How a Location Based Attendance App Can Play a Role in Mileage Reimbursement

No business will succeed without effective employee management. Without the right processes in place, you won’t be able to achieve the right balance between productivity and investment. Your workers could be slacking and taking home a handsome paycheck, or they could be working too much and quickly burning out right under your nose. Managing employees becomes even more difficult when they aren’t in a single workplace, but spread out over multiple locations, multiple shifts and constantly moving around in the field. You have limited supervision and little ability to enforce a strong work culture. This ongoing problem has led many businesses to invest in a location based attendance app to administer at least some standard for accountability and productivity. 

Location based attendance apps allow employees to mark attendance from any location as well as track employees movements throughout the workday. They usually utilize Location Services on the smartphones of employees which uses GPS, Bluetooth, crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations to determine the right location of a user. 

One of these apps can ensure your employees are getting to where they say they’ll be while working out in the field. With the right app, you can do more than just track attendance, though. 

Tracking Attendance

From simple communication to supervising performance, technology is a huge asset in managing field employees such as sales reps, field engineers and those employees providing other site-specific services. Almost everybody has a smartphone on them at any given time of the day, including workers on the clock, and this allows a location based attendance app to track attendance via GPS. Each time employees mark their attendance, apps capture the exact date, time and location coordinates. 

By simply capturing the geo-data from marking attendance, an app is able to track a business visit in the field – when an employee arrived, where they were and how long before they arrived at their next appointment. All of this information can be used to record employee timesheets, which is helpful in the case of tracking hourly workers’ schedules. Since the entire sign-in/sign-out process is captured systematically, supervisors can review an employee’s attendance and approve it without dealing with manually created spreadsheets and tedious paperwork. 

A location based attendance app solves several prevalent issues experienced with a mobile, distributed workforce. Most importantly, it prevents attendance records from being falsified. Whenever attendance is marked, it documents where they are and when they were there, leaving no way for them to hide being late for an appointment or not working the required hours. 

The data an attendance app can provide also helps assess performance of your workforce. With this information, you’ll know who the hard workers and the slackers are, who is working too many hours 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. 

A typical location based attendance app provides a lot of benefits to a business, but it leaves out a critical component: how do employees get to these different service locations in the first place? Are they using their own vehicles? Should they be tracking their mileage and trips? It seems cumbersome to have one app for tracking their attendance from location to location while having a separate system for tracking their travel from point A to B. Fortunately it is possible to do both at once. 

Reimbursing Mileage Expenses

Many mobile employees use their own vehicles to travel and fulfill their job responsibilities. If your company is one in which this happens, then you probably know that you have an obligation to reimburse employees for the use of their own cars. To do this, though, employees must track their trips from location to location and submit reimbursement reports that detail their travel for approval. 

The process of keeping mileage logs, submitting reports, reviewing trips and properly paying employees out in a reasonable amount of time quickly becomes an overwhelming, taxing process for companies who have more than just a few mobile workers. There are expense apps to help you work through these tasks just as there are location based attendance apps to help you track employee movement. Since these two important aspects of field employee management are so interconnected, it makes sense to find a tool that can address them both at the same time. 

Comprehensive Employee Management

The right kind of system will be able to solve both problems at once. This is how CompanyMileage manages both employee attendance tracking and the mileage reimbursement process.

Track Employee Activities

Using our SureMobile app, employees can both document their attendance and track their work-related trips. With our Check-In feature, users are able to quickly submit GPS location data for their starting or ending locations of trips right from their smartphones. This data includes the date, the start and end times, the beginning and ending locations and any supplementary information or memos. The information generated can be used to calculate mileage and complete an employee’s travel logs. 

Our Quick Capture Widget makes the process even simpler, allowing you to easily capture the date, the trip end time and coordinates at the current location of your arrival, right from the home screen of your phone. This information is automatically stored in the app and can be retrieved at the end of your day to create trips, calculate mileage and then submit reports for reimbursement.

Calculate Employee Expenses

Rather than using GPS to track the miles traveled and then verifying this trip mileage is legitimate after the fact, our SureMileage solution determines the most expedient route from point A to point B and calculates that mileage. This approach eliminates common issues associated with manually tracking travel such as mileage padding, estimating or rounding up trip totals or including personal errands or detours in work-related mileage reporting. 

At the end of the day, the list of captured locations can be reviewed and edited on from a mobile device or on the web. At this time, employees can manually add any missed trips to their routes. Since you probably aren’t familiar with the longitude and latitude of your clients’ home or business, captured coordinates are compared against addresses stored in the address book to help map out the trips, or addresses can be manually added. Once they’ve completed their trip forms, employees simply submit them to their supervisors for review and approval. 

A Smooth Administrative Process

SureMileage reduces administrative overhead for both employees and supervisors. Instead of taking hours out of the work week to keep track of their mileage logs and complete the necessary paperwork to turn in to their supervisors, employees spend just 1-2 minutes each day managing the process. For managers and supervisors, all levels of the system can be tailored to your specific goals and processes. All reimbursement requests will be automatically moved through your approval workflow to ensure employees receive payments as expediently as possible. 

Not only does our solution limit inflated employee expenses related to their time spent working in the field, it’s an excellent tool for supervisors to monitor employee schedules and time management. A location based attendance app is capable of doing much more than simply letting employees punch in their place and time throughout the day. They can actually help you maximize productivity while minimizing excessive expenses. 

CompanyMileage customers have saved 20-30% on their mileage reimbursement costs, and this doesn’t even account for all the time and effort saved by foregoing wasteful manual processes. Discover more than just a location based attendance app; discover a solution to all of your problems. Request a demo with CompanyMileage today.