Your employees are busy. Your managers are busy too. Neither has time amongst the jam-packed calendar of a typical working week to review the minute details of your travel and expense policy. Whether they’re just submitting expenses, or reviewing expense claims for others, they simply don’t have time to spare.
If you’re still using a manual or paper-based system, the process is even more time-consuming. Even when expenses are submitted and approved, your finance team can be wasting valuable time processing piles of paper or manually updating various spreadsheets.
As a result, inaccurate or exaggerated expenses can slip through. Without transparency, automation and digital cues to guide employees toward cost-effective and compliant choices, your budgets are at risk.
Inaccuracies are even more of a concern when it comes to claiming mileage.
For many businesses, mileage is the only expense category where you don’t need to provide documentation for reimbursement. If your business is one of them, employees could be claiming for more miles than they are entitled to. This is a real concern when you consider that mileage is one of the most common expense categories. That’s a lot of unnecessary spend that could be put to better use elsewhere.
It’s not a pleasant experience for employees either. They need to remember every trip they made, when they made it, if roadworks were an issue, if they were transporting a fellow colleague… the list goes on and on. This takes time and can be a real drain on productivity when it comes to submitting a mileage claim.
So how can technology help?
A new bolt-on to the SAP Concur mobile app called Drive, helps to take the guesswork out of claiming mileage. Using GPS technology, and a few taps in the mobile app, employees can choose when to track mileage. This can be done automatically – by changing the settings to tell Drive when to track mileage, for example during your usual working hours – or when prompted. Then, this information can be sent straight into a Concur Expense claim.
Using this technology can benefit both the employee and the manager. Employees can manage all their expenses, including mileage, from anywhere and at any time through the SAP Concur app and managers can review and approve claims more quickly to ensure employees aren’t out of pocket for long. A win-win for everyone.
Bringing traveller and technology together
Investing in expense and mileage technology bring with it many benefits, not just improving the efficiency of employees and managers:
• It’s much easier to document, report on and reimburse the actual distance driven• You can be confident that mileage reporting is accurate, to improve compliance and audit readiness• Expense reporting becomes standardised for business mileage, removing the guesswork• You can spend less time scrutinising expenses and more time growing your business
And, as all this data is captured in real-time, everyone can be confident they’re not over or under claiming. Ultimately, utilising the technology available takes the frustration and guesswork out of claiming mileage, a solution that keeps managers – and their employees – happy.
To learn more, visit concur.co.uk/concur-drive