Your Employee Location Tracking App Shouldn’t Rely on GPS

It’s not a new phenomenon that when employees are on the job, their employers like to have a decent idea of where they are in the workplace. But for mobile employees who drive their own personal vehicles as part of their day-to-day work-related travel, the ‘workplace’ covers a lot more ground than a standard office building. For many organizations that have a large number of these mobile workers, using an employee location tracking app gives them a tech-savvy way of determining that their employees are where they say they are, and doing what they’re supposed to be doing, without breathing down their necks while they’re trying to work.

The field of jobs untaken by mobile employees is a wide one. If your organization employs hospice workers who make home visits, or traveling salespeople or contractors who are always out in the field throughout the day, how do you monitor the activities of these employees? You need a method of determining where employees are going, what trips and stops they are making, and their trip mileage when it comes time to reimburse them. An employee location tracking app fills many of these needs, but with all kinds of potential solutions on the market for employee tracking and mileage reimbursement, which one should you choose? 

For some, it can be tempting to say that GPS is the best employee location tracking app technology. After all, pretty much everybody has GPS on their phones these days, and knows how to use it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best technology for employee tracking and mileage reimbursement in the mobile workplace. Let’s delve into GPS technology, how it’s used for employee tracking, its pitfalls, and better alternatives for your organization’s employee location tracking app. 

What is GPS and How Does it Work? 

Global Positioning System, or GPS, technology is pretty much ubiquitous these days. Originating in the Sputnik era of the mid-20th century, GPS is a space satellite-based navigation system that can pinpoint a location with high precision and accuracy at any time, all over the world. Since these days most computers, tablets, and smartphones have GPS functionality, many mileage logging and tracking solutions take advantage of this tool to track employees’ work mileage for mileage reimbursement. 

There are benefits to using a GPS-enabled employee location tracking app. One oft-cited advantage of GPS tracking apps is their convenience and ease of use, letting employees use existing technology on their phones to track an log mileage while giving leadership and management an easy way of verifying where their workers are, and when. GPS can also benefit employee efficiency, giving workers a visual tool for planning, tracking, and changing routes as they go about their workdays. This can help them maintain the most efficient routes possible in real-time, potentially saving them time and you money in the process. 

The Downsides of Using GPS Tracking For Mileage Reimbursement 

Using GPS for mileage reimbursement has some notable downsides.

For one, an employee location tracking app that utilizes GPS technology depends on the employee using it to determine when and what mileage data gets recorded. This means that there’s technically no rule or oversight stopping employees from tracking and recording workday travel even when it’s not job-related. It can be hard with GPS tracking apps to catch and prevent fraudulent behavior, like submitting home commutes and personal errands for reimbursement. 

Perhaps, during your review of employee expense reports, you’ll notice an errant trip submitted by an employee, but parsing the eligible travel from ineligible travel is easier said than done. If a dishonest employee starts regularly running errands between home visits and reports it with their work-related mileage, GPS-based apps won’t alert you to this habit, and over time, the costs will start to add up.

Some employee location tracking app options don’t even allow employees to track mileage for expense reports. These GPS-based apps simply use the technology to locate employees geographically and track shift times, ensuring they’re clocking in at the appropriate hours and locations. 

This means employees will still need to use a mileage log of some kind to record odometer readings if your business intends to reimburse them. Employees may start to wonder: What’s the point of being tracked by their employer if they’re still being asked to keep mileage records on top of sharing their location information?

Additionally, using GPS for mileage tracking isn’t always the most reliable method, due to its dependence on, well, GPS. Besides the opportunity for manipulation and tampering, and how easily GPS tracking could make certain types of mileage fraud, GPS can be subject to technical issues that are out of your, or your employees’, control. If an employee loses service, enters a dead zone, or loses or damages their phone, there goes their method of mileage tracking. And while these issues are fixable, think about recurring technical issues on the scale of your entire mobile workforce. Do you have the IT knowledge – or the IT department – needed to deal with that? 

Alternative to GPS: Point-to-Point Calculations

For organizations who can’t overlook the many downsides of using GPS for mobile employee tracking, there are employee mileage tracking app alternative options. Maybe it’s time to consider something a little more novel, and more specific, like the point-to-point calculation methods. 

Point-to-point calculation is a mileage tracking method that just requires the starting and ending point of each work-related trip. Employees enter the address of the location they’re at and the location they’re heading to, and the system will automatically determine the mileage for the most direct route. 

Calculating trips from a starting to an ending location is a reliable, simple solution to the persisting problems associated with reporting mileage expenses. Unlike GPS-enabled employee location tracking, it doesn’t need to be active and monitoring the employee at all times. 

Another benefit of point-to-point calculation in an employee location tracking app is that it completely eschews the need for manual mileage calculations using odometer readings or other methods. Instead, it automates the calculations, saving time and energy while increasing accuracy.

This method for determining trip mileage for reimbursement also gives you and your employees more visibility into the process. If a worker needs to take a quick detour to run by the bank or drop their kids off at school, it won’t affect the mileage of the trip in any way. Should you ever be audited by the IRS, you will be confident your records contain no IRS-disallowed travel. 

Of course, sometimes you have to deviate from your route due to road closures and other unforeseen events. In those cases, employees should be able to report the change in route. The goal is to always have an accurate report of mileage reimbursements including when, what and why you issued each payment. 

What CompanyMileage Has in Store for You

If you’re looking for an employee location tracking app for mileage reimbursement, you’ll find no shortage of available options designed to achieve a specific goal. If your goal is mileage reimbursement technology that automates the reimbursement process without sacrificing accuracy or ease of use, we have the software solution for you! 

SureMileage by CompanyMileage was developed to tackle the mileage reimbursement process for everyone from home healthcare workers to pizza delivery guys – anyone whose employees use their personal vehicles for work-related travel. As employees travel from location to location, our system automates and streamlines the normally time-consuming process of tracking expenses, using the point-to-point method of calculating mileage for reimbursement. Businesses that take advantage of our suite of software solutions get access to features like:

Address Book: The master list of all of your job sites can be imported into our system, saving your employees time looking up addresses for trip reports. Employees will only have access to the addresses they’re permitted to see.

Quick Capture: This feature allows employees to quickly submit their geo-location from their SureMobile app on their smartphone at each new address when they arrive, with just the touch of a button. Quick Capture also logs the date and time of the entry. At the end of the workday, employees can review the list of captured locations and add any trips they missed earlier in the day. The coordinates of each captured location are compared to those in the address book, and employees can select the one they visited to use on their trip form. Quick Capture significantly reduces the amount of time employees spend each day managing their mileage and trip expenses. 

Automated Approvals: All expense reports submitted through SureMileage are moved through an automated approval process, easily customizable to meet your company’s specific needs and structure. Once a trip has been approved, accounting can issue a reimbursement. SureMileage integrates with all major accounting and payroll systems, further streamlining the process.

CompanyMileage delivers a system that solves the many issues of using a GPS-based employee location tracking app to determine employees’ work-related mileage reimbursement, keeping your workforce free to do their actual jobs, instead of tangling with their phones all day. To discover more about our reimbursement software and how we can save your company up to 30%, contact us and schedule a demo!