Your Sales Rep Tracking App Needs Mileage Tracking

Managing sales reps effectively requires an arsenal of software to perform tasks such as lead management, contract management, sales territory mapping and messaging between reps. The more processes that you automate and use technology to streamline, the more time that your sales reps have to do what they do best: sell your product or service and make the big bucks. 

For all of this technology, you’re likely still tracking mileage using pen and paper, though. When your sales rep tracking app has the ability to track mileage, it solves a number of problems you likely didn’t even realize existed in your business operations concerning travel expense reimbursement, approval workflows and time management. All of those little problems add up to wasted time, money and resources. Luckily, there’s a single solution for all of them – automated mileage tracking – which will save you and your reps time and money in the short- and long-term.

Achieving Accuracy in Mileage Expenses

After payroll, travel expenses are normally the largest expense for companies, so it’s important that they be accurately accounted for. Unfortunately, when sales reps are manually recording odometer readings after every trip in order to determine their work-related mileage, accuracy is a difficult thing to achieve. We’re all human after all, and we may round up trip mileage to make the math easier, forget to record a few readings and guesstimate mileage or even go run a few personal errands while driving around. 

Say, for instance, that one of your employees drove 45 miles, but they round it up to 50. That’s only 5 miles, which when multiplied by the 2024 IRS mileage reimbursement rate amounts to an extra $3.35 in reimbursement. If you have 200 sales reps, then you’re really paying out an extra $670 more in mileage reimbursements than you should.

If your sales rep tracking app tracks mileage between locations for them, then you don’t have to worry about how much human error is costing you. More accurate mileage leads to more accurate reimbursement payments and an overall happier workforce. 

Optimizing Expense Reporting & Reimbursement Workflows

Hopefully, even if you are working with a manual mileage tracking process, you have some kind of workflow in place for submitting expense reports and having them approved. When employees are responsible for recording a log of their mileage, the process for approval can be cumbersome, though. Usually, it involves reporting mileage in an excel spreadsheet and having supervisors or managers verify the miles driven at the end of each pay period. 

These manual processes cause a number of inefficiencies. Reimbursement requests can get lost along the way in the approval process, duplicate reports can be submitted, after-the-fact mileage verification does not always catch mistakes and it can take longer to pay out reimbursements. By tracking mileage via an app, you can resolve all of these problems. 

Better Time Management Between Customer Visits

Tracking sales reps does not only mean tracking their leads and each location they visit. It should also mean tracking their time between locations. Automating mileage tracking gives you more visibility into the trips taken throughout the day, helping you to find the most direct route and giving you the ability to check in at each destination. 

A GPS tracking app may help provide the location of sales reps throughout the day, and it may even recommend routes from one location to the next, but it won’t help your company streamline route planning. Being able to find the most direct route for your employees is also beneficial when it comes time to reimburse travel expenses. Would you rather reimburse the miles driven for a route that zigs and zags and backtracks on itself, or would you rather reimburse for a more efficient, and often shorter route?

What CompanyMileage Does for Sales Reps

CompanyMileage has taken a novel approach to mileage tracking with our SureMileage and SureMobile apps. Rather than having supervisors review and verify trips traveled, we calculate the most expedient route from point A to point B and determine how much mileage each employee should be reimbursed for. This means that sales reps won’t need to keep a personal mileage log, and managers won’t have to try to retroactively prove their travel. 

With SureMobile, sales reps only need to enter their starting and ending location for each trip to calculate mileage. Our Check In feature ensures that it only takes a matter of seconds to log your geolocation and time, and managers will be able to see arrival and departure times for each location as well as any notes made about the visit. 

When trips are submitted, SureMileage automatically moves them through your approval process for the appropriate people in your company to review. These workflows can be structured to best fit your business processes, and once approved, CompanyMileage integrates with all major payroll systems so there’s never disruption between submitting expense reports and issuing reimbursements. 

When you’re managing a fleet of mobile sales reps, every mile counts. When you’re accurately tracking trip mileage with CompanyMileage, you can save 20-30% in mileage reimbursement expenses. Request a demo today and start using a sales rep tracking app that will help you save money while making money.