5 Signs Your Mileage Spreadsheet Has Hit Its Breaking Point

If your business has mobile employees who need to be reimbursed for their work-related travel, spreadsheets might seem like the natural starting point for mileage tracking. They’re simple, familiar, and easy to set up. Short-term solutions can’t do the work of long-term systems, however. As your organization and your team grow, what once worked smoothly can quickly become difficult to manage.

Today, let’s discuss five signs that your mileage tracker spreadsheet system is starting to break down, and what your next steps should be.

1.It Worked With 5 Drivers… But Not With 25

What was manageable with a small team gets chaotic when your team expands and more employees need to submit expense reports. Things that were tiny inconveniences before suddenly become big roadblocks. More employees using a mileage spreadsheet means more traffic and more noise in that spreadsheet. And that means more data, more inconsistencies, and way more room for error.

2. Version Control Is a Constant Headache

Let’s say all of your employees are still using spreadsheets to manage work mileage. You might start to notice that between those different users, a bunch of versions of the same spreadsheets are floating around. And all those different spreadsheets are getting emailed, edited, and resubmitted. 

This is a big issue. No version control means no version clarity, and you never want your mileage reimbursement workflows to operate in the dark. With mileage spreadsheets, it’ll always be a struggle to determine which version is correct, leading to confusion and duplicated work.

3. Small Errors Keep Adding Up

Here’s the thing about manual mileage logging methods. Humans have a tendency to make mistakes, and when your employees are all logging their mileage themselves, the margin for error gets pretty big. Manual entry leads to typos, duplicate trips, and miscalculations.

Those individual errors might not seem like a big deal. And maybe, at first, they won’t be. But over time, ‘minor’ mistakes pile up into huge problems that can significantly impact reimbursement costs. When there’s too many mistakes to catch, some of them won’t get caught, and workers’ mistyped or miscalculated mileage totals will make their way into expense reports and reimbursement payments. Regulatory bodies, especially the IRS, are typically not a huge fan of this. 

4. There’s No Clear Audit Trail

With mileage spreadsheets, it can get difficult to verify when entries were made or whether they’ve been changed. This violates one of the major tenets of good mileage reimbursement management: You should be keeping clear, organized records of everything related to mileage reimbursement, from tracking to reimbursement payments. 

The rules for an IRS accountable plan include consistent, accurate, and through records. Without those records, your business won’t meet those standards, making reimbursements taxable. What’s more, poor recordkeeping seriously increases risk in the event of an IRS audit. 

5. Reviewing Reports Takes Too Long

Sorting through, validating, and approving spreadsheet mileage logs is slow, tedious, and time-consuming work for managers, and it bogs everything else down with it. 

Slower reviews mean slower approvals. Slower approvals mean slower reimbursement payments. Not the best way to show gratitude to your hard-working mobile employees. Plus, using up all that time and energy on an inefficient approvals process pulls focus away from higher-value work. 

So…Now What?

Spreadsheets aren’t the enemy here. They’re just not built to manage mileage logs and reimbursement for growing mobile teams. If you’ve seen any of these 5 signs in your mileage reimbursement workflows, spreadsheets simply aren’t serving you anymore. 

Instead, you need a streamlined, intuitive system that not only makes your workload lighter and easier, but actually does some of that work for you. It’s time to embrace what automated mileage reimbursement software can bring to your business:

1. A system that scales as your company does
2. Centralization and version control, so everyone works from a single source of truth
3. Automated mileage tracking that reduces the need for manual entry, with the option to automatically flog problematic entries, such as duplicated reports, for further review
4. Full transparency by automatically logging and tracking changes made to reports
5. A streamlined review process in the form of customizable expense approval workflows, which increases visibility while decreasing the number of manual steps 

CompanyMileage Gets You the Right Tools to Take the Next Step

CompanyMileage offers all of these features and more in our suite of software solutions designed specifically for better, smarter, and simpler expense reimbursement, from mileage logging all the way through payment distribution. 

SureMileage, our mileage reimbursement software, logs travel by automatically calculating mileage for reimbursement between the start and end points of each work-related trip. Called the ‘point-to-point method,’ it takes the responsibility off your employees to manually track and calculate mileage. This ensures that errors, duplicate entries, ineligible trips, and inflated mileage totals don’t end up making their way into expense reports. 

Using our mobile app SureMobile, employees can log trips, save receipts and submit reports from their mobile devices. Once submitted, those reports move quickly and easily through your customizable approval workflow. Our system even integrates with all major accounting and payroll platforms. 

If you’re ready to learn more about how CompanyMileage can take your business to the next level, contact us to request a free demo today!