. When more people understand and remember the policy, HR gets fewer questions, and business travelers feel more confident.
So, what’s the secret? How can you create a global travel and expense policy that is clear, concise and easy to use? Start by building a strong foundation with key sections like booking processes and expense guidelines. Then make it accessible and practical by applying the tips we’ve shared.
To make things even easier for you, we’ve created a free, customizable global travel and expense policy template. We designed it based on the lessons we learned while improving our own policy. This template is perfect for global teams because it addresses the unique challenges of coordinating travel across various locations and time zones.
It covers everything you need, from a pre-built email for flight bookings to detailed expense guidelines and a per diem table that adjusts to local living costs. Our template will help you create a clear, practical travel and expense policy that supports your global team. That way, you can keep everyone on the same page no matter where they are.
Check out our templates for virtual meeting etiquette and asynchronous communication too. And don’t miss our global workforce playbook to better understand the global workforce management insights that informed our policy templates.