Let’s face it: In conversations about financial management and workflows, employee reimbursement management doesn’t always get a huge amount of attention compared to other accounting processes – but when it’s not managed well, it can cost companies a lot of money. Consider how your organization manages expense report submissions and mileage log tracking. How much oversight does management have of employee reimbursement requests? Are there checks in place to avoid fraud and other problematic behaviors? 

According to a 2016 Chrome River survey, expense fraud alone costs businesses an estimated $1 billion a year, with employees who committed fraud doing so to the tune of an average of almost $2,500 dollars in false reimbursement claims. By neglecting your organization’s reimbursement management, you allow these and other unnecessary expenses to go unaddressed and uncorrected, causing problems to pile up, which can only lead to trouble for your business in the future.

But enough doom and gloom. How can you – and your company – manage reimbursement better? 

Look at Your Current Processes

Before you change anything about your current processes, take a deep, long look at how your organization currently handles reimbursement management. Then, ask yourself some key questions that can help identify areas for improvement. Questions like:

What’s Wrong Here?

You can’t fix anything until you can identify what needs fixing! What problems currently plague your less-than-perfect mileage reimbursement management? Many organizations see issues like bottlenecks from expense reports that are left to pile up, overly long timelines that lead to delayed reimbursement, or an overreliance on human touchpoints that lead to more problems if a member of the approval workflow in place is sick, on vacation, or simply away from their desk for too long.

How Are You Tracking?

Well-kept, accurate, and accessible records are everything in mileage reimbursement. They’re absolutely vital for everything from keeping the ire of the IRS at bay to, of course, making sure that your mobile employees are fairly and accurately compensated for their work-related travel in their personal vehicles. While the IRS regulations for compliant mileage logs do not have any stipulations about how mileage is tracked, the method to this madness can help – or hinder – your business, depending on which methods you use. 

Some organizations still stick to methods like tracking through manual entry in digital spreadsheets or recording odometer calculations in paper forms or logs. While these methods are definitely tried, they’re not always true. Manual, analog tracking has a high margin for all kinds of errors, including data entry errors, mathematical errors, and duplication errors, not to mention how truly easy it is to lose, misplace, and misfile paper forms. 

Does Your Process Have Defined Steps?

Don’t let things get too complicated! The best way to make sure your employees follow the rules and regulations of your organization’s reimbursement process is to make that process as simple and easy-to-understand as possible. This includes clearly defined steps for every part of the process, as well as outlining the necessary responsibilities of every employee in this process, from mobile employees submitting reports, to members of management approving these reports, to employees in accounting who distribute reimbursement payments. 

Time to Utilize Technology

Tradition has its place in plenty of processes…but reimbursement management doesn’t need to be one of them. As outlined above, manual expense tracking is rife with the possibility for errors and mishaps on multiple levels. Instead, consider embracing technology, and taking advantage of the benefits that could be offered by utilizing software solutions for managing mileage reimbursement. 

By using mileage reimbursement software to automate the reimbursement process, you greatly reduce the opportunity for human error. Such software solutions are also designed in a way that allows management and supervisors oversight into employee behaviors, allowing them to quickly and easily catch mistakes and problematic behaviors, such as mileage fraud and duplicated reports. Time is money, and the streamlining allowed by automating reimbursement management will allow your employees to actually focus on their job roles, saving them time and you money in the process.

What Does Better Manage Reimbursement Management Get You?

Efficiency is great, but what other benefits will your organization reap from more efficient management of mileage reimbursement processes? Happier employees, for one! The people you employ, much like most members of a healthy workforce, enjoy getting compensated for their incurred expenses in an efficient and timely manner, and they don’t like having to jump through hoops for reimbursement either. Well-managed mileage reimbursement can only increase and maintain the satisfaction of your hard-working mobile employees. 

Additionally, better reimbursement management means better financial transparency! When an organization has a well-managed reimbursement process, it allows them to follow the rules of an IRS accountable plan. This allows organizations to deduct reimbursement costs from taxes. This financial transparency also gives companies better structured and organized records, which will be a blessing should your company ever have to prove an audit trail for any reason. 

CompanyMileage Makes Mileage Reimbursement Easy and Affordable 

Managing mileage reimbursement may not be glamorous, but it sure is important, and at CompanyMileage we offer a suite of software tools to make your organization’s reimbursement as simple, efficient and streamlined as possible. SureMileage, our mileage tracking software, uses a unique point-to-point calculation method, taking the starting and ending points of an employee’s work-related trip to determine the distance between them for reimbursement.

Using SureMobile, our tracking app, employees simply need to log their trip info and submit any necessary receipts for approval. After moving through a customizable automated workflow, our approval software also integrates with major approval and accounting systems, so employees can rest assured they’ll receive accurate payments in a timely manner. 

Stop sweating reimbursement management and discover how CompanyMileage can save you time and money by contacting us for a demo today!