For many companies, the majority of work has never happened inside a centralized office. Instead, you have a fleet of workers on the move every day providing products and services throughout your service area. Home healthcare aides, social workers, property managers, maintenance technicians and many employees spend a great deal of time away from managers and supervisors. If you’re responsible for mobile employees, you need a field tracking software that not only keeps track of their activities, but will also manage the expenses of such an operation for you. 

When it comes to finding a tool that’s up to the task, you’ll quickly realize there are an array of options available. Which one is right? Well, to help you weed out the apps that won’t meet your operational standards, CompanyMileage has compiled our list of must-haves in a field tracking software. 

1. Routing

Not only would you like to know where your employees are going, they’d like to know, too. Route planning is a central component of any field tracking software, enabling employees to determine their best route from location to location while giving you visibility into their movements. 

When employees use our app, SureMobile, for example, it allows them to enter the start and end points of their trip, and our software will automatically find them the most direct route. By organizing appointments so that employees travel the shortest total distance possible, they save on mileage and are able to use their day more productively. Over time, this waste reduction can save a company thousands in driving expenses and countless hours in employee time. 

2. Contact Database

Oftentimes, mobile employees will find themselves going back to the same service location again and again. This is especially true for workers in home healthcare or property management. To keep track of all of these addresses, it’s incredibly helpful to have some kind of contact database included in the field tracking software you choose. Otherwise, workers are either storing this sensitive information in their phones or writing them down on a piece of paper that gets lost in the shuffle. 

In SureMileage, our integrated Address Books store addresses in real time and can be populated with current client lists. Storing contacts on the app means you only have to share them one time, with the knowledge that everyone will have access to this database. You also have control over which employees have access to which addresses, so nobody needs to ever see an address that isn’t relevant to them. 

3. Time Tracking

For mobile workers, it seems that nothing is more precious than time. How much time does it take to travel to the service location? How long were they at each location? Could time management be improved at all? These are all questions a field tracking software should be able to help you answer. 

A unique feature of CompanyMileage is Quick Capture. The Quick Capture feature provides a quick and painless option for submitting trips. As you travel from one location to the next, employees simply click the Quick Capture button in the SureMobile app, and their current latitude and longitude coordinates, the date and time will be recorded and saved for later. Trip end time serves as the visit start time, and once the service has concluded at a location, users manually enter the visit end time. 

The time tracking data collected will help you assess the performance of your workforce. Who’s working hard and who’s hardly working, who’s working too much overtime and who has a chronic tardiness problem. All of this knowledge can ultimately be used to engender a more productive work environment, save time and effort spent managing employees and increase profitability.

4. Trip Expenses

All of those miles your employees drive cost money, something many field tracking software solutions tend to overlook. To save on trip expenses, many companies opt to have employees drive their own vehicles for work rather than provide them with their own. This doesn’t rid you of the responsibility of tracking travel expenses, though. While there is no federal law mandating you reimburse employees for the use of their cars, it’s a smart business practice if you want to keep employees satisfied with their jobs. 

Tracking trip expenses is actually a fairly straightforward process if you have the right software to help. In our app, SureMileage, employees simply report their starting points and destinations for each trip, and the system calculates the driving distance between them. By using this method, we don’t have to worry about employees accidentally counting mileage for any detours or personal errands they ran while on the clock. We also exclude home commuting from trip expense calculations since the IRS considers such travel ineligible for reimbursement. The result is that you know exactly how many business miles each employee traveled and therefore, how much the trip cost. 

5. Managed Reimbursement Process

Mileage reimbursement represents a significant cost for your company, and having an inefficient process just adds to that cost. Field tracking software is uniquely positioned to help you manage mileage reimbursement for your mobile employees. When you can better manage this process, your company not only controls expenses, but can save money by claiming a tax deduction for mileage reimbursement. 

Using SureMileage or SureMobile, employees can submit mileage expense reports in just a few minutes at the end of each day. Once in our system, supervisors can review and approve expenses and send them to accounting for reimbursement. Since SureMileage integrates with most accounting and payroll systems, the entire process from start to finish is seamless. You don’t have to worry about verifying mileage for a trip after the fact to ensure no disallowed travel occurred. Since SureMileage automatically provides the fastest route rather than calculating miles driven, the risk of over-reimbursement is eliminated. 

Are We the Field Tracking Software For Your Company?

In an era where travel expenses are on the rise and new technology solutions seem to pop up everyday, CompanyMileage has already helped hundreds of companies save 20-30% on their mileage and expense reimbursement expenses. If you’re ready to learn if CompanyMieage is the solution for you, request a demo with us today.