Excel to flowchart template (travel request and approval)
An Excel to flowchart template, shown as a cross-functional travel request and approval flow: five phases, four lanes, a policy gate, a cost threshold that escalates to finance, and a receipts check that returns incomplete claims.
How it works
Rename the four lanes to your real roles
Employee, Line manager, Travel desk and Finance are placeholders. If bookings go through an external travel management company, give it its own lane so the handoff is visible. If you have no travel desk, move the policy check into the line manager lane and delete the lane rather than leaving it empty.
Put your own figure on the threshold
Replace "Total cost over the approval threshold?" with the number from your delegation of authority schedule and state the currency. Decide whether destination overrides cost — many policies escalate any overseas trip regardless of value — and test the estimate including any documented exception, not the fare alone.
Write your caps into the policy gate
The policy check is only as useful as what it tests. Note the written caps on the node: cabin class by flight duration, nightly accommodation limit by city, minimum advance booking window, preferred suppliers. Without them, every approver applies their own reading and the gate stops meaning anything.
Decide what finance is actually checking
The escalation has three exits on purpose: approve, refuse, and send back to be re-costed. If your finance team only ever approves or refuses, delete the re-cost branch. If they own the budget line rather than the judgement, say so on the node and record who approved it and on what date, because an audit of the claim starts there.
Repoint the change-of-plans loop if changes go further back
New dates currently re-enter the threshold test, which assumes the manager's approval still stands. If a change of dates in your organisation needs the line manager to look again, repoint that exit to "Line manager approves the trip?" instead. If your bookings are non-refundable, add a step for the change fee before the trip continues.
Set a deadline on the receipts loop
The claim currently bounces back to the employee for as long as it takes. Add the resubmission window your finance calendar needs, and define what complete means for you — an itemised VAT receipt per line rather than a card slip, foreign amounts converted at the statement rate, prepaid items excluded.
Frequently asked questions
What are the stages of a travel request and approval process?
Five, and this chart's phase columns are named after them. Request: the employee states dates and purpose and estimates the total trip cost. Approval: the trip is checked against policy, approved by the line manager, and escalated to finance if the cost is above the threshold. Booking: the travel desk books flights and accommodation and issues the itinerary and booking references. Trip: the employee travels and keeps receipts, unless plans change first. Expenses: the claim goes in with receipts, is checked against policy, and is reimbursed in the next payroll run. The order matters more than the names — every gate is measured against the estimate made in the first phase.
Who should approve business travel, the line manager or finance?
Both, doing different jobs. The line manager approves the trip: whether it is necessary, whether the dates work, whether the person should be away. Finance approves the money above a threshold: whether the budget line carries it and whether any policy exception is acceptable. Collapsing the two into one approval is what produces the familiar argument in which nobody is sure who is holding the request. Give the manager every trip and finance only what is over your figure, name the second approver, and record the date of each approval, because the audit of the expense claim starts at the approval and not at the receipt.
What happens when travel plans change after the trip is booked?
Treat it as a new cost, not an amendment. New dates usually mean a different fare, a different length of stay and sometimes a change fee, so the trip has to be tested against the approval threshold again rather than proceeding on the strength of the original approval. That is why the change decision in this chart re-enters the threshold test instead of continuing to the trip. A cancellation is a separate exit: the bookings are released and the process ends there, which keeps cancelled trips out of the expenses phase and stops a released booking turning up in a claim.
I used to build this from an Excel table with the Visio Data Visualizer add-in. Where has that gone?
Microsoft announced the retirement of the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel in November 2025 and set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026, a date it confirmed in December 2025 was unchanged. It has published nothing since either confirming the shutdown ran or reversing it, and its support pages still describe the retirement in the future tense while some marketing pages still advertise the add-in as current — which is why the situation is confusing. The route Microsoft recommends is Visio Plan 2 and the Data Visualizer templates in the Visio desktop app. This template is not a Visio file; it is the same shape, produced from rows you edit in the browser.