All the Problems With Your Employee GPS Tracking App

At this point, it’s a pretty safe bet that all of your employees have a smartphone on their person at all times (or, at the very least, know how to use one). While the ever-growing omnipresence of mobile devices can often act as a source of frustration, as workers have such an accessible distraction at their fingertips during their work hours, these devices can also be a useful tool for many employers. Every smartphone you can buy these days comes equipped with location tracking technology, so using an employee GPS tracking app is an obvious and simple solution for businesses looking for a way to easily track and manage their mobile employees in the field. 

Right?

On its face, employee GPS tracking app technology might seem like an optimal way to track mobile workers’ progress and activity, as well as to record their travel mileage for IRS-compliant mileage logs. After all, having employees download an employee GPS tracking app to the smartphone they already own, with technology they probably already know how to use, does seem like a pretty easy and efficient way to manage mileage reimbursement. But if you look a little closer, the cracks start to form. 

The ease and availability of GPS technology—and mileage tracking apps that utilize it for mileage reimbursement—doesn’t make up for the inherent problems that could cause trouble for your organization down the line. Let’s take a look at those deficiencies now, and the ways in which they might hinder effective mileage reimbursement. 

An Employee GPS Tracking App Doesn’t:

Know the Difference Between Business and Personal Travel

Yes, an employee GPS tracking app does give you the ability to monitor where your employees have traveled over the course of their workday and which clients and locations they have visited. GPS tracking apps don’t, however, differentiate between work-related travel, which is eligible for reimbursement, and personal and commuting travel mileage, which isn’t. 

This lack of differentiation makes it all-too-easy for personal travel to sneak past you when you review all travel for all employees. If, during the day, an employee decides to take a break from work to run a couple of errands, such as stopping by the bank or picking up their kids from school, this travel is likely to get folded into their reimbursable work-related travel on a GPS tracking application. 

This means that your organization may end up reimbursing for travel that didn’t actually benefit the business in any way. When this happens by accident every now and then, it’s not such a big deal, but when business and personal travel is constantly being conflated in a way that is difficult and time-consuming to separate, these reimbursement expenses will quickly add up across your organization. 

Track and Calculate Mileage

Apps that utilize GPS tracking for reimbursement tend to neglect a key element of proper mileage management for employees in the field: their actual travel. As noted above, GPS tracking apps don’t differentiate between work-related and personal mileage; they also don’t provide any kind of route management, or way to determine the best way to optimize travel mileage between trip destinations. 

Likewise, these apps are designed to locate employees geographically and track their shift times, not track or calculate their work-related mileage for expense reports. This oversight means that on top of using an employee GPS tracking app, employees might still have to keep separate mileage logs just to achieve accurate reimbursements. What’s the point of making all your employees use GPS to track their movements every day if making them record and subtract odometer readings is still a more accurate way to accurately calculate work-related travel mileage? 

Integrate With Your Reimbursement Processes

Regardless of how your specific business is structured, your expense reimbursement process should consist of several key steps. Employees need to keep track of any expenses they incur throughout a set period, including saving receipts and keeping an updated, accurate mileage log with recorded odometer readings for all of their business related travel. They should then compile this information into an expense report, submitted to their manager or supervisor. These expense reports go through an approval process in which at least two people review expenses and check for errors in reporting before giving their approval and sending it to accounting. At this point, an accounting administrator can issue a reimbursement payment to an employee. 

When you’re using an employee GPS tracking app, which, again, works mostly as a way to track employee movements and shift times rather than manage reimbursement, your organization is still performing all or most of the reimbursement process manually using paper reports and in-person handoff. This means that the opportunity for human error is still a huge factor in your processes, costing you money in a number of ways such as: approving duplicate reimbursement requests, approving reports with inflated trip mileage, or approving out-of-policy expenses. 

Secure Valuable Client Data

A huge contingent of today’s mobile workforce occupy positions in or related to the healthcare field, such as home health care and hospice workers. For these workers, their clients’ private health information, also known as PHI, is protected and regulated under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. If you’re using an app to track employees as they visit clients, patient info such as names, addresses and contact information will invariably be stored in your database, which has the potential to cause major issues for companies subject to HIPAA regulations. 

If your organization (and the software you’re using) fail to abide by HIPAA regulations for the security of PHI outlined in the HIPAA Security Rule, you could be subject to lawsuits and even criminal charges. The HIPAA Security Rule dictates that Business Associates, a term applied to all companies or entities that provide third-party services to Covered Entities, must sign a Business Associates Agreement (BAA). This agreement serves as a written contract, specifying each party’s responsibilities when it comes to handling and securing PHI.

Even if your company doesn’t employ workers in the field of health care and securing PHI is not a concern for your organization, protecting client information should always be a priority for you. Your clients are probably not aware that their personal information is being stored by your employee GPS tracking app, or even that such an application exists. We’ve seen enough security breaches in the last decade to know how damaging it can be if one of your software tools exposes your clients to undue risk. 

How Can CompanyMileage Help? 

Despite its appeal, using an employee GPS tracking app comes with too many drawbacks to serve as the solution for your organization’s mileage reimbursement needs. But that doesn’t mean that a better option doesn’t exist! That’s where CompanyMileage comes in, with our suite of software, SureMileage, SureMobile, and SureExpense, which were specially developed to find the perfect solution to tracking employees by streamlining and automating the reimbursement process. 

Instead of just tracking and verifying the miles driven by mobile employees, SureMileage, our mileage reimbursement program, automatically calculates the expenses to be reimbursed by finding the most direct route from point A to point B of a work-related trip. Our SureMobile app makes tracking and expense management even further, letting workers manage travel, organize trip data, and submit reports quickly and easily, right from their smartphones. Employees simply check in at the beginning and end of each trip, and at the end of each day, they use this data to submit expense reports. 

Our system also manages and automates approval workflows, letting businesses customize these workflows to complement their company’s internal structure, ensuring that expense reports never get stuck or delayed as they move through the approval process. Supervisors can also use SureMileage to monitor employee schedules, and monitor their time management throughout workdays. SureMileage also has the option of letting management and supervisors flag potentially problematic activities in  the system, such as submission of duplicated reimbursements or exceeding mileage limits, taking the onus off of supervisors to catch errors. 

CompanyMileage doesn’t stop there! Our system is also compatible with all major account and approval software, seamlessly integrating with your company’s accounting and payment solutions, so that once reimbursement has been authorized, there’s no gap between that decision and payment being issued. You can also rest assured that this ease, convenience, and speed doesn’t come at the cost of security; our three-tiered security system guarantees that important customer and company data will be protected every step of the way by data encryption, a BAA agreement and extensive security policies. 

CompanyMileage has taken the original concept of an employee GPS tracking app and addressed its numerous flaws, resulting in a system that not only allows you to manage your employees in the field with ease, but also saves you money along the way. Request a demo with us today and learn how we regularly save our clients 20-30% on mileage expense reimbursement costs.