BCD Travel is making a structured set of invoice data available to customers in an effort to streamline the spend management process, the travel management company announced on Thursday (9 February).
The data set, delivered by BCD’s Invoice API, combines trip information with the financial details of the ticket transaction, fare and tax breakdown, ticket status, and the status of each individual coupon within the ticket.
The TMC said it is leveraging Invoice API for its proprietary BCD Pay spend management platform and, by making it available to customers and partners, hopes to “drive automation and efficiencies through external travel and expense solutions”.
“We make this enriched data available to our customers and technology partners in near real-time through open APIs to solve a variety of use cases for travellers, travel managers and finance teams,” said Yannis Karmis, senior vice president of product planning and development at BCD Travel.
“Our invoice collection is an example of a targeted data set that, in this case, helps us collectively mitigate some of the challenges of T&E spend management for customers,” he said.
The first partner to develop against this advanced collection of invoice data is Mobilexpense, which will pre-populate expense reports with trip and invoice data.
“We believe that the connection between the Mobilexpense platform and BCD Travel’s invoice API will allow us to improve the traveller experience by automating their travel expense process, regardless of how the booking took place,” said Mobilexpense CEO Thibaud De Keyzer.
The Invoice API is available to customers and developer partners through the BCD Developer Hub.
The TMC said receipt images for BCD and non-BCD invoices will be added to the data collection “later this year”.