A business travel request form does one thing that a message saying 'can I go to Denver' cannot: it carries a figure. The fare quoted, the nights at the hotel rate, the ground transport, the days at the company's allowance, added up per traveler, with the approver's name and the date once it is signed. Travel request forms that carry those fields are the whole of a travel approval system for a company of two to a hundred travelers; the software is only the place the forms are kept. This page sets out the fields, the route a travel request takes, and where the free form on this site fits.
The ten fields, and why the total is one of them
Traveler, purpose, dates, destination, fare, lodging, ground transport, allowance, total and approver. The total is a field rather than something the approver works out because the request is approved as a figure, not as a description; the free travel request form on this site computes it from the other fields per traveler and shows the lodging and allowance lines separately, because different clauses of the policy cap them. The worked example comes to $1,044 for one traveler, two nights and three days.
The route: request, policy, approver, bookings
A travel request goes from the traveler to the policy first: is the fare under the cap, the rate under the nightly cap, the total under the threshold. Under the threshold the manager approves; over it a named approver signs. The approval releases the bookings the form lists (fare, hotel, ground) and nothing is booked before the yes. Perdiemo Pro keeps the approved request as the first entry on the trip with the approver's name and the date, so a request approved after booking is visible as one.
A travel approval system without buying one
A travel approval system is the route above, kept. A small company can run it on the free form printed and signed, on a shared folder, or in Pro, where the request, the approval date, the bookings and the policy version are one record. What makes it a system is that every trip goes through it, not the software; what the software adds is that the office can find last quarter's approval in seconds and see the estimate beside what was actually booked.
What the form should not ask for
Receipts, because the request is before the trip; a personal card number, because the company does not want to hold it; the traveler's reasons in paragraphs, because the purpose is one line and the figure is the argument. Travel request forms that grow into expense forms stop being filled in. The claim after the trip is a different document and, in this estate, a different product.
Questions people ask about business travel request form
What should a business travel request form include?
Traveler, purpose, dates, destination, fare, lodging, ground transport, allowance, total and approver. The free form computes the total from the figures per traveler.
Who approves a travel request?
The traveler's manager under the policy's threshold and a named senior approver above it. The travel policy worksheet sets the threshold and shows the headroom to a typical two-night trip.
Do we need a travel approval system as software?
No; you need every trip to go through the route. Software is where the approved requests are kept so the office can find them, which is what Perdiemo Pro does.