For finance in organisations that run their own aircraft, vessels and camps
No claim number, no payment.
UnityTrip puts every dollar of travel spend through one gate: no provider is paid without an approved claim number, and no traveller moves without a booking number. For an organisation that runs its own aircraft, vessels and camps, that closes the two leaks a spend report cannot see: travel booked by phone and email that never triggered approval, and seats on transport the organisation already pays for, valued at zero because they have no fare.
What reaches the ledger is the booking's cost allocation: approved against the balance the ERP sent that day, carried on the claim number, and posted per journey, per leg and per cost centre, including partner and joint-venture shares. Private journeys carry no claim, because no company money moves: the traveller pays through the card gateway, and a cancellation is a refund against the gateway, not a posting.
- Nothing bypasses approval. Budget is checked at booking against the real allocation, under delegation of financial authority. A journey with no claim number does not get paid.
- The fareless seat gets a number. The cost of the lease does not change; what it buys does. Utilisation from a 40% industry average to 90% on the same fixed cost is the figure finance can report. Basis at benchmarks.
- Nothing waits for month-end. Cost-centre balances synchronise every day, postings for approved claims go back the same way, and the ledger stays the ledger.
What finance can require
- One number for every dollar. Business travel posts on a claim number. Private travel pays through the gateway and never posts. Two columns, nothing in between.
- Approval before spend, not after. Every posting carries the four fields the ledger needs, reason, fund, cost centre or WBS, and GL code, because the claim carried them before the seat was sold.
- A refund ledger that reconciles. When staff pay by card for seats on company aircraft, the organisation is the airline and holds a real liability. The value line is frozen per passenger per segment at booking, so every refund is arithmetic on a known figure, reconciled to the gateway, and a person settles the cases the rule cannot before anything is automated.
Put together, that is a control: every movement through one booking number, every dollar through one claim number or gateway reference, and a ledger of record that stays the master. A finance team without it is approving the travel the booking tool can see and paying for the rest after the fact.
What finance can ask operations for
One question: which journeys last month had no booking number, and which payments had no claim number? If the answer is a list, that list is the unmanaged spend. If nobody can produce the list, that is the first finding.
What it needs from you
Read access, and nothing else, for the review: the movement and claim records, the payment gateway and the postings. The review reconciles what the systems believe to what the gateway and the ledger actually did, and returns the ten largest recoverable opportunities ranked by money, with the rows that prove each one. The findings are yours whether or not you proceed.
Where the ERP is SAP, the connection is in production: staff profiles, budgets and balances in over RFC each day, postings for approved claims back through middleware. SAP stays the master ledger. Where there is no ledger of record, UnityTrip holds the authoritative books.
Common Questions
What does "no claim number, no payment" mean in practice?
For business bookings, no payment executes to a provider without an approved claim number. The claim is the approval: many bookings can attach to one, and its revisions track the journey rather than a single moment. Private travel is paid by the traveller through the card gateway and never posts. The two chokepoints are set out on the category page.
Where does the spend report go wrong on company aircraft?
In two places. It values a seat with no fare at zero, so the largest travel cost the organisation carries appears in no report until service fails. And it never sees the bookings made by phone and email or the charters arranged by an operations desk, which surface in the accounts after the money is spent, if at all. The unmanaged-spend review measures the fraction that bypasses approval and where it enters.
Does SAP stay the master ledger?
Yes. Where the organisation runs a ledger of record such as SAP, it stays the master ledger and UnityTrip keeps the shadow books: balances taken from SAP daily, checked against, and postings returned daily, with budgets attached to funds, cost centres and WBS, or both. Where there is no ERP, UnityTrip holds the budgets itself. Where budgets attach, and the four questions that show which, are in UnityTrip and SAP: a single source of truth.
What does finance give up to get the ranked ten?
Nothing that changes. The review works from read access and extracts you approve under a confidentiality agreement; no user is retrained and no process is touched. What comes back is a ranked list of ten findings with the evidence behind each, and the decision to treat any of them is yours.
How much of your travel spend passed through an approved claim number last month?
If the answer is a fraction, the rest is where the review starts. Tell us which systems hold the record, and we will tell you what the reconciliation would look like.