Surveys show nearly two-thirds of travel managers are loosening the reins and allowing their employees to make their own travel bookings. Empowering staff to manage their travel means companies now face a separate administrative challenge – the reconciliation and reimbursement of each individual’s travel expenses. A company’s expense claim process can be a burden, threatening productivity owing to hours wasted making claims. Businesses are looking for an appropriate solution that allows them to embrace the concept of booking freedom – all the while ensuring expenses are managed effectively – and this is perhaps why an ever-increasing number of businesses are opting for pre-paid corporate expense solutions. Pre-paid cards mean employees will never be out of pocket and, more importantly, won’t be wasting valuable time logging expense claims. This solution works well the majority of time, allowing for total visibility over expenditure, with the ability to view employee transactions in real-time, allocate funds by department and individual employees. Managers can also pull unused funds back off the cards into the controlling account. The ability to create a hierarchy of accounts to manage cards allows organisations to segment card users by division, region, etc, but also enables the management of these tiered accounts to be delegated, providing a simple departmental budgeting, reporting and administration solution. Global pre-paid card transaction volumes have grown by more than 20 per cent during the past four years. A review of travel and expense management solutions could provide a simple, low-cost but highly effective way of loosening the reins while still retaining an element of control.