Home / Travel Expense Reporting in Austria

Travel Expense Reporting in Austria

Last updated: June 7, 2023

Product updates

Melanie Gabriel

Co-founder, Yokoy

Lump sums, mileage allowances and collective agreements: Austria does not make travel expense reporting easy. Luckily, Yokoy has developed an automated solution for this complex work. With Yokoy Trips, expense reporting for business travel becomes playfully simple.

Daily allowances in Austria

Austria is one of the countries with the most difficult expense reporting for a business trip. Travel expenses usually include:

Travel expenses
Additional costs for meals and overnight stays
Additional expenses

Daily allowances can be claimed for additional meal expenses if the business trip is at least three hours long and the destination of the trip is more than 25 km away. This amounts to a maximum daily allowance of 26.40 Euros per day. However, if the meals are taken care of (by a customer, the employer, etc.), the respective daily allowance will be adjusted.

As for the details of the expense regulations, agreements from various collective agreements or company agreements apply. This leads to a complex accounting process, as several sets of rules and various lump sums regulations may have to be consulted in order to correctly pay the expenses of a business trip.

The expense process is therefore complex in all areas: The input, the approval, the accounting, the payment and the policy review.

With this challenge in mind when we expanded into the Austrian market, we made it our goal to eliminate this problem. Our Managing Director in Vienna, Stephan Hebenstreit, travelled very often and had to sacrifice up to 4 hours a week to book all his receipts correctly. He is delighted that he is now able to provide a solution to customers in Austria:

“Yokoy Trips is an absolute game changer. Travel expense reporting is incredibly complex and time-consuming, both for the people incurring the expenses and for the HR or finance teams. But with the Yokoy Trips, it suddenly becomes simple and fun. We map collective bargaining agreements and company agreements, allowing us to automatically calculate lump sums and mileage allowances. The travel feature has wowed everyone so far and provides end-to-end automation of the entire expense process!”

So how exactly does Yokoy Trips work?

Yokoy Trips works on the basis of a “visual container.” Employees can create their trip with just a few clicks. By simply entering the departure and arrival locations as well as time, Yokoy Trips can then automatically handle mileage calculations using the mileage rates stored.

During the trip, the person incurring the expense fills this “container” with their expenses. They can photograph the receipts and upload them directly into the created trip.

The receipts can of course also be added before or after the trip when it’s in draft mode. The deposit of the applicable collective agreements and company agreements guarantees that the correct amounts are accounted for.

After the business trip, the expense originators submit their entire trip, including all receipts and reductions. In the event of ambiguities, error reports or questions about the submitted expenses, supervisors can return the receipts or an entire trip to the submitters.

In turn, submitters can comment on their receipts or respond to questions. This results in an entire documentation of the trip in the app.

Better overview, less fraud

This documentation and the simple interface ensure that no more receipts are lost or double-posted. This gives the company a better overview of anomalies and allows them to see how the rules and regulations are being adhered to. With Yokoy Trips, unnecessary expenses can be reduced to a minimum.

An example that can illustrate this is the “marking”: In the case of lump sums, internal employees can be marked, e.g. in the case of receipts for meals. This makes it easy for supervisors to check whether the reduction in daily rates has been accurately marked.

The Trips feature is a must-have for us and we are happy to offer a simple solution to a complex problem. The intuitive operation, effort reduction and better compliance make Yokoy Trips a great success. For air travel, we also offer integrations with various travel tools. This way, all booked travel data is automatically imported into Yokoy.

Current billing processes are very time-consuming for all parties involved. Yokoy Trips saves not only a lot of work and repetitive tasks for the expense submitters and managers, but also for the finance and HR team.

In a matter of seconds, trips can be created, receipts can be added without manual effort, and everything can be submitted digitally directly to the finance and HR team. Now that is a seamless digital process that we all love.

See the feature live with a free demo.