Center Unveils 'Insights for Travel,' Advancing Card-Centric Travel & Expense Innovation

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Oct 08, 2024, 09:00 ET

New Capabilities Provide Access to a Panoramic View of Travel Spending and Trends, Unlocking Unparalleled Visibility and Enhanced Control for Finance and Travel Managers

BELLEVUE, Wash., Oct. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Center, a software company modernizing expense management, today announced the launch of Insights for Travel – new comprehensive dashboards within Center's travel and expense (T&E) solution that provide a holistic view of travel spend and deliver actionable insights to support policy compliance and streamline budget management. This new addition builds on the success of Center's recent integration of travel management into its card-led solution, which has seen strong year-over-year adoption, including a 2x increase in T&E customers and 50% growth in the company's overall customer base.

In managed travel, off-platform bookings and project-based expenditures are historically challenging costs to control. A 2024 Deloitte travel study found that nearly half (44%) of employees surveyed are aware of corporate booking channels and still book through unmanaged channels. Center's Insights for Travel hub addresses these pain points by being the first solution to unify all real-time travel spend data, including both on- and off-platform bookings, to provide customers with a comprehensive view of travel expenditures. A set of strategic dashboards provide administrators with granular insights into departmental spending, booking behaviors, vendor negotiations, and policy adherence, and can be viewed by booking type – including airfare, hotel, and car (rental and rideshare). The module also gives a detailed breakdown of project-based spend by client, project, or job to simplify invoicing and budget tracking.

A complete picture of all spend, including a full view of travel spend, allows finance and travel managers to identify and address inefficiencies, adjust policies proactively, simplify invoicing and budget tracking, and negotiate better rates with vendors. Travel approvers can monitor and approve travel expenditures efficiently, with built-in compliance checks that ensure policies are being followed. Travelers also benefit from Center's new 'Insights for Travel' by leveraging the unified view of expenditures and trend analysis to gain a better understanding of their own spending habits with proactive policy violation alerts that help them improve compliance.

"Center's Insights for Travel has been invaluable for understanding our AMAROK employees' travel trends," said Becky Crow, Director of Accounting for AMAROK. "With clear data on average hotel and flight costs, top travelers, and vendor usage, the dashboard provides a quick overview, while the drill-down capabilities allow me to analyze department-level activity when I need to. This insight is crucial for evaluating our travel policies and identifying areas that may need attention or updating. It's truly amping up the way we approach travel management!"

"We know that corporate travel adds value from both a professional and personal perspective for many employees and teams, but it has been a challenging cost to control given preferences to book direct through unmanaged travel channels and the lack of clarity over business expense policies," said Naveen Singh, CEO and Co-founder of Center. "We developed Insights for Travel with this challenge in mind to support our customers' need for a unified view of all travel data, including off-platform bookings. By unlocking holistic visibility into all spend, we're enabling businesses to make more informed decisions, optimize travel spending, and ensure compliance with T&E policies."

In addition to the launch of Insights for Travel, Center has further streamlined and automated the expense process with Smart Receipts, IRS-compliant digital receipts that are automatically attached to expenses that have complete transaction data, saving users time by removing the need to manually attach every receipt.

About Center
Center is a software company modernizing corporate card, travel, and employee expense management with one integrated solution. Our corporate card and connected software gives businesses real-time visibility into all employee spending, automates manual accounting tasks, streamlines travel booking and expensing, and provides finance teams with the controls and data needed for optimal decision making. With a usage-based business model requiring no upfront investment, our card-first experience combines self-service configurability with first-class deployment to ensure customer success. Center is a privately held company headquartered in Bellevue, WA with team members nationwide. For more information, please visit getcenter.com.

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SOURCE Center