Consulting, law, accounting, architecture and engineering

Client travel, coded to the engagement

In a firm that bills its time, a flight is rarely just a cost: it belongs to a client, a matter or an engagement, and often it goes back to that client on an invoice. Clients have started asking a second question as well: how much carbon did your work for us put in the air?

TripDesk365 records every trip against the code your billing system already uses, and answers both questions from the same records.

The matter or engagement code on every trip

Your travel manager defines what a booking must carry, in your firm's own words. A consulting firm might ask for an engagement code and a billable flag; a law firm for a client-matter number; an engineering practice for a project number and a phase.

Text or a list. A free-text code for firms with thousands of matters, or a list to pick from where there are a few dozen active projects.
Billable or not, as a yes-or-no field, so pitch travel and internal training stay out of the rebill.
Required where it matters. A missing code is flagged on the booking itself, rather than discovered by the billing team a month later.
Correctable after the trip. When an engagement is renumbered or a trip turns out to serve two clients, the value is changed on the booking and the next export carries it.

Firms with offices or practice groups that report separately can also set up cost centres, so a trip carries both whose budget paid and which client it served.

Rebilling a client: what the export gives you

The flight-by-flight export is built for the person who prepares the rebill. Filter the register by departure dates, download, and you have one row per flight with:

our booking reference, the PNR and the status;
the client, the lead traveller and how many people travelled;
the flight, the airline operating it, the airports, local departure and arrival times, and the cabin;
the cost centre and a column for every booking field, matter code and billable flag included.

Sort it by matter and the trips for each client are together. Every export needs its own permission and a stated reason, and is logged with its row count before any data leaves, which is the answer when a client asks how its people's travel details are handled.

Amounts need a recorded price. TripDesk365 does not price airline fares itself today, and a booking imported from your agency's confirmation or an airline email arrives without a price. Once the agency records what the trip was sold for, the booking-by-booking export carries it in its Total column. Until then, match the export to your agency invoice or card statement on the PNR or booking reference.

A rebill checklist

Check the engagement letter: which travel is rebillable, at cost or with a fee, and in which cabin.
Filter the export to the billing period, by the date the trip departed, not the date it was booked.
Remove rows marked not billable, and any trip cancelled before travel.
Match each remaining row to its amount on the agency invoice or card statement by PNR or reference.
Split a trip that served two clients the way the engagement letters say, and note the split.
Keep the export with the invoice, so a query months later can be answered row by row.

When a client asks for your travel emissions

Companies reporting their own value-chain emissions count their suppliers' business travel among them (the GHG Protocol's Scope 3 category 6 is business travel), and more of them now ask their advisers for a figure. The usual question is narrow: the flights your people took for us last year, and their emissions.

Set the emissions report to your matter or client field and TripDesk365 gives one row per value for the period you choose, up to 400 days: trips, traveller trips, distance, and kilograms of CO₂e, both with and without the non-CO₂ effects of flying at altitude. Every flight is measured at its own cabin, then multiplied by the travellers on the booking.

What to send with the number, so the client can use it:

The period, and that trips count by the local day their first flight departed.
The method: great-circle distance times the UK government's 2025 conversion factors (DESNZ) for the flight's haul and cabin. The CSV states it in its first line.
Which figure you are giving, with or without the non-CO₂ effects, and that the other is available.
How many trips could not be measured. TripDesk365 counts them separately rather than adding them as zero.
That it is an estimate from published average factors, not a measurement of the aircraft flown.

Trips with no client or matter filled in appear as their own row, so the totals for each client add up to the firm's total. Try the method on one trip with our flight emissions calculator.

Where is everyone this week?

Consultants live at client sites, and partners want to know who is where without opening another system.

In Slack, /tripdesk traveler and a name finds the person, with how many trips they have coming up and a link to their record; /tripdesk find looks up a booking by reference, PNR or surname; and /tripdesk recent lists the latest bookings. Answers are visible only to the person who asked, and each person sees only what their own TripDesk365 login may see.
By email, a Monday digest of the week's departures and any open disruptions, without names.
In the console, a calendar of every departure in the month and a directory of travellers with their next trip.

The consultant gets an itinerary by email, a calendar file, and a private trip link with local times at every airport, which they can forward to the client contact meeting them without exposing the record locator or ticket numbers.

Into your time and billing systems

Firms run on their practice management or ERP system, not on a travel tool. TripDesk365 has a read-only API that returns the booking register, with each booking's cost centre and booking fields, to the systems you already have, under keys that are scoped, expire and can be revoked; traveller names come back only to a key given that scope. Signed webhooks tell your systems when a flight is disrupted, a traveller asks for different dates or an itinerary is sent, and the events carry no traveller names and no prices. See integrations.

There are no live connectors to particular billing or expense products: your systems team or theirs reads the API. Your agency can also export your invoices and credit notes as a vendor-bill file shaped for NetSuite's import, in your own vocabulary: your accounts, your columns, and a different account for a cost centre that needs one.

Plainly

What TripDesk365 does not do for firms

It is not an expense tool: it does not capture receipts, mileage or meals.
It does not price fares itself, so an imported booking has an amount only once somebody records it; otherwise rebill amounts come from your agency invoice or card statement.
It does not search fares or book hotels and cars today; it records the flights your agency or your people booked.

Bring one client's trips

Send us last quarter's flights for one client before the demo. We will import them, code them to the matter, and show you the export and the emissions report for that client.

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