The old separate business travel quota is gone; business travel now sits inside the general Liberalised Remittance Scheme ceiling. What has not changed is that a company sending its people abroad has both a compliance obligation and a real opportunity to stop overpaying for currency.
Where business travel sits now
- Foreign exchange for business travel falls under the LRS ceiling of USD 250,000 per person per financial year, shared with every other purpose.
- Where the employer bears the cost, the remittance can be made by the company against the trip rather than by the individual, and different documentation applies.
- The USD 3,000 per-visit limit on physical currency notes applies exactly as it does for leisure travel.
Documents to keep
- 1A letter from the employer confirming the traveller, the destination, the dates and the business purpose.
- 2The invitation, conference registration or client correspondence establishing the reason for the trip.
- 3The traveller's passport, visa and itinerary.
- 4PAN — the company's, where the company remits, and the individual's where they do.
- 5The A2 declaration with the business travel purpose code.
Where companies quietly lose money
- Reimbursing employees who bought currency at an airport counter. The company pays the 9% markup without ever seeing it as a line item.
- Buying per-trip instead of in planned batches, forfeiting any negotiating position.
- Loading single-currency cards for multi-country trips and paying cross-currency fees on most of the spend.
- Not collecting the GST invoice with the company GSTIN on it, and losing the input credit.
- Not reconverting unused balances, so foreign currency sits on dormant cards accruing inactivity fees.
A policy that fixes most of it
Name a single provider and route every trip through them. Issue cards rather than cash beyond the first day. Require the GSTIN on every invoice. Set a per-diem loading standard by destination so nobody is deciding amounts ad hoc at the last minute. Reconvert balances above a threshold on return rather than leaving them.
For a company sending fifty people abroad a year, the difference between a policy and no policy is routinely several lakh rupees, and none of it requires anyone to travel less.
