Home » B2B » What Is A Business Trip Report And How To Prepare One?
Business trip report is a post-trip activity essential to know the outcome of the business trip vis-à-vis its objectives. Employees can use the trip report to highlight their achievements and enhance their reputation in the eyes of the management. Additionally, the report will help the management to analyze the outcome of the business trip. Let us discuss the tips for writing a business trip report.
A business trip report, or a business travel report, summarizes the business trip to justify travel expenses. It reviews activities to fulfill pre-defined business objectives, such as finalizing a business deal, providing technical service to a customer, or representing the organization at a trade fair.
Business travel reporting activity helps understand to what extent the employee met the trip objectives. It enables travel managers to change policies and improve the efficiency of the future business trips.
A corporate trip report is necessary to justify the cost of business travel. It is a critical summary to enable reporting, auditing, and business travel budgeting. Business trip reporting helps travel managers monitor, track, and control travel costs. They can leverage the knowledge to enhance the effectiveness of future business trips.
An ideal trip report provides a detailed review of the particular business travel report and is a vital instrument for understanding the justification of the trip expenses. The business trip report comprises many details, such as graphs, tables, photographs, and other documents supporting the claim by justifying the travel expenditure.
Preparations for writing a comprehensive business trip report begin before proceeding on a business trip. You should note down the core corporate of the business trip you expect to meet. The entire trip itinerary will focus on accomplishing this goal. The measure of the trip’s success will depend upon the details and supportive documents you provide while submitting the trip report. Continue noting down all details about your achievements as your business trip progresses. Collecting bills or receipts is an essential prerequisite to facilitate expense reporting. Platforms like Paxes can help you with planning, booking, and producing the necessary travel data and invoices needed to back your report. Remember to get snaps and video clips of important events besides documentary evidence of your achievements, like feedback forms to justify your accomplishments.
The heading section should provide a quick introduction to the trip report with the total cost of the business trip. Mention the core purpose in the first section of a business trip report. Include the cities and places you covered with dates. Write down the names of colleagues if they accompanied you on the trip. List the names of prospects, customers, and business associates you met on the business trip.
A general overview of the business trip is an essential feature of the introduction. Let the introduction outline the goal and the results of the business trip. Mention the places you covered and the people you met with the outcome. One should briefly describe the activities such as attending the exhibition stall, highlighting product benefits, meeting prospects, or attending seminars. Focus on how you accomplished the trip’s aim without providing data or supportive documents.
The main section of the business report is the body. You should provide details of the activities that helped you meet your business objectives. By providing reasons, you should also reveal the goals you missed to achieve. One should add any other achievements, not part of the trip’s original objectives, in the body. You should explain how the achievement can benefit the organization.
The summary justifies the consumption of resources to cover the trip. Share your observations by mentioning how the business trip can help the organization win more customers, increase sales revenues, or improve the company’s brand awareness. The summary should focus on the expected rise in the business to help travel managers know the ROI from the business trip. The report should include attachments like data, snaps, and customer feedback reports that will help support your accomplishments.
Here is a simple template for you to get started with your business trip report:
Trip itinerary: Insert summary of trip itinerary
Purpose of trip: Define the purpose of the trip with a clear objective
Activities and meetings conducted: Write about the activities and meetings conducted
Site visits and events attended: Write details of site visits and events attended
Key accomplishments: Summary of key achievements during trip
Business opportunities: New opportunities found during the trip
Logistics issues: Were there any issues with the transportation
Communication issues: Any language barrier encountered
Other issues: Other issues occurred during the trip
Travel and accommodation expenses: Enter airfare, transfers, mileage, hotel rooms charges
Meal and other expenses: Meal expenses, stationary costs and others
Improvements: Tips on how to get better results
[End of Business Trip Report Template]
Organizations use the business trip report to know the return on travel costs. Business travel reporting is the art of presenting your achievements systematically. Providing details and supporting these with data or documents is the key to writing a perfect business report. The business report should be crisp and clear, presenting the trip’s purpose, activities, learnings, and recommendations.
Travel and expense management platforms such as Paxes offer easy and quick booking of flights and hotels. Additionally, the expenditure data provided in these platforms can help one in preparing a comprehensive business trip report.
Employees submit a corporate trip report to line managers, or corporate travel managers, depending upon the corporate policy.
The business trip report should not include personal experiences, like visiting a tourist spot, having dinner with colleagues, or detailed notes. Avoid lengthy descriptions of the event or venue.
The ideal format is the headline, introduction, body, and summary. However, some organizations expect employees to write a corporate trip report in a particular fashion.
Many organizations mandate attaching expense reports to the business trip report. In such cases, one can add receipts and bills to the expense report.
A corporate trip report aims to explain how the investment in the business trip will benefit the organization.
A business trip report should consist of trip details, itinerary, expenses, results, challenges, and recommendations.
A document detailing the various aspects of a business trip for analysis and betterment of next trips is called business trip report.
Sales trips, brand awareness trips, VIP trips are some of the examples of business trips.
A business trip report is used to highlight the key findings of the trip and analyze the same to better the following trips.
