Top 6 Ways We Save You 20-30% on Mileage Expenses Reimbursement Costs

The process of conducting expenses reimbursement for mobile employees’ work-related travel can be a time-consuming, complicated one. Mobile workers have to keep track of their mileage, log the time, date and purpose of each trip in an IRS-compliant mileage log, create an expense report, and submit it. Then they still have to wait for organizational management to approve the submission before they can receive their reimbursement payment. If not handled properly, expenses reimbursement procedures can take up a lot of your time, energy, and, yes, it can get expensive. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way! Companies and organizations that work with CompanyMileage to streamline and automate their travel expenses reimbursement regularly save anywhere from 20-30% on expenses related to employee mileage and the reimbursement process. With such a large amount of savings, you’re likely asking a very reasonable question: How? 

How can a mileage tracking app have such a huge positive impact on your company? Well, for one thing, CompanyMileage does a lot more than just track employees’ trip mileage. CompanyMileage and its suite of mileage reimbursement products actually do so much more that we’ve broken down the top six ways in which we bring efficiency, automation, and visibility to every step of mileage expenses reimbursement, helping your organization in the process. 

1. Fast, Accurate Trip Calculation

One of the biggest and most enduring pains in the world of expenses reimbursement procedures? Mileage calculations. Some organizations stick to the old manual methods of subtracting odometer readings to calculate their travel mileage, but this method is time-consuming, inefficient, and has an extremely high margin for error – not what you want to hear when you’re trying to save money on expenses reimbursement processes. 

Methods are changing with the times, and CompanyMileage isn’t the only mileage solution on the market. However, similar software and apps that track employee mileage for business purposes typically use GPS-based tracking systems. These systems are easy for mobile workers to use as they travel to various locations throughout the day, but they have flaws. GPS tools are intended to track all miles, including mileage that isn’t eligible for reimbursement like personal and business mileage, and on top of that aren’t able to manage other expenses.

On the other hand, SureMileage, CompanyMileage’s mileage reimbursement software, uses point-to-point trip calculations instead. Instead of using GPS to constantly track their movements through the day, employees simply enter the starting and ending points for each trip, and our system calculates the driving distance between them. It is the mileage of this optimal route, calculated by SureMileage, that they will be reimbursed for. If they must deviate from the intended route for an unexpected reason such as an accident or road closures, they must report that change in the system. Employees cannot simply be reimbursed for making detours or taking an alternate route to their destination without a record corroborating it. 

2. Home Commute Management

95% of companies that utilize CompanyMileage for expenses reimbursement are “home visit organizations,” with a workforce of mostly mobile employees. These mobile salespeople or home healthcare workers usually go straight to visit clients or patients from their home each day. Because of this, some mobile employees will claim a reimbursement for their commutes from home to their first appointment, even though home commutes are not eligible for reimbursement under IRS rules for an accountable plan. 

Reimbursing employees for their drive from home to work each day might only add up to a few dollars, but when an organization has a workforce of hundreds of employees, those small costs can grow exponentially. To avoid the potential for this kind of mileage inflation, CompanyMileage’s proprietary system automatically deducts the home-to-work amount from employee travel, eliminating this expense for our clients. 

3. Instant Insight

Another element that sets us apart from our competitors is the amount of oversight and transparency we give organizations into expenses reimbursement. There’s no time like the present, which is why CompanyMileage’s automated systems allow for real-time reporting. Unlike other expenses reimbursement systems, in which leadership might not see employee records until days or weeks later when trips are submitted for approval, trip log data is viewable almost immediately. This gives management oversight into expense trends as reports are submitted, instead of well after the fact.

Additionally, all mileage and trip info recorded in our systems are digitized and stored in a centralized location, easily accessible for employees and management. This encourages transparency, helping maintain accountability across all levels of your organization. Having easy access to accurate, well-organized employee mileage log info will also make it incredibly easy for your business to prove an audit trail in the case of an IRS audit.

4. Flagging Behaviors 

Expense fraud is unfortunately all-too-common. There are several popular expense reporting schemes employees are likely to use, including mileage inflation and logging ineligible travel for reimbursement, as mentioned above. With other expenses reimbursement systems, these instances of fraud can be hard to catch even with your close examination of expense reports. Luckily for our clients, CompanyMileage remains vigilant so you don’t have to. 

Our system allows users to set up flags to alert you of problematic behaviors, including instances of duplicate trip bookings, employees reporting excess mileage and overrides in the system. This feature allows you to quickly identify and prevent fraud and other unauthorized behaviors before they cost you money without expending the time and energy in manual examination. 

5. Quick Capture 

Mobile employees have enough to take care of accomplishing their actual job duties. Who wants to take time out of their busy workday to painstakingly make entries for mileage logs? Nobody, and that’s why CompanyMileage offers our Quick Capture feature.

Using the SureMobile app on their smartphones, QuickCapture lets employees quickly and easily submit their geo-location at each new destination along with the date and time of the submission. At the end of the day, workers can review their list of captured locations and, if needed, manually add trips that weren’t logged earlier. The coordinates for each captured location are compared to locations in your address book that are then used by employees on the trip form to calculate mileage.

Quick Capture reduces the time needed to submit expense reports for expenses reimbursement, while increasing the accuracy of the mileage recorded for each trip. Throughout the day, employees can focus on their responsibilities instead of fiddling with a GPS app on their phone or tracking odometer readings in a mileage log.

6. Automated Approval Systems

Slow, complicated expense approval processes can be the death knell of expenses reimbursement procedures. Inefficient expense approval workflows that fall victim to losing or misplacing documentation, approval delays, or other issues, means slow, unreliable reimbursements. If your employees can’t count on an organized, timely reimbursement process, that’ll further demotivate them to accurately report mileage, or even report mileage at all, further frustrating the process

CompanyMileage avoids this dilemma entirely by automating and centralizing the review and approval process for mileage expenses reimbursements. Our clients no longer need to rely on a disorganized, slow paper-based process. As soon as employees submit their trips for reimbursement, the appropriate supervisor will be notified and able to review. Once they approve, the expense report moves on to the next reviewer in your workflow. 

SureMileage takes a huge weight off the shoulders of supervisors who dread having to parse through expense reports at the end of each month. It also significantly reduces the time your mobile employees spend filling out expense reports. Our clients’ employees spend less than five minutes every day getting their reimbursement requests in order in our system. 

How Much Will You Save On Expenses Reimbursement With CompanyMileage?

Just like you, we take top-notch, efficient, and accurate expenses reimbursements processes extremely seriously. That’s why CompanyMileage has created a suite of reimbursement software solutions designed to automate, streamline, and perfect every step of the way, from route planning all the way through reimbursement.

SureMileage, SureMobile, and SureExpense let organizations record, submit, and reimburse expenses through an automated workflow easily customizable to meet the unique needs of your business. Once expense reports have moved through the automated approvals system, CompanyMileage can integrate with all major accounting and payroll software, so employees will receive their reimbursement payment in a manner as quick and efficient as the rest of the process. 

Our commitment to creating the best workflows for expenses reimbursement possible has yielded systems so streamlined and accurate that we often save our clients 20%-30% on mileage expenses. We’ve listed the top six ways we save our customers here, but discover many, many more ways for yourself by contacting CompanyMileage to learn more today!