Bring Your Manual Mileage Tracker Form into the Digital Age

Time is one of those things we’ll never be able to control. Time keeps on marching forward and as it does, so does technology, and the role it plays in the fast-paced environment of today’s business landscape. For a savvy business owner, it’s necessary to keep up with the times before they leave you behind; this extends to everything from hiring remote and/or mobile employees to updating tools used by those employees, like the mileage tracker form. 

The IRS rules for mileage tracking and reimbursement do not dictate a format, leaving the finer points of the mileage log up to individual businesses. That being said, just because a business certainly can stick to the traditional method of manual mileage tracking doesn’t necessarily believe that they should. In this article, we’ll explore the pitfalls of using a manual mileage tracking form, and how embracing digital options could be a huge boon for your organization.

Limitations of Manual Mileage Tracking

Pen and paper – or even manual computerized entry, like using spreadsheets – don’t just make your mileage tracker form look old-fashioned. Manual mileage tracking can come with several downsides, including: 

Time

The thing about doing anything manually is that it takes time, and extensive manual entry is certainly a time-consuming task. Manually taking down information for their mileage tracker form is taking up swaths of your employees’ work time that would probably be better and more productively elsewhere, like in the course of their actual job related duties. Additionally, the drudge and time-consuming nature of entering their mileage data may discourage employees from doing it thoroughly, or at all! 

Error Potential

Humans make a lot of errors! That’s just a fact of life. And all-manual mileage tracking logs opens up those logs to the potential for things like misentered data, duplicated data, and missing information, not to mention the possibility of lost, misplaced or forgotten paperwork. Inaccurate logs could have massive impacts on your company’s financial reporting and the accuracy of reimbursement payments, not to mention that they might incur the wrath of the IRS. Should the time ever come to prove an audit trail, it’ll be extremely difficult to verify and cross-check paper records. 

Fraud

Manual logs have no way of easily flagging or catching problematic behavior, making it easier for employees to falsify their records, include travel that isn’t actually eligible for reimbursement (like commuting, or personal errands) in their mileage tracker form, or to inflate their mileage travel, for a bigger reimbursement. The potential for fraud means higher risk of non-compliance issues in the case of a tax audit. 

Storage

Paper is expensive, and the cost of storing it even more so. Manual mileage tracking often means physical copies of mileage logs, which means your organization would have to worry about collecting, organizing and storing a huge amount of physical records. Besides the massive inefficiency when it comes time to try and locate anything (remember what we said about the audits?), it’ll also cause an awful lot of clutter. 

Advantages of Digital Mileage Tracking

But what if you and your organization choose a digital solution for your mileage tracker form? Besides eschewing the above downsides, you’ll also see the following benefits:

Quick and Simple Implementation

Good software solutions for mileage tracking and reimbursement are quick, easy, and efficient to use, streamlining every step of the mileage logging process with automated data entry. 

Precision in Measurements

While there’s plenty of room for error and oversimplification in a paper mileage tracker form, digital tracking allows for the utmost precision. Your business will see a greater level of accuracy in mileage calculation, greatly reducing both the chance for and the margin of error. Many digital solutions use GPS technology for mileage calculation and tracking, meaning that the numbers will be as exact as possible. 

Greater Oversight

By digitizing and automating the mileage tracker form, management and supervisors have greater oversight into the data being logged, as well as the ability to flag patterns of behavior such as duplicated claims, reducing the opportunity for unchecked fraud.

Regulation Compliance

One huge boon inherent with digital mileage tracking systems is that they are specifically designed to meet IRS standards. That coupled with the accessibility and compactness of digital records will make it easier than ever for your business to meet tax regulations, prove audit trails, and search for and verify expenses. 

Mileage Tracking Made Simple With CompanyMileage

Bringing your employees’ mileage logs into the future doesn’t have to be difficult. CompanyMileage and its suite of software solutions for mobile employee reimbursement are specifically designed to be easy and intuitive to use, from mileage logging all the way to dispensing reimbursement payments.

Our SureMobile app lets mobile employees log their mileage right from their smartphones with the touch of a button. They simply need to report the starting and ending points for their work-related travel and from there, our system will calculate the mileage for reimbursement, eliminating the need for mileage calculations or for employees to separate eligible and ineligible mileage. At the end of the day, employees just need to take a few minutes to organize their trips, any relevant receipts, and submit their expense report for review. 

From there, SureMileage moves that report through an automated workflow, easily customizable to meet the unique needs and structure of your organization. Our software also integrates easily with all major accounting and payroll software, guaranteeing a smooth, efficient processing from beginning to end.

Learn more about how to perfect and optimize mileage tracking for your business today by contacting CompanyMileage for a demo!