Endless receipts, shuttle buses… and other business travel bugbears

• • Travelling for business • 1

Light switches in the wrong place? Hotels miles away from meetings? Flights at unsociable hours? When you’re on the road, negotiating a packed schedule of meetings, these are the sort of bugbears that can make life unnecessarily difficult for employees. So how do you make sure your staff have the best experience when they travel for work? To help, we spoke to a range of business travellers to uncover the biggest gripes, so you can take some of the hassle out of your staff’s travel. A lack of space Who wouldn’t love a little more legroom on flights? A cramped […]

The dark side of business travel: tips to avoid getting lonely

• • Travelling for business • 2

A meeting in New York, back home for a few days and then off to Shanghai followed by Tokyo to meet more clients. It’s the sort of schedule that sounds glamorous and important, right? But there’s a ‘dark side’ to business travel. A study by the University of Surrey and Lund University in Sweden say factors such as stress, loneliness and distance from community and family networks are often ignored and they can cause big issues. It’s easy to see how frequent business flyers could become lonely, travelling to countries where they may not speak the language and spending long […]

girl lost

How to manage international commuter travellers

• • Travelling for business • 2

Do your employees fancy living in one country and working in another? It might be that they work for you in the UK, but are desperate to live the good life in France. Or maybe you’ve given them an international assignment but it’s not practical for them to drag their family along. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, changing views on work/life balance and more flexible working practices, international commuting is now a reality for in-demand workers including experienced executives and particularly highly-skilled individuals. Lee Hamilton, partner at accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, says international commuters are a small but […]

Multi card top-up on the FairFX Expense Platform

• • Travelling for business • 1

We’ve just made it even quicker and easier to give your team the funds they need when they need it. There’s no need to top-up your employees’ cards one-by-one, our new multi card top-up feature allows you to top-up multiple cards at the same time. A quick and easy way to get funds to your team instantly. Perfect if you have a whole team heading away on a business trip, or if you’ve fallen behind on providing funds for regularly occuring expenses. How multi card top-ups work 1. Once you’re logged into the FairFX Expense Platform click ‘Multi card top-up’ […]

cinema ticket

Unusual expenses requests and how to deal with them

• • Travelling for business • 1

Birthday drinks at a nightclub, vet fees for a poorly rabbit and ‘a three-piece suite for my partner to sit on when I’m doing my accounts’. Those were among unusual expenses claims that HMRC revealed earlier this year. All were rejected. We wanted to know about more unusual and extravagant requests that employees put on expenses – and wanted to share some insight on how best to deal with them. What becomes clear in the examples we uncovered, revealed below, is the need to find a balance between allowing staff freedom, while ensuring they are aware of a clear and […]

receipt on desktop

New ways to track staff expenses

• • Travelling for business • 3

Say hello to our latest FairFX Expense Platform features – specially developed to help you keep track of staff expenses and cut down on reporting time. Our brand new features allow you to: Upload photos of receipts Start annotating card transactions on the mobile app Add VAT amounts to transactions To start using the new features straight away check out our guide. Read more about how these features can help you below: Uploading receipts If you need to keep a more detailed record of staff spending by keeping copies of receipts, you can now do it directly on the FairFX […]

corporate payment

How British businesses are wasting millions without knowing it

• • Travelling for business • 1

Are you the type of business traveller that browses for a good deal before booking a hotel room? Or maybe you even try to use public transport over taxis, where possible? That’s great, but all of that hard work can go to waste if you end up falling for a simple trap that could mean you inadvertently put your business out of pocket. It’s called DCC and its collectively – and unnecessarily – costing companies £99m. The DCC trap DCC, or Dynamic Currency Conversion, is offered by restaurants, hotels, meeting places and via ATMs overseas, giving those picking up the […]

gb and eu flags

Brexit deal or no deal: how can SMEs prepare?

• • Travelling for business • 1

With the government‘s long-awaited White Paper now published (a 98-pager which sets out the sort of relationship the UK wants with the EU after Brexit) and debate on the Chequers deal in full swing, many businesses are trying to plan a course for what might lie ahead come 29 March 2019. Preparing for the unknown Less than a third of UK business leaders have carried out contingency planning on Brexit, according to a survey this summer by the IoD. EU & Trade Analyst at the Institute of Directors (IoD), Claudia Catelin, said that of those IoD members that were contingency […]

cash in hand

The airport currency rip-off every business needs to know about

• • Travelling for business • 1

Businesses are always looking for ways to cut costs. Well, here’s an easy one – stop your business travellers from ever exchanging currency at airports. Planning your currency is an important part of travelling for work and business travellers who don’t plan ahead could end up getting ripped-off before they’ve even stepped on the plane. An investigation into exchange rates on offer at UK airports in July showed business travellers leaving their currency exchange until the last minute, and relying on airport exchange desks, could lose over £100 worth of Euros for every £500 exchanged. Some airport currency exchange desks […]

woman in airport lounge

Don’t let jet lag ruin your business trip: tips from experienced travellers

• • Travelling for business • 2

Investor and entrepreneur Matt Haycox learnt the hard way about the ill-effects of jet lag when travelling for work. He says: “In the early days, jet lag would kill me, and I wasn’t giving my businesses the best version of me, but instead a tired and underwhelming shadow of myself. This often resulted in poor decision making and communication.” He is by no means alone. A study by Kayak and Airbus found that jet lag costs UK businesses £241 million a year through mistakes made by jet-lagged staff. According to its findings, jet lag affects travellers for an average of […]

currency eyes

How to keep your business safe from banking fraud

• • Travelling for business • 1

You work in a busy finance department of a fast-growing company. You receive an email from your CEO, asking you to make a large payment from the business bank account – and to do it ASAP. It’s for an important, time-sensitive deal. You quickly scan the message, one of many filling up your inbox. Perhaps you don’t notice that the email address isn’t quite right. The chief is getting impatient and sends you a chasing email soon after, piling on the pressure. It’s urgent – have you made the payment yet? You don’t have time to really think through the […]

skyline of new york business district

International currency transactions: your questions answered

• • Travelling for business • 1

Businesses venturing into overseas markets need to understand how best to make and receive payments in different currencies. Below we answer some of the most common questions being asked about international currency transactions. How do multi-currency business accounts work? Businesses that trade across borders normally need to hold accounts in more than one currency, or face the costly process of constantly converting money to and from Sterling. Multi-currency accounts are intended to simplify this, by enabling businesses to manage all their day-to-day business banking and international money transfers in one place. They make it easier for businesses to be paid […]