Travel Management (FI-TV) 
Purpose
SAP Travel Management supports all processes involved in handling business trips. Its comprehensive functionality is integrated with settlement, taxation, and payment processes. Travel Management enables you to request, plan, and book trips, create travel expense reports, and transfer expense data to other functional areas.
Notes on Implementation
To ensure optimum use of SAP Travel Management, you should analyze the travel processes in the company. What is the approval workflow for business trips? Which trip rules have to be considered for which employee groups? Will it be necessary to first define trip rules? Are there any agreements with external travel service providers that need to be taken into consideration? How is the reimbursement process implemented, and which organizational units are involved?
Based on an analysis, you must systematically determine which business tasks you can conduct using SAP Travel Management that will increase efficiency and which subcomponents you will need to achieve this.
Subcomponents of SAP Travel Management
The following three areas of SAP Travel Management can be combined in different ways to reflect individual requirements and the organizational structure of the company:
● Travel Requests
● Travel Planning
● Travel Expenses
Possible Combinations of the SAP Travel Management Subcomponents
|
Travel Requests |
Travel Planning |
Travel Expenses |
1 |
X |
X |
X |
2 |
X |
|
X |
3 |
|
X |
X |
4 |
|
|
X |
Travel Expenses is the anchor component. This component can be used independently of Travel Requests and Travel Planning.
Cross-Release Use
You can use the current release of SAP Travel Management independently of the rest of the SAP application environment. SAP ALE technology (Application Link Enabling) provides the necessary communication links to SAP applications from earlier releases. You therefore only need to maintain the data once.
For more
information, see 
Transfer Travel
Expenses to Accounting.
Task-Related Processing
To support task-oriented use of the system, since Release 4.6 you can assign users different predefined or individually adjustable roles or activity groups. The users can then only access those functions in SAP Travel Management that are relevant to their business tasks.
Integration
Due to the integration with Payroll and Financial Accounting, the data from Travel Planning and Travel Expenses can be transferred to these components for precise objects as it occurs.
Another advantage of SAP Travel Management is the integration of the three subcomponents Travel Requests, Travel Planning, and Travel Expenses. Thus, for example, all three objects use the same HR master data.
Travel Planning is connected to one or more external reservation systems (GDS) that enable you to book travel services online.
Features
The following diagram illustrates the integrated functions of Travel Planning and Travel Expenses:
With the SAP Travel Management application component, you can perform all business travel processes from Travel Request and Travel Planning to Travel Expenses and the transfer of travel expenses to other business function areas efficiently and reliably.
Travel Requests
● Input of general trip data, required travel services and cost estimates
● Transfer to manager for approval
Travel Planning
● Access provider-independent information and booking services for flights, hotels, car rental, and rail
● Application of travel policies for queries and bookings
● Custom hotel catalog
● Consideration of agreements made with travel service providers
● Consideration of travelers' personal preferences
Travel Expenses
● Input of trip facts (central/decentralized)
● Settlement and booking of trips
● Payment of travel expenses via Financial Accounting (FI), Payroll (HR) or via data medium exchange with banks (DME)
● Optical archiving of receipts
● Full integration in Financial Accounting (FI), Payroll (HR) and Controlling (CO)
● Credit card clearing
Information Systems
● Reports for trips taken to analyze the trip behavior of the employees or to aid negotiations with travel service providers
● Analyses of travel expenses for cost control and transparency
Request and Approval
● Requesting business trips
● Approving business trips with or without SAP Business Workflow
International Use
The standard version of SAP Travel Management can be configured to meet country-specific requirements. You can also use special country versions that are preconfigured with the applicable statutory and tax regulations.
For more information, see Country and Industry Versions of Travel Expenses.
ESS
As part of SAP Employee Self Services (ESS), Travel Expenses supports decentralized processing of travel expenses from planning to expense reporting. Employees can enter their travel and expense data themselves without having to leave their workplace, and can also make their entries via the Internet or their company intranet.
For more information, see ESS in Travel Management.
See also: