Moving staff travel off personal accounts
Reimbursement is a tax on everyone involved. There is a better structure.
In most Ghanaian organisations, staff travel is still handled the same way: the employee pays, keeps a receipt, submits a claim, and waits. It works, in the sense that people do eventually get their money. It is also expensive in ways that never appear on an invoice.
The hidden costs of reimbursement
A junior employee is effectively lending the company money. Finance processes claims individually. Somebody chases receipts. Approvals happen after the spend, when refusing is awkward and the money is already gone.
None of this is anybody's fault. It is the structure.
What a business account changes
Trips are raised against the company rather than a person. Departments, cost centres and projects can be attached, so spend is categorised as it happens rather than reconstructed at month end. Spend limits can be set per person. Approvals can be required before a trip rather than after it.
At the end of the period there is one invoice in cedis with a receipt behind every trip.
Approvals that happen at the right moment
The most useful change is not the invoice; it is that the control moves before the spend. A limit that stops an unusual trip being booked is worth more than a policy that flags it three weeks later.
Topsy also enforces a separation you would want in any finance system: the person who requested an adjustment cannot be the person who approves it. That is enforced in the system rather than left to convention.
Guests and clients
A business account can book for someone who has no Topsy account at all. A client leaving your office, a candidate coming to interview, a visitor going back to their hotel. The trip carries their name and number so the driver knows who they are collecting, and the cost sits on the company.
Whether it is worth it
If your organisation makes more than a handful of work trips a month, the reimbursement overhead alone usually justifies it. If you regularly move clients or visitors, the case is stronger, because the alternative is asking a guest to pay and claim.
Getting started
Corporate signup is an application rather than an instant switch, because the account is invoiced. Have the billing details and the person who will own the account ready.