Why Businesses Should Automate Mileage Tracking

All business-related drives can be used to claim mileage deduction. Whether it’s an on-site visit, meeting clients, or providing client demos, tracking your mileage is imperative as it impacts overall employee productivity and also helps in tax savings. The mileage rate is updated annually and forms the foundation for calculating mileage allowance.

In situations when mileage tracking isn’t done properly, there are two possible outcomes for both the employee and the organization. The former may incur losses due to unreported miles. The latter may suffer significant losses due to fraudulent claims. Hence, tracking your business mileage can save you money during the tax season. No tracking essentially means leaving money on the table.

In this blog, we will explore how traditional methods of mileage tracking can be improved with technology.

Traditional methods of mileage tracking

Business travel, both national and international, is routine these days. Employees are traveling to make sales calls, meet clients, and close deals. This makes it highly likely they have multiple pitstops and numerous mileage entries on a day-to-day basis.

Traditional methods require all personnel to keep track of business expenses by saving the receipts everywhere they go. Once the trip is done, they need to file their expenses. This requires going over all the receipts and manually sorting them based on clients, projects, and other pertinent categories. Once the sorting is complete, the details of the miles and other business expenses need to be manually entered on spreadsheets which gives a lot of room for error.

Some of the mandatory fields for tracking travel expenses are:

1. The correct travel dates
2. Miles traveled
3. Start and end locations
4. Purpose of the trip
5. Miscellaneous spends

This requires frequent travelers to keep track of these categories for every trip, logging them, and waiting for approval. The accompanying paperwork while manually tracking expenses can be daunting. It can turn out more frustrating if there are multiple rounds of going back and forth between the accounts team and the employee for insufficient documentation.

In addition, the actual process of manual data entry is very time-consuming and tedious. With travelers often guessing or assuming the number of miles, unreported miles will lead to a loss. This will affect the reimbursement cycles causing a delay, hampering productivity and reducing employee morale.

Traditional methods of reporting don’t have features for customization to optimize spends. This proves to be a major drawback as there is little to no insight on spending trends and policy violations. Mileage fraud very often goes undetected, reducing the productivity of the finance team.

Automated mileage tracking

Automation simplifies the tracking of business travel expenses by seamlessly facilitating mileage reimbursements through easy and well-documented tax deductions.

A centralized dashboard provides real-time insight into business and travel expenses. This drives strategic business decisions regarding financial spending at the same time reducing and eliminating unnecessary leaks.

An automatic mileage tracker makes it simple and easy to enter details like purpose of the meet, date, time, etc, log in miles, run real-time policy checks, and detect policy violations. This helps identify and reduce fraudulent claims while staying audit-ready at all times. A streamlined system accelerates the reimbursement cycle significantly.

The advantages of an automated expense reporting app with mileage tracking benefits are:

1. Trip and fuel receipts are tracked automatically
2. GPS-enabled feature to get accurate mileage eliminating the assumption-based approach
3. Eliminates mileage fraud due to pre-determined rates for mileages
4. Automatic data extraction, in turn, eliminating the need for manual data entry which can lead to errors
5. Categorization of trips based on fields such as personal or business etc
6. Significant reduction in the turn-around-time for reporting and reimbursements
7. A centralized database that provides all pertinent information at all times
8. Overall, an enhanced user experience

How Zaggle can help

At Zaggle, we are always innovating and working towards creating an enhanced user experience across all our products. In an effort to make mileage tracking truly seamless, we provide multiple ways for the employees to add mileage. These include the following options:

• Entering Distance

The user can manually enter the distance traveled and provide further details such as the vehicle and the purpose of the trip.

• GPS Tracking

This feature allows the user to connect to GPS services using which the distance traveled can be fetched automatically with Start and Stop button functionality.

• Geolocation

Using geolocation, the distance traveled is calculated from Google maps as the user indicates the starting location and the destination on the maps.

• Odometer Reading

With this feature, the user can enter the start and end readings on the odometer. The mileage is then calculated based on the user entry of these readings.

To simplify the reimbursement process further, you can adopt multi-wallet Zaggle Zinger cards which allow you to allocate money to your employees beforehand. With this benefits card, employees can swipe the card at all fuel stations, and upload their fuel bills on-the-go.

Get started with Zaggle Save

Manage travel expenses, disburse petty cash, and automate mileage tracking with our all-in-one expense management solution, Zaggle Save. Gain control and visibility over your business expenses. Sign up for free today.